http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,717...l?tw=wn_index_1

the best bit is at the end of the second page where a dad talks about his toughts for the future.

Wow! That's incredible. I have the utmost respect for these people's aims and resourcefulness. Just... wow!

Thank you for posting this - it's really made me go...uh, wow!

I like how they use lego for proof-of-concept designs.

This IS pretty fucking awesome.

Would something like this happen in SR?

Yeah it's easy cyber limbs at 10% of the nuyen cost, but made of lego!

Yeah, imagine people achieving some kind of positive victory against corporate power in the SR timeline. Heresy!

But seriously, I think this can be integrated into SR. It doesn't need to be explicitly called Open Source. I imagine it as the more innovative Street Docs playing around and doing custom jobs. Many of them will have trid images of their work displayed in their clinic (or more grisly - reclaimed examples if the payments weren't met). Likely they'll swap notes over the matrix. Next time a player is numbed up and can't move while she has a cyberlimb fitted, the doc will open up a trid channel to his mates in Beijing and Birmingham and they'll swap suggestion as he works.

Obvious, stylish cyberware is one of those things that I feel really disappeared/was discouraged in the SR3 era. I'm kind of hoping it comes back with SR4.

In a world where you can have your muscles regrown and your skin toughened and your brain boosted until you're as quick as a cheetah, I think the concept that "people react badly to cyberware" is a little outdated.

btw, this whole article is a example that free market powers are not a cure-all. given the limited interest and numbers there are of people that loose hands or more compared to the number of people that loose a foot, the corporates that develop bionic replacements are focusing on the largets market. leaving the others with "ancient" solutions.

hell, you see the same thing with antibiotica's. the big medicine corps no longer finds them interesting as the development time and cost cant be recooped before the bacteria become resistent to the chemicals.

In the next 30 years I can see people chopping off perfectly healthy limbs to make a fashion statement. AGiven the recent advancements in DNI computing and robotics cyberlimbs that are superior to the real thing should not be uncommon in the near future and when the metal is better than the flesh there will be pressure to chop off the flesh and buy the metal.


What I link is that, assuming that you know someone who can put it together, the cost of a SOTA prostesis is reduced from thirty-thousand dollars minimum to a few hundred dollars.

All things being equal, most of the cost of prostesis and similar items are intellectual property fees. With an open souce design the per-unit cost is reduced to the actual cost of constructing a unit.

Would YOU get a cyberlimb?

maybe, if i could get a mobile phone and a mp3 player installed, and that worked just a good as the meat in terms of tacticle feedback and precision.

Hell I've wanted a cyberlimb since 1989.