Your asking a question that has a very complex answer. In short, no, this would not mean anything relevant for RP, although you are correct in the similarities of RP and MD. Also, keep in mind that neovascularization is a symptom of MD, not the cause (thus the problem I have with this article). Furthermore, you are correct that they both have a genetic basis, but RP is more directly correlated with several types of genetic mutations than MD,

You are correct in that they are different treatments, but the physiological effects (precise indications for use) are very similar. Neovascularization will continue to occur and lead to problems even after treatment until you mitigate the root cause. Also, maybe you still don't use lasers, but believe it or not many still do in the US (in Richmond, VA and Washington, DC to be specific).

I think you will find that this is meant to only slow the progression of the disease rather than cure it. This form of treatment has existed for years for Diabetic Retinopathy, where aberrant blood vessels are cauterized with a laser, thus slowing the progression of the disease. The difference is that this treatment for Macular Degeneration is more specific to the region, since the macula of Macular Degeneration is in your central field of vision only and takes up a very small percentage of the retinal surface area. In Diabetic Retinopathy you have a general full field degeneration starting in the peripheral fields of vision, and thus the treatment is more dispersed. With MD it needs to be very specific to the macula, which is difficult.

@Downloadsquad: The articles that could be defined as troll bait have been increasing lately it seems - articles where the whole truth seems to deliberately not be told. Try to cut back or risk relegating yourselves to the pit where so many other blogs have fallen. Are your traffic numbers going down? Don't resort to this please Perhaps you can take a clue from Engadget, who seems to know more about patents, and who clarified also (in addition to the fact that this wouldn't be built into the paid OS) that patents actually rarely go to production.

Well done? It would be good if it was a part of the OS and well done if not needed.

As Whiskey noted, Opera has done this for a long time, why compare it to that garbage IE 8?

As good as having Flash would be on a smart phone, better news to me would be all major video websites supporting HTML 5 Video. This way we can start ditching plugins for Silverlight and Flash, Flash of course being the cause of 95% of crashes (I think that was an Engadget article actually). Furthermore, I see how processor intensive Flash is on my old 3 yo Thinkpad, I wonder how a battery on a smart phone will handle this? HTML 5 Video is no where near as bloated and processor intensive, and battery draining.

The risk is more a heating issue actually, which I'm sure they have safeguards for and keep to an acceptable minimum. The energy associated with these is very very small in comparison to cell phones (which I think is what you are thinking about).

This would theoretically work on any retinal degeneration that leaves some part of the retina intact. RP and MD leave parts of the retina intact, but many other disease do as well. This one is unique in that they are stimulating the back of the retina (towards the brain, aka subretinal) as opposed to the front where the light enters (aka epiretinal). This is seemingly odd since the degenerating part of the retina for these diseases (the photoreceptors) is in the back, so you are targeting the bad part as opposed to the good part of the retina. Most other retinal prosthesis folks use the epiretinal approach. It has its advantages though, and is able to stimulate through the bad areas, or use what's left of the photoreceptors. Keep in mind the resolution of these is still very low, and hasn't improved much in the last decade. It will be a long time before it gives these blind folks the ability to see at all similar to how we do.

People pointing out the atrocities of putting ads on this thing that are built into the OS are getting rated down, and those defending the ads are getting rated up????!!!!!????? It is without a doubt now that Redmond send minions to take over these comments forums.