Certainly not all the input was inaccurate. There could have been incorrect accounting for the effectiveness of education or news efforts. The medical personnel may have improved faster than predicted. Mobility limitations might have reduced the spread to a manageable rate. Or it could simply be the outcome was a 1:20 chance that beat the predicted odds. There are way too many variables to even know which was the least accurate, but I wouldn't claim any were as bad as "garbage".

And that's my point. A non-engineer manager won't know what their engineering employees do, so they won't incentivize the right behaviors.

Business lobbyists in the US would have candidates sell this to voters as an example of "onerous, unasked-for Big Government interference!" They'd threaten voters with nonsense like "You have to throw away your dad's old wrenches because it will be illegal to use inch sized bolts!" or "It's a big-tool-company plot to force us all to buy new wrenches!" This would spark irrational debates around pointless-topics, and won't do anything but make candidates look even stupider than they are.

Never mind that most shade-tree mechanics already have toolboxes full of both.

Not always. For example, the Senior VPs at Verizon can discuss the bits and bytes of the GSM protocol with you. They understand how 3G can be subverted, how A5 is weak, signal strength, all that.

And have you ever looked at a hospital's administration board? Notice how many of those people have the word Doctor in their title? If a hospital doesn't promote doctors into executive positions, they make bad decisions and patients suffer and die.

If a company makes an effort to promote engineers to lead up the engineering teams, or whatever kind of specialists to leadership, they will have much better results.

It's also been demonstrated that when a company promotes a personnel or finance manager to the top of an engineering organization, disaster ensues. Unless the board can rectify the error, the company will implode. Witness the painful demise of HP at the hands of Carly Fiorina, who had zero qualifications to run an engineering company - she had an MBA and degrees in philosophy and history, nothing in engineering. She came out of it smelling like a successful politician, while HP came out of it with a reputation as the place to buy badly supported, DRM-encrusted PCs and peripherals.

It's not just management to blame. Every mid-level peon who is attempting to play the game instead of focusing on delivering value for their customer is subverting the goals. When Manager Mike asks Joe Lineworker for a specific result that's conducive to his politics, Joe can say "sure, I'll scratch your back, just don't forget I did this for you." It's corrosive in both directions.

What happens in this case is the outcome is as the manager inflates his project, the organization is wasting money on a project that isn't of as much value as the executives wanted. And if the wrong projects are inflated, the bad numbers coming out of it corrupt all other projects.

Do you know how many doctors they have in America? How about in Liberia?

According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2008 the U.S. had 2.4 doctors per every 1000 people. In Liberia, they had 0.01 per 1000, but that was before ebola killed 40 of their 120 physicians. Volunteer doctors have helped a little, but not too many want to risk their own lives in such a hot zone. The need is almost beyond comprehension.

Oh, and of those 80 remaining doctors, how many do you think specialize in surgery, and have hours in their day to operate on you? How many specialize in the kind of surgery you may need at that moment?

You can't 'just ship the actual doctor' any more than you can send them a stack of gold bars. There aren't enough who have time or the inclination to go.

Oh, and if it's a time-critical disaster scenario, the patient is still better off with a remote surgeon than with no doctor at all. If the surgeon physically cannot get to the field hospital in the next two hours, and your choices are limited to:

A) bleed to death from a punctured lung because there's nobody here to sew you up, or
B) take your chances with Comcast delivering enough bytes for a doctor two states away to sew you up,

most people will opt for B.

You solve this by running the remote surgery in a hospital that still has local doctors and nurses. One general doctor can be in house and prepped for surgery, on call for one or more operating theatres. The patients will still need local nurses to prep the patients, physically administer the anesthesia (in the case of a remote anesthetist), and handle all kinds of tasks. The remote surgeon makes the cuts, does the work, then closes up behind himself as he leaves. The whole time the local nurse(s) is(are) monitoring vitals, and watching for problems. If anything comes up that can't be remotely managed, the nurse signals for the on-call doctor to come in and handle the situation. All the local doctor really needs are the skills required to close up and remove the machine from the patient - they don't have to complete the delicate surgery if it's beyond their capabilities.

Don't fret. Congress is staffed almost entirely by lawyers, and there is zero chance they'll let their bread-and-butter be outsourced or replaced by machines. They already won't even pass laws to simplify laws, in order to keep their jobs as clever interpreters of the cracks between the laws.

They'll damn everyone else to a subcontracted devil running an outsourced version of hell, but they've proven they're going to protect their jobs forever.

I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.

So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.

The use of CGI was quite limited. It provided some big background sets (the Citadel), it was used to hide safety wires, and to remove Charlize Theron's arm.

George Miller simply likes building desert-warrior cars out of old rusty hulks and smashing them up. And his love for the craft comes through the screen like a physical thing.

Is that duck-typing or duck-stereotyping? /ducks.

I'd give it six stars for visuals, but negative 3 stars for story. Fortunately, they never let the story interfere with the action - they just used it to break it up once in a while.

Not underground, where cell service is blocked by a hundred feet of rock and dirt.

But you could make a whole lot of money if you could develop a "tin-foil accelerometer blocker". Every starship a hundred years from now is going to need inertial dampeners!