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!

And the bacteria are fighting the effects of the fungus. Go reread the summary.

I'm glad they do 'real work' with their money, but don't underestimate the value of a successful lobbying campaign. If the resources of the government can be brought to bear, they have the capability to make much bigger changes, even if they seem hobbled by compromises and special interests.

If 10% of people are gay, then this impacts 10% of nerds. I don't run Apache, but I don't bitch when they put an Apache story on the front page. Get over it.

This is how organized religion dies -- to thunderous applause.

As they fade into irrelevance day after day, and people discover that they actually value the freedoms their churches have been suppressing, I expect people will abandon them at an even faster pace.

The TV market is bad, but the watch market is not great.

What they should be trying to crack is the in-car nav/infotainment systems - the iCarStereo. Current nav systems are somewhere between total-suckage and so-distracting-they-cause-accidents. Bluetooth pairing is painful when it even works, calling systems don't integrate with smartphone phonebooks, there is no way to share contact addresses, and the voice controls are no better than someone reading a "Car navigation is attempting to quit, cancel or allow?" dialog box. And the interfaces are so poor as to command the driver's full attention for seconds, looking for touch-screen items or clicking the right button, taking focus off the task of driving.

People would trade their old cars in for one equipped with an Apple iCarStereo if it solved those problems. A watch? It will take a lot of luck for it to be more than a fashion item that falls off the radar in a few years.