"There there, ship." *pats the hull*

I am a keyboard snob. The keyboard is the part of the computer with which I interact the most, so I hate the mushy feel of membrane keyboards that are based on the same technology as VCR remotes.

If you want to be a keyboard snob too (in a good way), then start by going to wasdkeyboards.com and buying their sampler kit ("http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/sampler-kit-1.html"). For $8, you get eleven keycaps in different colors, four Cherry MX switches (blue, brown, black, red), and fifteen dampeners in three types. This is a cheap way to understand the difference between the four kinds of Cherry MX switches and decide which you prefer. You can then buy a custom-made keyboard from wasdkeyboards.com, choosing the switch, keycap color, and text for each individual key if you want.

I don't use my numeric keypad much, so I opted for a tenkeyless keyboard. wasdkeyboards.com doesn't yet offer these (current estimate is March), so I got it from "http://elitekeyboards.com".

If you want an old-fashioned IBM Model M clacky keyboard, you can get it from "http://www.pckeyboard.com".

"No consequence to dying" - untrue. It's true that you can be resurrected, but dying damages your armor and makes it harder to continue to stay alive until you head back to a town to have it repaired. And if everyone in your party is dead and there's no one left to resurrect you, then you have to go back to the last waypoint. I've seen huge zergs go after bosses and fail by being entirely wiped out.

"Players versus door" - you're missing the fact that the other team is trying to reinforce their door and kill you while you try to break down their door and kill them. Strategy, boy, strategy.

"Complete ghost towns" - I've reached a level 75 PvE area in the game (Malchor's Leap) and there are plenty of people around to join, help, and be helped by. I've seen no evidence that people are abandoning Guild Wars 2; to the contrary, the events they've had so far (Halloween, Lost Shores) have been well conducted and extremely well attended, and a lot of people are looking forward to Wintersday.

It's a beautiful game, I've been enjoying the exploration and the crafting, the Trading Post (auction house) is done right, there's enough challenge to the dungeons to keep me coming back, the world is dynamic with a lot of things to do, and there are lots of other players to help make the going easier.

So, here's the funny thing. I heard the news right after it broke. I saw a discussion thread about it and I wanted to post a link to http://nooooooooooooooo.com/.

Except, at the moment, that site was responding really slowly and took two minutes to load.
 
... as if, all over the world, millions of other people were also hitting the site at the same time...

I will second "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah". That got me into a lot of early Richard Bach books, primarily "The Bridge Across Forever" as well as his biographies of piloting a biplane across the midwest. They showed me a different way of looking at life. Also, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull".

Check into it and ask about the impact of retinal remodeling on potential interventions.

Nossir. That is not correct. See my comment just above.

Yes. Precisely.

[sigh].... do not feed the troll.... do not feed the troll...

OK, I'll feed the troll. Yes, I am acutely aware of Paul Bach-y-Rita's work. You however apparently do not understand the concepts that you are invoking. There is plasticity in neural systems, yes. Plasticity is important in vision, sure. Nobody, *anywhere* has demonstrated that they can generate coherent "visual percepts" in a coordinated fashion with any kind of stimulus. Its far more complicated than hooking up electrodes and stimulating until someone "learns" what the stimulus means.

btw, the tongue thing is very, very cool. Its not vision and does not even map to vision, but those lingual electrodes can easily map topographic data, sonar data, relief data, contrast data onto the high resolution innervation of the tongue and allow people to interpret those stimulii as a map to be followed. The technology was originally developed for US Navy SEALS to navigate complex 3D environments at night, with no light and it works. It works incredibly well with very little training necessary. I would like to see more effort and funds put into techniques like that to help people live more independent lives.

I am familiar with Nirenberg's work. What Nirenberg seems to be missing is that the programming outflow of the retina is altered in retinal disease. ON and OFF channels are substantially altered in retinal disease and the whole programming substrate is altered because the circuitry and programming down to the molecular levels is altered.

Its not all pessimism though as we will need to understand how the normal retina signals and I find her work to be interesting and compelling. Though she is not addressing *which channels* of information outflow are being encoded. There are 14-16 separate outflow channels in the retina that project to different areas of cortex and sub cortex and she is not addressing how to separate those channels and what those separate channels mean in terms of the "visual world".

This is just my point. While I understand that science and engineering has to start somewhere, they have made promises to this woman and done surgery to her, potentially increasing risks for other problems where I would argue there is no hope of "seeing" anything coherent.

Yes, we can do remarkable things with even an 8x8 pixel array, but this approach has no promise of even delivering that to this woman. The electrode cuff on the optic nerve simply stimulates too many neurons that are not coherent and those neurons project to far too many areas of cortex. A retinal implant that appropriately targets cell populations would be more appropriate as would genetic engineering of targeted opsins to other cell classes.

As for implants directly in the cortex, I might argue that this has a better chance of stimulating phosphenes that could be interpreted as vision. I've participated in some of that early work http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/08/bionic-implants/ and while I believe there are other approaches that will be more effective, that work still has some promise (particularly for motor interfaces).

Ah, ad hominem attacks from an Anonymous Coward... You will note that I am an "eye doctor". What are your qualifications to call someone else a clown?

We'll see... I would have liked to have seen some traditional methods of evaluation in animal models using psychophysics before moving directly to humans. Were I a betting man, I don't think the engineering is up to the biological task right now. A couple decades work already suggests that we don't yet understand how the information is coded to get into the brain.

Yeah, its easy for people to get enthused about rescuing vision loss. Its an important thing and keeps us working at all hours of the day as hard as we can to understand how the visual system works and how to fix it when it goes wrong. We've published before on this issue and I am sure they are aware of the work. My only concern is when promises are made to patients and expectations are built up that these devices will cure blindness when the biology has not been worked out and the engineering is predicated upon that imprecise understanding of the biology.