I dunno. If these were rich idiots who were complaining, then they'd have hired lobbyists to brib^Wpersuade the State of the folly of its ways, but you need it to be the rich idiots who were removed so that the death taxes could cover the costs.
The grossest example for copyright being the Russian who was arrested for a DMCA violation by breaking Adobe copy protection whilst in Russia. On security, a pilot was arrested in the UK on the orders of the US after 9/11. They wanted him deported without the required deportation hearing and without knowing what he was charged with. The UK ultimately refused, gave him an extradition hearing, and he proved his total innocence of the charge. Had the UK not done that, he'd be in Gitmo to this day with no rights and no knowledge of even the charges made.
This doesn't make the UK particularly heroic - obeying its own laws should not be considered exceptional, it should be considered the norm. The UK was also involved in a number of renditions that DID violate UK law, just not that one.
If you divide up liberties rather than giving them all to one group, then no one group ends up with the liberty to remove the minimum set of liberty. The more you split the brain and require a consensus between those divisions that cannot influence each other in order to remove any liberty at all from anyone for any reason, the more likely it is that such power will be used sensibly. Consensus politics tends to fail when camps do have influence across partitions because then the consensus doesn't really exist. One group is making all the decisions.
The Bush-era advocacy of the harassment, arrest and even assassination of critics of the government meant that it was illegal for 8 years to criticize the government or the head of state. It's extremely dubious as to whether it's legal now. By your argument, the US ceased to be a democracy during that time and possibly into the present. Certainly the Occupy protesters in Oakland would argue that the US has ceased to be a democracy on those grounds.
At the same time, can you honestly tell me that the US is no different from the one-party states you refer to? It may have a lot of similarities at present (detention without review, torture, police brutality, espionage against its own citizens, etc) but it's still no Iran.
So clearly it's not an on/off thing, it's a spectrum. The US has slid down that spectrum but is still over the halfway mark. Only just, but nonetheless. As such, then yes. Something CAN be a democracy and not have all the attributes one might consider ideal.
I question the "absolute" part. There has to be a sensible balance between individual rights and governmental rights. If liberty tops all other factors, the government can do nothing because there are no rights left to be had. There are only so many to go around. Government should not have excessive rights, it shouldn't even have 50% of the rights, but it can't have none at all. The same is true of any other collective entity (corporations, special interest groups, etc). They, too, should have rights but by giving them rights that can't be infringed, you have to take away the right to infringe on those rights from everyone else. It isn't zero-sum, but it IS bounded.
The problem in the US and other Western democracies is that the rights of entities other than individuals have become excessive. That is a natural property of the free market, since corporate rights are cheaper than individual rights and a "free market" implicitly gives 100% of the liberty to the corporate entities. You've got to have a system where rights to non-individuals are only given according to a demonstrated and legitimate need rather than a desire.
Thailand's system is improperly balanced, but it would be unfair to say it's any worse balanced than anyone else's. It's merely easier to see for most of us because we're on the outside of Thailand. Outsiders always spot flaws and defects with greater ease than insiders.
I'm not so sure. The US system has multiple entities, all elected by the same group of people, making the laws, certifying the laws and then evaluating the legality of those laws. (Well, for those judges who are elected, it's the same group of voters.) This means there are no meaningful checks and balances, which ultimately means everything really is decided by a simple vote. It merely has the illusion of not being.
Now, Plato in his book on The Republic asserts that it is not procedure that fixes the flaws in democracy but a highly educated populace. His theory was that democracy ultimately degenerates into a semi-dictatorship the moment a populist leader takes charge of a nation where the majority are ill-informed and poorly equipt to judge the merits of any argument. I would agree that this is part of the solution, though there's plenty of evidence that highly educated people are no less likely to be swayed by illogical but emotively convenient arguments and that prejudices are actually more firmly fixed rather than remedied through intellectual debate. There needs to be an additional ingredient.
The UK's approach, the House of Lords, has some nice elements. It's theoretically a meritocracy, since you don't just get given titles you have to earn them. It's also partially isolated as those who agree to hold title are (ok, were) barred from voting or standing in local or national elections. It meant that the views of the Lords could not dominate or sway the views of the general populace AND that the general populace had no means of dominating or swaying the views of the Lords. If the two Houses agreed, it was because there was something to the arguments put forward beyond being advocated by a rich lobbyist. Not always a whole lot more, but at least something. The system was flawed, yes, and has become increasingly so, but a consensual split-brain approach is definitely worth further examination by other democracies.
It is better to learn from the mistakes and strengths of these ideas than to stagnate.
That needn't be the case - countries are quite capable of learning from each other, just as people are. Of course, capability and willingness aren't generally the same thing, but that's a choice and not an intrinsic property.
This was a matter of time, given that they could do regular transistors and graphene is much simpler. What will be interesting, however, is what people do with this. There have been all kinds of interesting attempts at novel engineering (liquid crystal memories, for example) that either never got funded to completion or ended up going nowhere.
The latter is as it should be. There is no point in research if you know the results beforehand. It is merely fraud to only do what you know will work. The former is typical bigotry against those who actually do the real work in society.
You're not capable of politeness. Hell, I'm not sure what you ARE capable of. I can tell you now I'd have failed you in any class I taught for selectively picking up one post rather than the context of my posts. You "could tell"? Indeed? I'm impressed that you could "tell" from a single snippet of a minute fraction of a conversation not only the entire content of that discussion but the capabilities of everyone within it. So very impressed. Perhaps you could tell me my IQ, height and favourite tea whilst you're at it.
Learn to read, it's not a skill that's beyond you. Until you do, I won't waste my time on the petty affairs of some third-rate wannabe.
Business models aren't even that much of a factor. A trivial case in point -- there are lots of cult TV programs out on DVD in Britain that cannot be obtained anywhere else because of region locking and formatting -- and will never be made available anywhere else. That is not a business model, unless bleeding small markets dry then deliberately killing them is a business model. To me, that's simple perversity.
The US is more... interesting... in that respect. Disney, for example, have released DVDs of some of their US television shows ONLY overseas and not within the US at all (or, when they have, only under extreme pressure and half a decade after everywhere else). Again, what kind of business model is that? It's a blatant attempt to kill a market, which is no business practice I am willing to recognize as a model of anything (except perhaps a Death Star).
After you've added in the corporate-imposed fees (taxes by corporations) for blank media, corporate-imposed fees to cover the overheads of DRM research, development, deployment, litigation and compensation for damage inflicted on consumers, and all the other corporate-imposed fees that have nothing to do with legitimate costs and legitimate profit margins, you've already probably got a 200% tariff. It's merely that because it's by an unelected body with nobody to answer to that it doesn't bother people.
But, yeah, the ruling elite in some countries may well impose special "luxury gaming" taxes as well as any import duty, sales tax/VAT, corporate tax on the importer, etc. No individual tax need be that high for a large enough list of them to become significant.
Bandwidth is actually a big reason for this line of thinking for me. An actual limb has an enormous number of nerve endings to senses, muscles, etc. One of the problems with current handling of amputees is that most of the nerves body-side are allowed to drift, creating illusory ("phantom") sensations. Optics can certainly carry the density of information needed to supply every residual nerve with valid input. Artificial limbs can't generate that much data now, so you'd lock most of the values to ground, but because the information generated and handled has 100% coverage of what the body (and therefore brain) is expecting, you can upgrade the technology in the limb freely without ever having to muck around with the interface. The interface already covers any upgrade you could ever make. Not just for the foreseeable future, but ever.
The second factor, though, is that you can run fibre as far as you like. A severe injury that requires bionic implants in the first place has a decent chance of causing nerve damage at points other than at the place requiring the implant. Even complete death of every nerve running from that part of the body would not be impossible to work around, since it's possible to run fibre from the impant through the body, up the spinal cord and demultiplex only at the brain itself. Another poster mentioned the potential problem of stress and wear/tear on the fibre, which may limit just how much you could do on this. The spine is especially going to be a problem as you don't want to disconnect the implant every time you twist or bend your back. However, I see no obvious reason why this should be unsolvable versus being merely unsolved.
Yes, that is a potential problem. I don't know the answer to that and it may well be that the resilience of current optic fibre technology to normal wear and tear is a fatal flaw in this approach. That's an excellent observation (sadly not a common property of Slashdot comments these days) and worth looking into. Not for any practical purpose, as I doubt I'm likely to get rich off what amounts to idle speculation, but purely out of fascination over what sorts of solutions are being overlooked.
Direct interfacing means that you can run two fibres that can carry every signal from every synthetic nerve ending in a bionic hand or leg, demultiplexing somewhere in the body. (So this will still work if someone loses a leg and has spinal damage that breaks the nerves before they reach the point where the limb is lost. Demultiplexing in the spine would require a clever design to keep within space constraints but there are no technical constraints at this point. Mixed-mode silicon is commonplace, ADCs and DACs go well over the speed needed and semiconductor lasers are almost child's play.) In other words, you've sufficient bandwidth to connect up every nerve that relates to a lost limb and do something useful with it.
Indirect interfacing (blasting signals at hundreds of gigabits per second through the skin) might be viable - I don't know the error rate you'd get if you tried. If the error rate is low enough, then you could do that to eliminate the infection risk entirely. Obviously, if you could do this (have fibre each side of the skin and then relay across the airgap/skingap using just light) then that would be the best solution of all.
Because you're talking just two fibres, though, rather than one wire per synthetic nerve/muscle, the amount of gap needed is extremely small. It's not quite at the sweat pore level, but it's infinitely closer to that than a typical clunky sci-fi depiction of an interconnect. Yes, even that has a risk of infection, but it may well be manageable if the indirect interface proved too difficult.
The probability of an error being such that the error correction will adjust the data and the cryptographic hash in ways such that the hash matches the data is negligible. (A trivial checksum like CRC32 would likely work just fine most of the time, but with medical implants you want to reduce the odds of mangled data as far as humanly possible. One in a million is still far too frequent. Whirlpool or one of the SHA3 candidates would seem better.)
So long as data is oversampled and then filtered as needed at the other end, you can afford to lose some packets, so mangled error correction isn't so important provided (and this is a big problem) the packet loss is within tolerable bounds. Due to the excessive overuse of the band, you can't make such a guarantee.
However, I go back to what I've said elsewhere - you are MUCH better off eliminating the biggest source of noise and going with optic fibre or some analogue thereof. A single fibre can carry the signals from billions of (real or synthetic) nerves if you go with dense mode multiplexing, which means it becomes theoretically possible to replace the entire spinal column if you had to. You'd obviously need a bunch of switches that could connect up the biological nerves to this synthetic nervous system and convert between the two data formats, but existing bionic implants already interface with biological nerves so this is not an impossibility.
My definition of economics is very different from what a lot of bankers think it is. So? I'd rather be right than popular.
I can't help it that I studied at the University of Manchester, where (a) computing was invented in the first place, and (b) where all the top innovations in computing (from instruction-level parallelization in the 70s to asynchronous processors in the 90s to some mind-bending stuff in the present day) came from. I learned from the very best.
And, yes, I repeat, engineers do not look at the past for guidance.
Approach 1: Scientists develop models based on past observations and present observations. Engineers use the current models *and therefore don't need to look at the past* because it has already been factored in.
Approach 2: Formal design engineers follow the standard RASDIT model - Requirements gathering, Analysis of the requirements and the system, Specification of the problem according to the analysis, Design of the software according to the specification, Implementation and then Testing. You can modify this a bit using Extreme Methods and move part of the test phase into the design phase -- since you have a specification, you can combine the design of the software with the implementation of the tests so that when you implement the software you can prove each component is implemented according to the design and specification.
In both cases, you DO NOT CARE what was there before. You DO NOT CARE about legacy approaches or implementations. You DO NOT CARE about the past at all. You care only that what you end up with will perfectly match the problem that needs solving.
THIS is not the hallmark of "the worst engineer", this is the hallmark of an engineer who will get it right. Hacking legacy code may produce quicker and cheaper results, but it will also produce buggier, bulkier and less maintainable results. I call that inferior.
(Note to Linux kernel hackers: The Linux kernel is one of those strange pieces of software. There is crud and cruft in it, we all know that, and we all know that it's for the above reason. The kernel could never have been engineered, though, because it has too many novel ideas and too many components. It could only have come into being through evolution, not revolution. It could be re-engineered from the ground up, today, if you had $2.3 billion and a year to spare, and the result would be smaller, faster and more robust. It's not going to be, because most of those with $2.3 billion in loose change - Bill Gates, are you paying attention? - have a vested interest in not spending it on cleaning up the kernel. If you factor in the patches that would be submitted over the course of a year, you're probably looking at twice that amount. But it's perfectly doable.)
A lot of error-correcting codes can be parallelized. Not brilliantly, but certainly adequately. You've also got to bear in mind that if you're going with a bionic implant (which isn't a cheap thing, and where space and weight constraints are often high) you're probably going to be going with ASICs with heavy-duty digital signal processing for almost everything. In fact, highly special-purpose parts should be everything. There shouldn't be any general-purpose computing devices, no software and even analogue components should be limited to just those that can't be put into mixed-mode silicon. When you've got a purely hardware-driven computing device, speed isn't going to be a limiting factor.
I have no idea how many nerves run down the spinal column, but I think it's safe to say that you could replace most/all of the parts of the nerve in the spine with a single optic fibre in dense multiplexing mode, with some variant of packet switches to identify if a given packet is supposed to be for a given nerve ending and then convert the payload into the correct voltage. The bandwidth would therefore allow you to have as complex a virtual nervous system as you like. That would be the only benefit of having such bandwidth available* - run one replacement for many many damaged nerves.
*Ok, I'll concede there is a second potential benefit. If you replaced all the neural interconnects (which are electrical and chemical) with optic fibre as well, you eliminate virtually all of the latency in the brain due to communications delays. I could easily see the brain becoming an order of magnitude faster -- BUT you'd have to also genetically modify the brain in the process because new interconnects grow all the time and a speed mismatch would be severely disruptive if not fatal.
...of a problem that was first noted in the mid 1980s and termed "electronic smog" but the most general term is RFI and dates back as far radio systems in general. Not only do signals interfere with each other, but signals will interfere with ANY electronic device where pins or wires are capable of acting as a dipole. It's unusual for a machine to get scrambled due to an electronic can opener, but if said devices are improperly shielded, it is inevitable.
In the case of wireless devices, you obviously can't shield the antenna. Well, not if you want it to still work. Provided interference is randomish and not overwhelming, AND provided all devices are based on packet communications, a device will be capable of repairing packets and identifying if they're intended for that device.
The first problem is that many electronic devices don't give a damn about power levels beyond being low enough to not be the target of FCC ire. The second problem is that older devices especially are NOT packet based. This means that such devices can't tell if stray signals are intended for them or not. Anything that merely detects the presence of a signal won't care if that signal is a door-opener or a WoW session.
It would be good if transmitters/receivers were a bit more directional - a garage door probably shouldn't be looking for signals coming from the neighbor's house. A door opener can afford to be very direct, since you want to open your door and nobody else's. A smart meter is designed to transmit to the road, so again it can be extremely directional. Directional transmitters and receivers mean less power is needed for the same signal strength received AND less interference off those directions.
Medical devices, except when ABSOLUTELY necessary, should NEVER be wireless. The risk of RFI is way too high and the consequences of an error are far too severe. Wireless is also lower bandwidth, which places hard limits on the kinds of sensors it's useful for and also hard limits on what innovations can be made to medical sensor technology. Inside of a hospital room, I can't think of a single use for wireless devices where wired would not be superior in every respect.
Yeah. Random clicks (reed-solomon) or bursty noise (turbo codes) are solvable provided they don't swamp the error correction bits. Front-end overload can't be solved by this solution at all. (See my alternative of running fibre.) I gracefully concede this hand, and pay up the 1024 virtual beers.
Optic fibre seems the way to go. Carries the maximum amount of data and is the least prone to interference. It is also already used by some sea sponges instead of regular nerves, so it is a known biological solution. You can convert the optics into electrical impulses in the bionic implant and vice versa. If you went this route, then future iterations could involve unthreading dead nerves from the spinal cord and running the fibre down it. Increased protection from damage and increased compatibility with how the body works.
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I dunno. If these were rich idiots who were complaining, then they'd have hired lobbyists to brib^Wpersuade the State of the folly of its ways, but you need it to be the rich idiots who were removed so that the death taxes could cover the costs.
The grossest example for copyright being the Russian who was arrested for a DMCA violation by breaking Adobe copy protection whilst in Russia. On security, a pilot was arrested in the UK on the orders of the US after 9/11. They wanted him deported without the required deportation hearing and without knowing what he was charged with. The UK ultimately refused, gave him an extradition hearing, and he proved his total innocence of the charge. Had the UK not done that, he'd be in Gitmo to this day with no rights and no knowledge of even the charges made.
This doesn't make the UK particularly heroic - obeying its own laws should not be considered exceptional, it should be considered the norm. The UK was also involved in a number of renditions that DID violate UK law, just not that one.
If you divide up liberties rather than giving them all to one group, then no one group ends up with the liberty to remove the minimum set of liberty. The more you split the brain and require a consensus between those divisions that cannot influence each other in order to remove any liberty at all from anyone for any reason, the more likely it is that such power will be used sensibly. Consensus politics tends to fail when camps do have influence across partitions because then the consensus doesn't really exist. One group is making all the decisions.
The Bush-era advocacy of the harassment, arrest and even assassination of critics of the government meant that it was illegal for 8 years to criticize the government or the head of state. It's extremely dubious as to whether it's legal now. By your argument, the US ceased to be a democracy during that time and possibly into the present. Certainly the Occupy protesters in Oakland would argue that the US has ceased to be a democracy on those grounds.
At the same time, can you honestly tell me that the US is no different from the one-party states you refer to? It may have a lot of similarities at present (detention without review, torture, police brutality, espionage against its own citizens, etc) but it's still no Iran.
So clearly it's not an on/off thing, it's a spectrum. The US has slid down that spectrum but is still over the halfway mark. Only just, but nonetheless. As such, then yes. Something CAN be a democracy and not have all the attributes one might consider ideal.
I question the "absolute" part. There has to be a sensible balance between individual rights and governmental rights. If liberty tops all other factors, the government can do nothing because there are no rights left to be had. There are only so many to go around. Government should not have excessive rights, it shouldn't even have 50% of the rights, but it can't have none at all. The same is true of any other collective entity (corporations, special interest groups, etc). They, too, should have rights but by giving them rights that can't be infringed, you have to take away the right to infringe on those rights from everyone else. It isn't zero-sum, but it IS bounded.
The problem in the US and other Western democracies is that the rights of entities other than individuals have become excessive. That is a natural property of the free market, since corporate rights are cheaper than individual rights and a "free market" implicitly gives 100% of the liberty to the corporate entities. You've got to have a system where rights to non-individuals are only given according to a demonstrated and legitimate need rather than a desire.
Thailand's system is improperly balanced, but it would be unfair to say it's any worse balanced than anyone else's. It's merely easier to see for most of us because we're on the outside of Thailand. Outsiders always spot flaws and defects with greater ease than insiders.
I'm not so sure. The US system has multiple entities, all elected by the same group of people, making the laws, certifying the laws and then evaluating the legality of those laws. (Well, for those judges who are elected, it's the same group of voters.) This means there are no meaningful checks and balances, which ultimately means everything really is decided by a simple vote. It merely has the illusion of not being.
Now, Plato in his book on The Republic asserts that it is not procedure that fixes the flaws in democracy but a highly educated populace. His theory was that democracy ultimately degenerates into a semi-dictatorship the moment a populist leader takes charge of a nation where the majority are ill-informed and poorly equipt to judge the merits of any argument. I would agree that this is part of the solution, though there's plenty of evidence that highly educated people are no less likely to be swayed by illogical but emotively convenient arguments and that prejudices are actually more firmly fixed rather than remedied through intellectual debate. There needs to be an additional ingredient.
The UK's approach, the House of Lords, has some nice elements. It's theoretically a meritocracy, since you don't just get given titles you have to earn them. It's also partially isolated as those who agree to hold title are (ok, were) barred from voting or standing in local or national elections. It meant that the views of the Lords could not dominate or sway the views of the general populace AND that the general populace had no means of dominating or swaying the views of the Lords. If the two Houses agreed, it was because there was something to the arguments put forward beyond being advocated by a rich lobbyist. Not always a whole lot more, but at least something. The system was flawed, yes, and has become increasingly so, but a consensual split-brain approach is definitely worth further examination by other democracies.
It is better to learn from the mistakes and strengths of these ideas than to stagnate.
That needn't be the case - countries are quite capable of learning from each other, just as people are. Of course, capability and willingness aren't generally the same thing, but that's a choice and not an intrinsic property.
This was a matter of time, given that they could do regular transistors and graphene is much simpler. What will be interesting, however, is what people do with this. There have been all kinds of interesting attempts at novel engineering (liquid crystal memories, for example) that either never got funded to completion or ended up going nowhere.
The latter is as it should be. There is no point in research if you know the results beforehand. It is merely fraud to only do what you know will work. The former is typical bigotry against those who actually do the real work in society.
You're not capable of politeness. Hell, I'm not sure what you ARE capable of. I can tell you now I'd have failed you in any class I taught for selectively picking up one post rather than the context of my posts. You "could tell"? Indeed? I'm impressed that you could "tell" from a single snippet of a minute fraction of a conversation not only the entire content of that discussion but the capabilities of everyone within it. So very impressed. Perhaps you could tell me my IQ, height and favourite tea whilst you're at it.
Learn to read, it's not a skill that's beyond you. Until you do, I won't waste my time on the petty affairs of some third-rate wannabe.
Business models aren't even that much of a factor. A trivial case in point -- there are lots of cult TV programs out on DVD in Britain that cannot be obtained anywhere else because of region locking and formatting -- and will never be made available anywhere else. That is not a business model, unless bleeding small markets dry then deliberately killing them is a business model. To me, that's simple perversity.
The US is more... interesting... in that respect. Disney, for example, have released DVDs of some of their US television shows ONLY overseas and not within the US at all (or, when they have, only under extreme pressure and half a decade after everywhere else). Again, what kind of business model is that? It's a blatant attempt to kill a market, which is no business practice I am willing to recognize as a model of anything (except perhaps a Death Star).
After you've added in the corporate-imposed fees (taxes by corporations) for blank media, corporate-imposed fees to cover the overheads of DRM research, development, deployment, litigation and compensation for damage inflicted on consumers, and all the other corporate-imposed fees that have nothing to do with legitimate costs and legitimate profit margins, you've already probably got a 200% tariff. It's merely that because it's by an unelected body with nobody to answer to that it doesn't bother people.
But, yeah, the ruling elite in some countries may well impose special "luxury gaming" taxes as well as any import duty, sales tax/VAT, corporate tax on the importer, etc. No individual tax need be that high for a large enough list of them to become significant.
That's what multiplexing is for. Every time you get multiple wires, multiplex onto a single wire and demultiplex when you need to split a signal off.
Bandwidth is actually a big reason for this line of thinking for me. An actual limb has an enormous number of nerve endings to senses, muscles, etc. One of the problems with current handling of amputees is that most of the nerves body-side are allowed to drift, creating illusory ("phantom") sensations. Optics can certainly carry the density of information needed to supply every residual nerve with valid input. Artificial limbs can't generate that much data now, so you'd lock most of the values to ground, but because the information generated and handled has 100% coverage of what the body (and therefore brain) is expecting, you can upgrade the technology in the limb freely without ever having to muck around with the interface. The interface already covers any upgrade you could ever make. Not just for the foreseeable future, but ever.
The second factor, though, is that you can run fibre as far as you like. A severe injury that requires bionic implants in the first place has a decent chance of causing nerve damage at points other than at the place requiring the implant. Even complete death of every nerve running from that part of the body would not be impossible to work around, since it's possible to run fibre from the impant through the body, up the spinal cord and demultiplex only at the brain itself. Another poster mentioned the potential problem of stress and wear/tear on the fibre, which may limit just how much you could do on this. The spine is especially going to be a problem as you don't want to disconnect the implant every time you twist or bend your back. However, I see no obvious reason why this should be unsolvable versus being merely unsolved.
Yes, that is a potential problem. I don't know the answer to that and it may well be that the resilience of current optic fibre technology to normal wear and tear is a fatal flaw in this approach. That's an excellent observation (sadly not a common property of Slashdot comments these days) and worth looking into. Not for any practical purpose, as I doubt I'm likely to get rich off what amounts to idle speculation, but purely out of fascination over what sorts of solutions are being overlooked.
Direct interfacing means that you can run two fibres that can carry every signal from every synthetic nerve ending in a bionic hand or leg, demultiplexing somewhere in the body. (So this will still work if someone loses a leg and has spinal damage that breaks the nerves before they reach the point where the limb is lost. Demultiplexing in the spine would require a clever design to keep within space constraints but there are no technical constraints at this point. Mixed-mode silicon is commonplace, ADCs and DACs go well over the speed needed and semiconductor lasers are almost child's play.) In other words, you've sufficient bandwidth to connect up every nerve that relates to a lost limb and do something useful with it.
Indirect interfacing (blasting signals at hundreds of gigabits per second through the skin) might be viable - I don't know the error rate you'd get if you tried. If the error rate is low enough, then you could do that to eliminate the infection risk entirely. Obviously, if you could do this (have fibre each side of the skin and then relay across the airgap/skingap using just light) then that would be the best solution of all.
Because you're talking just two fibres, though, rather than one wire per synthetic nerve/muscle, the amount of gap needed is extremely small. It's not quite at the sweat pore level, but it's infinitely closer to that than a typical clunky sci-fi depiction of an interconnect. Yes, even that has a risk of infection, but it may well be manageable if the indirect interface proved too difficult.
The probability of an error being such that the error correction will adjust the data and the cryptographic hash in ways such that the hash matches the data is negligible. (A trivial checksum like CRC32 would likely work just fine most of the time, but with medical implants you want to reduce the odds of mangled data as far as humanly possible. One in a million is still far too frequent. Whirlpool or one of the SHA3 candidates would seem better.)
So long as data is oversampled and then filtered as needed at the other end, you can afford to lose some packets, so mangled error correction isn't so important provided (and this is a big problem) the packet loss is within tolerable bounds. Due to the excessive overuse of the band, you can't make such a guarantee.
However, I go back to what I've said elsewhere - you are MUCH better off eliminating the biggest source of noise and going with optic fibre or some analogue thereof. A single fibre can carry the signals from billions of (real or synthetic) nerves if you go with dense mode multiplexing, which means it becomes theoretically possible to replace the entire spinal column if you had to. You'd obviously need a bunch of switches that could connect up the biological nerves to this synthetic nervous system and convert between the two data formats, but existing bionic implants already interface with biological nerves so this is not an impossibility.
Already answered that elsewhere in this block of replies. If you're going to harangue, at least read what you're haranguing about.
My definition of economics is very different from what a lot of bankers think it is. So? I'd rather be right than popular.
I can't help it that I studied at the University of Manchester, where (a) computing was invented in the first place, and (b) where all the top innovations in computing (from instruction-level parallelization in the 70s to asynchronous processors in the 90s to some mind-bending stuff in the present day) came from. I learned from the very best.
And, yes, I repeat, engineers do not look at the past for guidance.
Approach 1: Scientists develop models based on past observations and present observations. Engineers use the current models *and therefore don't need to look at the past* because it has already been factored in.
Approach 2: Formal design engineers follow the standard RASDIT model - Requirements gathering, Analysis of the requirements and the system, Specification of the problem according to the analysis, Design of the software according to the specification, Implementation and then Testing. You can modify this a bit using Extreme Methods and move part of the test phase into the design phase -- since you have a specification, you can combine the design of the software with the implementation of the tests so that when you implement the software you can prove each component is implemented according to the design and specification.
In both cases, you DO NOT CARE what was there before. You DO NOT CARE about legacy approaches or implementations. You DO NOT CARE about the past at all. You care only that what you end up with will perfectly match the problem that needs solving.
THIS is not the hallmark of "the worst engineer", this is the hallmark of an engineer who will get it right. Hacking legacy code may produce quicker and cheaper results, but it will also produce buggier, bulkier and less maintainable results. I call that inferior.
(Note to Linux kernel hackers: The Linux kernel is one of those strange pieces of software. There is crud and cruft in it, we all know that, and we all know that it's for the above reason. The kernel could never have been engineered, though, because it has too many novel ideas and too many components. It could only have come into being through evolution, not revolution. It could be re-engineered from the ground up, today, if you had $2.3 billion and a year to spare, and the result would be smaller, faster and more robust. It's not going to be, because most of those with $2.3 billion in loose change - Bill Gates, are you paying attention? - have a vested interest in not spending it on cleaning up the kernel. If you factor in the patches that would be submitted over the course of a year, you're probably looking at twice that amount. But it's perfectly doable.)
You DO realize you posted that the same day that prototype optical interconnects on silicon were unveiled? Irony knows no bounds.
A lot of error-correcting codes can be parallelized. Not brilliantly, but certainly adequately. You've also got to bear in mind that if you're going with a bionic implant (which isn't a cheap thing, and where space and weight constraints are often high) you're probably going to be going with ASICs with heavy-duty digital signal processing for almost everything. In fact, highly special-purpose parts should be everything. There shouldn't be any general-purpose computing devices, no software and even analogue components should be limited to just those that can't be put into mixed-mode silicon. When you've got a purely hardware-driven computing device, speed isn't going to be a limiting factor.
Paul Shannon showed increasing power does bugger all for you in the end. I learned it whilst developing military communications systems.
I have no idea how many nerves run down the spinal column, but I think it's safe to say that you could replace most/all of the parts of the nerve in the spine with a single optic fibre in dense multiplexing mode, with some variant of packet switches to identify if a given packet is supposed to be for a given nerve ending and then convert the payload into the correct voltage. The bandwidth would therefore allow you to have as complex a virtual nervous system as you like. That would be the only benefit of having such bandwidth available* - run one replacement for many many damaged nerves.
*Ok, I'll concede there is a second potential benefit. If you replaced all the neural interconnects (which are electrical and chemical) with optic fibre as well, you eliminate virtually all of the latency in the brain due to communications delays. I could easily see the brain becoming an order of magnitude faster -- BUT you'd have to also genetically modify the brain in the process because new interconnects grow all the time and a speed mismatch would be severely disruptive if not fatal.
...of a problem that was first noted in the mid 1980s and termed "electronic smog" but the most general term is RFI and dates back as far radio systems in general. Not only do signals interfere with each other, but signals will interfere with ANY electronic device where pins or wires are capable of acting as a dipole. It's unusual for a machine to get scrambled due to an electronic can opener, but if said devices are improperly shielded, it is inevitable.
In the case of wireless devices, you obviously can't shield the antenna. Well, not if you want it to still work. Provided interference is randomish and not overwhelming, AND provided all devices are based on packet communications, a device will be capable of repairing packets and identifying if they're intended for that device.
The first problem is that many electronic devices don't give a damn about power levels beyond being low enough to not be the target of FCC ire. The second problem is that older devices especially are NOT packet based. This means that such devices can't tell if stray signals are intended for them or not. Anything that merely detects the presence of a signal won't care if that signal is a door-opener or a WoW session.
It would be good if transmitters/receivers were a bit more directional - a garage door probably shouldn't be looking for signals coming from the neighbor's house. A door opener can afford to be very direct, since you want to open your door and nobody else's. A smart meter is designed to transmit to the road, so again it can be extremely directional. Directional transmitters and receivers mean less power is needed for the same signal strength received AND less interference off those directions.
Medical devices, except when ABSOLUTELY necessary, should NEVER be wireless. The risk of RFI is way too high and the consequences of an error are far too severe. Wireless is also lower bandwidth, which places hard limits on the kinds of sensors it's useful for and also hard limits on what innovations can be made to medical sensor technology. Inside of a hospital room, I can't think of a single use for wireless devices where wired would not be superior in every respect.
Yeah. Random clicks (reed-solomon) or bursty noise (turbo codes) are solvable provided they don't swamp the error correction bits. Front-end overload can't be solved by this solution at all. (See my alternative of running fibre.) I gracefully concede this hand, and pay up the 1024 virtual beers.
Optic fibre seems the way to go. Carries the maximum amount of data and is the least prone to interference. It is also already used by some sea sponges instead of regular nerves, so it is a known biological solution. You can convert the optics into electrical impulses in the bionic implant and vice versa. If you went this route, then future iterations could involve unthreading dead nerves from the spinal cord and running the fibre down it. Increased protection from damage and increased compatibility with how the body works.