Actually, the UW surgical robot is the one you see in the space training sequences of certain SF movies. Ender's Game specifically.

It actually exists.

And again. It's not just the doctor that you can't get in rural areas. It's the nurse, the anesthetist, the OR tech, the OR, the pieces parts, the blood bank, the ventilator, etc. Surgery is a whole package. It is much safer to get the patient out to an institution that does the procedure on a regular basis than to try to hack through a treatment that the staff hasn't done in a year. Not everything goes right. Sometimes you want another specialist to help when surgical misadventures arise. Until the tech gets to be something like a Weyland Med Pod, robot surgery is going to be a niche area, confined to hard to get areas or procedures that need extremely fine physical control.

But if you lived in Machu Picchu and needed heart surgery, it would be extremely unlikely that anyone would truck the machine up there. Because you also need a bypass machine. And a damned good anesthesiologist (who probably lives with the other docs in the big city) and the nurses and the dacron grafts and the special sutures and the ventilators and the vent techs and so forth and so on.

So having the smart machine doesn't help you over much. Even for battlefield medicine, I don't think surgical robots are going to prove useful for the same reasons. It's easier to just pack up everyone as a team and dump them on some handy flat piece of ground away from the front. Then drag your victim in using paramedic level persons and helicopters - things that can stand being shot at and don't need high bandwidth connections to function.

The supervision of basic providers is an excellent model but that is typically going to be just video rather than a robot. Anything with opposable thumbs can do a basic cataract - you could build a robot that would do some of the manipulations, but it's pretty automated as it is. There are going to be niches with this sort of tech, certainly we can work on changing some procedures that have remained the same for 200 years, but surgical robots are going to be just a small part of things. Hell, a 3D printer might even be more useful - a common situation in remote areas is that the docs / providers know how to do something, they just don't stock the special screw / graft / gizmo that a bigger hospital would. Even 3D printed orthotics (ie, very low tech) would be pretty useful (and I'm sure I've seen articles where they are starting on this).

If coming up with a cheap nebulizer - which costs a hospital $2.50 for the plastic bits, is the best he can do, then this isn't going to get us far. Sure, the battery powered pump costs a couple of hundred dollars retail but anyone with more than a slotted head screwdriver for a brain is going to realize that it's an aquarium pump. This is hardly the earth shattering breakthrough that TFA insinuates it to be.

The other mentioned device, a better way to extract babies from the birth canal is certainly interesting but it represents the efforts of a single clever person (not associated with the MIT lab in any way). I don't think anyone has decided that there are no more smart people amongst the 7 billion humans on the planet.

Hopefully, this isn't reflecting where MIT is going but I'm beginning towonder. They seem to be in the news for all manner of Silly Little Things associated with important sounding laboratories.

Just make encryption that isn't ridiculously easy to crack illegal, or subject to severe regulation and taxation. Get an expert devoid of care for privacy (say, Dorothy Denning) to endorse the law on the Sunday Morning talk shows. Cast anyone who cares about secure encryption as a bitter and deranged malcontent. Tell people it's for the Common Good.

Problem solved.

No, I'd suggest getting one before they become impossibly thin and transparent to boot. Then you'd never manage to find the thing once you set it down.

I've visited a power generation plant in China. They have reverse-peak problems. They don't have enough peak generation, so they use base-load above base load. That means they have over-production in low use times. So every night, they pump water up hill. And when they need peak power, they use the uphill water to generate electricity.

There are plenty of ways to store electricity. The "problem" is that the peak price of power is now too low to make it worth while for Germany to recover "lost" power.

As an example, it's very hard to get any MDs or nurses in some of the emptier remote parts of WA, BC, and ID, and at times, even if you could drive it, it's 50-100 miles to the nearest hospital over mountain passes with a heck of a lot of snow where I grew up. Some days the highway won't reopen for a week.

So something like this is way more important than you might realize.

Links aren't that fragile in many of these remote areas, as a lot of our power generation is going on there, so you can piggyback on the transmission line power at very high communication rates, but sometimes you can't even fly there, and the surgery is needed ASAP.

So you only have ever been in places where jaywalking is illegal? I don't live in Alaska anymore, but I currently lice in a place where jaywalking is explicitly legal. And, aside from a place like NYC, almost nowhere has 100% of intersections controlled.

What vote is bought and with what public funds?

Your argument is that your house is property of the US federal government, since all land outside the original 13 colonies,Texas, and a few other exceptions was once "public land", and once it's been touched, it's forever tainted.

OK, so a revisionist advocate for the cause. Better?

And quite depressing that you find mormon.org to be more impartial than Wikipedia (and its cites).

Why would I do that. You presume that me correcting you on wrong facts has any bearing on what I think about those facts. The fact is that the Mormons were founded on polygamy. They have also been unable to shake that stigma, no matter how hard they try

They were founded on polygamy. They practiced it for a while, until government pressure helped end it. They don't practice it anymore. Because the government crushed their religious freedom, back in the '80s (1880s).

I'm familiar with the Microchip implementation. This is a 300-MHz-class 32-bit processor. Not particularly modern and not really fertile ground for R&D.

We did have two or three suggestions from commenters of open MIPS processor implementations, some of which are more modern. One uses a proprietary high-level HDL, which I haven't investigated.

A single person boycotting for obscure and unpopular reasons will have no effect on the bottom line of a company. I remember when the 7th day adventists organized a "large" boycott of Chrysler. Had something to do with animal products in the lube used in the cars. Chrysler's official response was "we don't care", though some time later, they complied with the requests, but I don't remember how many years that was. In the mean time, Chrysler gained market share while being boycotted by a whole lot more than one Internet nutjob.

A speed limiter doesn't work. There is no study that shows that a school bus with a 50 mph limiter in a state with 70 mph limits is safer than those without limiters. And yes, I've been in one of those rolling roadblocks on a long-ish trip.

A speed limiter doesn't change based on the conditions. Being limited to 70 MPH in a 35 mph zone doesn't do much for safety.

Yes. The entire thesis of the researchers is more than a little bizzare:

No, these machines are going to be used in 'first world' situations in order to help surgeons perform difficult tasks. The idea that someone is going to send a highly complex robot out into the total boonies is pretty far fetched. Surgery is much more than the surgeon. It's the scrub and circulator nurses. It is the sterile OR and equipment. It is anesthesia and pre op and post op nursing. This machine will do little to help with the lack of care.

Now, having a poorly secured surgical robot anywhere isn't such a bright idea and it is likely that the manufacturers need to work on this, but surgery robots are in their infancy at present.