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Laser Surgery Goes Online

Posted by samzenpus on from the put-your-eye-in-the-disk-tray dept.

Ignat writes "Scientists in Australia successfully performed a laser surgery in a Southern California laboratory via the Internet. RoboLase, the new technology used showed that realtime surgeries can be performed from distant locations. Scientists from UC Irvine, UC San Diego and the University of Queensland used RoboLase to produce surgical holes in a distinct pattern of less than one micron in diameter (1/1000th of a millimeter) in single cells."

1 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hidden racism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The fact is, Indian doctors can be just as capable as doctors from the US, or other Western nations. The same goes for the IT industry.

    OK, I can't speak to medical practitioners from India, but I can talk about their IT workers. On two seperate occasions I've worked for companies with significant offshoring in Bombay and Hyderabad. I know that my sample size is far too small for me to make any sweeping judgements about all Indian computer workers but from what I've seen -- they suck.

    At my current position it shows up in our project management tool quite consistently. Yellow is the color for a deliverable which is late but not yet blocking another portion of the project. All of the Indian developers have significant amount of yellow next to their names.

    What ends up happening is that each person in the stateside operations ends up needing to spend half their day doing babysitting and cleanup on their group of Indian developers. One of my favorite examples is when one of my cow-workers was tasked with writing a simple script. He handed it in two months late and it was a monstrosity -- More than 200 lines of spaghetti code. 22 if() clauses, 11 with else clauses, 17 exit points to the same function, 20 places which attempted to close the same filehandle -- and best of all it didn't work.

    And this shit happens all the time. EVERY developer in my office is spending huge amounts of time fixing loads of late garbage delivered from India. Interns in our offices are doing much better work than experienced graduates in India.

    Cultural superiority? Dunno. But the cultural differences are huge. One of the biggest ones is that it's impossible to fire someone in India. Seriously, because of their unemployment rate they'd rather keep a freeloader on the payroll than give him an invitation to the world. No matter what he's done. In the states we tend to have a "we can tackle that problem" attitude. In India they have an attitude they call "chalta hai" which is the opposite.