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> Does anyone really want to process analog data?

But.. you do all the time. pretty much all the time these binary states are calculated from curves, or approximations. The state isn't 1 or 0, its the set of states which make 1 or 0 depending, under error correcting codes, over-sampling, things like manchester encoding.

We're fundamentally imposing binary on a non-binary state, by making deterministic judgement calls about which side of a divide things fall on, but to do that we have to look at analogue qualities.

I like to imagine people who work in VLSI smile at this statement, but at some level its analogue everywhere. It's higher-states which get to act like its binary, but they map to an analogue signal substrate.



Well, analogue everywhere until quantum effects come into play.




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