Have you ever been inside an OR during surgery or seen a sponge? I spent two months watching my boss perform open heart surgery. Let me tell you, there is a great deal of blood. The sponges are inside the thoracic cavity during the procedures, and there is so much blood that they almost appear to be part of the tissue. The ones I saw also weren't that big, and they look nothing like the sponges we use in the shower. Certainly this type of incident should not happen, and the OR staff works hard to keep track of equipment; however, don't trivialize how difficult that can be under the conditions of a surgical procedure. It is a mess in there.

Firstly, this is not mathematics. No thousand year problems have been solved, this is just general stupidity. This is roughly equivalent to saying the answer to life the universe and everything = 42. Sure you have an answer but it's nonsensical, there's nothing you can do with it. Hooray! Now instead of not being able to do anything when you divide by zero, we have an answer! Sadly, we can't do anything with this answer. Also, if any plane ever falls out of the sky because its software was dividing by zero, the engineers should be promptly be drug out into the street and shot.

I work at a retailer that sells several different kinds of TVs and I've found that the average consumer that I'm dealing with is really in the dark about current TV technology and tends to follow the notion that more expensive = better.
I found myself having to really educate people who come in since they often have no idea that LCD is diffrent from flat CRTs, or plasmas, or HDTV. Most consumers really have very little to go on, and the battles between manufacturers on what will be the next standard really isn't helping.