Sylph

There's a lot wrong with that argument.

Firstly, the difference in brain plasticity (i.e. learning capability) between an infant and an adult are such that if you start with implants as an adult (and never heard before) you will never be able to use them as well as if you had started using them as an infant. In addition, not being able to hear while growing up can hamper a child's development in other fields purely because there are learning opportunities that it will miss, or even just because they have a smaller set of choices in schools.

Secondly, I would say that the best way to help somebody make a choice is to let the person experience both sides. A CI can be temporarily switched off to experience deafness, but it can't be temporarily implanted to experience hearing.

Lastly, I find the idea that there is really even a choice to make so weird. The list of things that you are simply unable to do when deaf is quite significant. Not all of those things work well with CIs (e.g. most music is problematic, everything sounds like it's coming through an out-of-tune vocoder, apparently), but there's still plenty of things that do. The idea that you'd consciously make the choice to never be able to one-on-one speak to people who don't speak ASL (i.e. the vast majority of the world's population) is so ridiculous to me. You are stopping so many great conversations and with that great friendships/relationships from ever happening, just by lacking the tools to ever start them.

Can confirm. It exists in The Netherlands (where I live) too.

source: my father used to be an audiologist (he's recently retired)

Would Biohazard not be a pretty hard counter? I'm guessing it is lower than your weapon. Of course you're going to say that whether or not that is the case is classified ;)

I think I remember Jamie Hyneman talking about using them on Blendo.

edit: Having some trouble finding the source now, maybe I remembered wrong.

What is it like to be doing this AMA and other interviews as if you are right now in the middle of the tournament even though in reality it has already been fought? Is it hard to keep things to yourself? Are there a lot of things that are not directly related to the outcome of the fights that you would like to talk about but are not allowed to while the show is running? If so should we expect a lot of more in-depth interviews with the roboteers once the season finishes airing?