Nice!

I am an Anesthesiologist in the US. Yes, in the US most of those tubes are put in by the Anesthesiologist. People tend to think of Anesthesiologists as being experts in giving drugs to make someone sleep. That is actually easy to do. The problem is keeping them breathing and the ABCs: Airway, Breathing, Circulation. People don't usually die from drug overdoses, they die from lack of oxygen to the brain because they stop breathing. THE experts in keeping the airway open and keeping someone breathing are Anesthesiologists. I could give a person a synthetic narcotic that is 100x as potent as Heroin and give them a 100 fold overdose and keeping them alive would be easy for me: just breathe for the patient until the drug wears off. Developing some kind of remotely controllable robot to keep a moving 400 pound (in the US we have many obese patients) patient's airway open would not be easy. Another other difficult problem would be nerve blocks: remotely advancing a needle to just outside the spinal cord, or just into the left brachial plexus seems like a difficult job to do by remote control. So cool use of a remote connection, but I'm not worried that I'll be outsourced anytime soon. I will be physically present at 2am putting that epidural in your back for your labor pains.

BP made about $10 billion in the past 1/2 year: http://www.bp.com/extendedgenericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7061409 They will not be happy to spend 1/2 a year's profit on the cleanup. If they have 100 rigs operating, each with a 1% chance of a $10 Billion loss, they are losing 1/2 their profit.

I'd rather administer The Cluefull family running Windows 98 than the Clueslesses on OpenBSD. I agree 100% with what you said.

The 2 things that fail on computers are hard disks and fans. I wonder if a really low power cpu could run without sucking dust in if a cpu cooling fan wasn't needed much.

My thoughts exactly! Iraq uses US supplied money to buy the stuff and half the price goes to the pocket of the official via a rebate.

I LOVE my flash drives in my desktop (OCZ) and Thinkpad (Samsung) I'd hate to go back to legacy spinny storage, but I had 2 USB flash drives crap out recently. A 32GB OCZ and a 1GB no name recently failed without being abused. I would be hesitant to place consumer ssds where there is no backup in place or where replacement is an issue. The CFL reliability story is apropos: it is easy to slap a 10,000 hr rating on a bulb or a 1,000,000 hr MTBF rating on a SSD. In the real world, it might not work that way.

Sheesh! She could get a heart bypass and a bone marrow transplant for that much! Why don't people call for a single government payer for legal care? Isn't legal care a right? Why do people get bent out of shape when health care costs out of pocket but not legal care?

I have been an Anesthesiologist for 20 years. I have been fascinated when I see 80 year olds who have been married for 50+ years and they still care about each other. Whenever I have a couple like that, who tearfully kiss goodbye before surgery, I ask what the secret is to being married >50 years. The consistant pattern of advice I find is two things: 1) Be easygoing, compromise. 2) Make each other laugh. I don't know how many times I've heard "He makes me laugh" with people who are married >50 years. So do you make her laugh? Does she make you laugh? Is she willing to compromise a little if you want to do something she isn't in to?

Not funny. It's actually a very good point!

There is a natural concentration of ~300pp billion of Nitrous Oxide in the atmosphere according to this reference at Encyclopedia of Earth: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nitrous_oxide

The Cute Kitty Flu.

So we won't kill the poor little bugs.
Viruses have rights and feelings too!