On the 'remote tower' thing (on the last page I think), Airservices was looking at such a system for some of their more remote towers a couple of years ago. There's a bit about it
here. They actually trialed it for a few months, with the 'tower on a stick' located at Alice Springs and controllers in a room in Adelaide, 1500km away, shadowing the on-site controllers in Alice Tower.
The technology exists and it works, but I seem to recall hearing that the results weren't up to the same standard as having controllers on-site (surprise!) and it was abandoned.