There are 3 tivo version 2 machines at the local goodwill. I was wondering how hackable they were since they were priced so low (so this was the perfect thread). I guess they just turn into landfill without any sort of hacker community, and are just junk in a few years. Repurposing the machines would be great, but I guess the company doesn't see any profit from opening up their hardware.

I guess he should have said this is the most awesome device that works and doesn't leak liquid helium he has ever seen.

This is a terrible question. The guys "problem" is that women are coming up to him and talking to him? Here is your witty response: ask for their number. Step one to being manly is to stop being an insecure dumbass worrying about looking feminine. If you want women to stop talking to you then just draw a penis on your computer and write "I'm completely insecure" on your laptop. "Problem" solved. If your manhood is put in question because of your laptop then you probably have other issues.

The eye is not replaced. The stimulator is stimulating the nerve cells in the back of the eye which travels through the optic nerve to the optical cortex. Only the rods and cones and some of the intermediate layers of the retina are being bypassed. Your Brain has enough neural plasticity to handle these implants after using them for a while.

These implants are only useful to people with retinitis pigmentosa and age related macular degeneration. You rarely/never see full blindness from these diseases in the young. I think a young patient that has gone completely blind from those diseases would be 50.

In both of those diseases the rods and cones in your eye degenerate but the nerve cells that are routing information through the optic nerve are still in tact. These are the cells that are stimulated. In other forms of blindness (such as damage to the optical cortex or a severed optical nerve) these implants will not work.

Way way way far off. Your eye has layers that compress the data that is received from the light input and sent down the optic nerve. To get better vision the implant would not stimulate the retina, since the max resolution would be the number of rods and cones in your eye to begin with, and being able to do that is not happening anytime soon. You would have to directly stimulate the optical cortex itself in order to get visual perceptions of higher quality than your eye can produce. That would require you to know how the body encodes the data in the eye, routes it to the visual cortex, and then you would need to implant stimulators at every single spot in the visual cortex in order to get visual perceptions that are better than the eye. You also have to encode, wirelessly transmit and wirelessly power the whole system. You would be better off genetically engineering a better eye and attempting to implant that instead.

I guess the short answer to your question is: not in your lifetime.

You need a patient that has gone completely blind from Retinitis pigmentosa or Ag related macular degeneration in order to put the implant in. You will still have better vision in the early stages of the disease. Depending on how bad you get the disease it could take a decade or so before you completely lose your vision. most of the test subjects are quite old for this technology.

The original model was a 4x4 image. This model is probably in the range of 64x64 or perhaps 200x200. It is enough to do very basic facial recognition. Don't get your hopes up that there will be anything much better than that though. Cramming in enough electrodes to individually stimulate the millions of points in the eye required for correct color vision is way way off. Just know that these are grayscale and give you blobs of vision. So far off that stem cell replacements are more likely to be viable before that happens.

It looks like the CEO has posted his response to the piece. It appears to be quite well documented and researched. Possibly more so than the original article:

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-east-bay-express.html