Yeah, a bunch of us here on Slashdot moved much of the conversation to Twitter. Unfortunately, Trump seems to get a bunch of the bandwidth there too.

Our company uses various StorageCraft products...they support Windows or Linux and do local and cloud backups. It can be used as simply as Carbonite or scale up to more advanced features and do normal or full image backups. We've been enjoying using it as it's pretty simple, even for more advanced backups. https://www.storagecraft.com/

Honestly, I don't blame them...I was in the Army and frequently I was worried with some of the risk taking. Now that I'm out and working in IT I just had a customer purchase a "refurbished" laptop from China and we had to spend hours removing rootkits and trojans from it (maybe not the norm, but still worrying). It's simply not worth the risk, especially when dealing with something as important as defense.

Finally a proper response to the Thunderf00t videos? I've been hoping there would be some sort of refutation of his pretty solid points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Hopefully this has been overcome! These videos worried me!

Totally understood. The trick is: you can tune your own signal/noise. Its very handy and I get essentially all my news via Twitter these days.

Its all on Twitter man...

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

Being in the military, I can assure you those are all run from either a network called "Centrix" (If it's a shared asset with other nations), or SIPR...and neither of those are connected to the internet like NIPR is.

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).