I would suggest that some ppl (especially the bozo who posted the whole thread) actually _read_ "The Diamond Age".
No mention of every kid having a PDA. What they had was a book with a program built into it which would teach the kids to read, write, interact with people, play sports, learn self-defense, and at the same time promote a system of values. Anyone reckon we could even _begin_ to write this kind of thing, never mind fit it into the limited capacity of a PalmPilot?!
As for mediaglyphs, we've already got them. Think of signs to the mens room, or the Mickie D's Golden Arches. That's what "The Diamond Age" mediaglyphs were - just logos representing companies or common concepts. They certainly were NOT a method of communication between ppl - no-one in "TDA" ever wrote a mediaglyph.
You want to invent a method of global communication, look at the stunning failure of Esperanto - it's only marginally more successful than Klingon! - and then think long and hard about whether all that money should be totally wasted. To _really_ benefit kids, build schools in Third World countries, provide scholarships for kids to attend college, do stuff like that. It's not big and flashy, and it won't get you in any newspapers, but it might just stand a chance of working.
Let's be honest though, the world culture is here and it's American. Us Brits did a good job of promoting English throughout the world over the previous century, and the US has taken that up with its massive superiority in media and marketing. The de facto world language is English - ppl may not like that, but that's how it's gone, the same way that the de facto office document formats are Microsoft's. This may change in the future if some culture gets wildly ahead (remember that English took over from Latin as the previous world language), but not in any short timespan, and CERTAINLY not by some little charity giving handouts.
Yep, sure it is. The same way that a PC is a PC, regardless of whether the CPU is made by Intel or AMD, or the mobo is made by Abit, Asus, etc. It's defined by what it does, not by how it's made.
And by that logic, if someone showed me an AI which made use of concepts such as self-awareness (ie. awareness of its own consciousness), humour, learning through experience, creativity, a problem-solving ability equal to or greater than a typical human, then I'd say it was close enough to human for us to have to rethink our boundaries. And I think (I hope!:-) I'd be prepared to treat it as a person.
Sure, but at age 11 I hadn't heard about Alan Turing yet!:-)
Re:wrong topic
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The movie DARYL said this even better:-
"A robot becomes human when you can't tell the difference any more".
That one film influenced me more than all the other sci-fi films I ever saw as a kid. It's the only one that really got that concept and went for it. OK, Asimov did it first ("Bicentennial Man") but cinema still hadn't really got there.
The characters were certainly the closest to synthespians that we've seen yet - on that level it was incredibly impressive (although watch the forearms of the characters - at least twice I saw flat sides to their arms!:-). On the polygon-count level, it was great.
Unfortunately, the animators were complete crap - it made Dragonball Z and Scooby-Doo look realistic! Facial expressions don't work properly, every character waves their arms around wildly in an unrealistic attempt to compensate for this, and none of them move realistically. Animated characters moving like humans works, and animated characters with super-realistic gestures also works. But humans (and they are superficially human) moving with super-realistic gestures just makes them look like bad amateur actors, and that was how the whole film felt - a bad amateur film made with a good computer.
My guess is that the computer team would be a benefit to any animation studio. But the guys actually responsible for character movement, and ESPECIALLY the 1st-grade scriptwriters, should be dumped on the unemployment line, and good riddance to them.
Seriously, I'm glad this has happened, bcos after FF I would NEVER spend my money on another film by those ppl, unless like the entire world said it was good, and even then I'd be unsure if I should risk my money again. A film is far more than just a polygon count, and that is all FF could offer.
Shrek OTOH showed that animation could be fun, witty, intelligent and appeal to agegroups other than kids. Antz started it - that was pretty good - but Shrek went one step better and really nailed it. The best example is that with Shrek you don't notice how good the animation is, bcos you just believe in the characters - with FF you were sat there thinking "well, at least the pictures are technically good".
Same way as any other engineering project. You work out what you want it to do, then you find out what you can actually afford, then you hook all the bits together.
The hooking together is the fun bit - welding, screwdrivers, etc - but you need some theory to start with to work out whether your robot will be competitive with the motors and weaponry you give it. It's that first stage of deciding what to do which is all-important - if you don't get that right then you'll have to modify your gear once it's all built, which is usually very difficult or impossible. And that's the difference between a good engineer and someone who just whacks something together randomly out of junk. The _real_ talent though is to look at a pile of junk and work out how you can use it constructively to meet your requirements!
Please remind me how Americans can't get treatment in hospitals, whilst universal accesss to medical care is a fundamental right in the UK? Or how it isn't possible for anyone born in poverty in the US to get a university education except if they're lucky enough to score a scholarship, whereas anyone in the UK can go to university provided they meet the grades? Admittedly you have to pay some tuition fees in England, but even that isn't such a big deal since you get government-sponsored rate-of-inflation-interest-only loans for your tuition and living expenses - poor Americans are totally denied a shot at uni since they simply couldn't afford it. Or how American Indians are shut away in areas without jobs and with zero healthcare?
The stories about a girl denied access to Oxford/Cambridge are bollocks, and the girl in question said so. The papers thought it'd make a good story, politicians jumped on it as an Issue, and bugger the truth.
Britain certainly has many ancient laws which have never been repealed, simply bcos they're never used. OTOH, America has some perfectly sensible laws which aren't used bcos of the rank of the ppl concerned - JFK getting away with a woman's death without even an investigation, JFK jnr getting away with rape, the Clintons getting away with Whitewater, the current Bush using his office to advance the interests of oil companies, Microsoft getting away due to large quantities of money - need I continue?
At the top level, Britain acknowledges the Royal family as figureheads, but doesn't grant them any power; but the US isn't prepared to acknowledge that certain families get more rights than others, and that those families have more power than others. American hypocrites.
No, that's exactly the case. The US was already planning to attack Afghanistan when 9/11 happened - read the news reports. All that 9/11 did was speed the process up and grant it legitimacy. Of course, the pre-9/11 justification was to free the ppl of Afghanistan from the oppressive Taliban, but that's it. Afghanistan doesn't have any oil resources of its own, but it's a key region for getting a oil pipeline built from the oil-producing *istans to the coast.
Sure, but not many. In the US you've traditionally built your houses out of wood, so there ain't many houses dating back 50 years, never mind 150. If it's going to last centuries it needs to be brick and stone, and only public buildings and warehouses/factories tended to get that treatment. So there's some old churches, old government offices and old factories, but there's next to no rows of old houses like you'll find in every European city.
Britain is much less class-oriented than Americans think. Certainly I've noticed more class-consciousness in the States than I've ever seen in Britain - the difference is that the States thinks it's class-free. In one sense of that phrase, it's mostly right...;-)
The problem in most countries is that cities weren't designed for cars, or for the number of ppl. So you've got a large number of ppl trying to drive on very small roads. And the roads can't easily be expanded, bcos there's bloody big tower blocks, offices, churches and other good stuff on each side. Added to this, much of the inner city in a European city is _old_ and is basically irreplaceable - any bozo could rebuild the Empire State and all other US landmarks bcos they're all simple concrete-and-glass skyscrapers with little historic value (none over 80 years old), but you couldn't do the same with the Tower of London!
So think in terms of computer files. If you can't improve your network connection, you compress your files to make the most of the bandwidth. That's the idea the rest of the world uses, getting more ppl onto buses, trams and trains to transport as many ppl as possible per unit of road space.
But even the US has this problem - think Manhattan in the rush hour. In spite of the number of roads, there's still terrible traffic problems. Trouble is, the US places a stigma on public transport - using a bus is an admission that you can't afford a car, and that's some kind of venal sin in the States. Cars for Americans aren't penis substitutes, they're more a way of demonstrating your wages and status. You might as well paint a big sign on that SUV saying "I earn more than $60,000 - suck my dick you cheapass losers". Until this attitude changes, the US will (1) continue to get worse traffic problems, (2) get worse pollution, (3) continue to use more energy per person than any four other countries, and (4) have to bend over and take it up the ass any time the Arabs decide the Yankee Infidels are getting too big for their boots.
Most infectious diseases are controlled by antibiotics, but many are now resistant. What we've been doing to diseases is roughly like spraying the swamps with DDT - it works to start with, but eventually the bugs become resistant and then you're screwed and need to find something else. We're rapidly approaching the "screwed" state in infectious diseases, without much in the way of ideas when everything's resistant to the latest *cillin.
Then there's cancer, where the only cure so far is either to hit the patient's body with something incredibly toxic and hope it kills the cancer before it kills the patient, or to cut it out and pray to God you got it all.
Then there's congenital disorders, which are utterly unsolved.
The best we can say for diseases is that we understand the symptoms - they're the devil we know. Are you happy with that status quo, or would you rather investigate the devil we won't know, just in case he's going to screw you over less?
If you go drinking that water, you've got more problems than just the nanobots!
Like Weil's Disease from the raw sewage, chloracne from the dioxins, breakdown of the central nervous system from the mercury, poisoning from the oil spills...
Basically, you're not going to be drinking it! And anything that's living in there (if anything can!) is not going to form part of our food chain, and likely not part of any animal's food chain either.
Consider the water they are placed in. Or more accurately, consider the pollution. Dioxins, PCBs, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, oil spills, raw sewage, etc... And then consider the nanobots.
Basically, if we're sticking these things in the water then it's already polluted enough that it doesn't _have_ an ecology!
Anyone else remember "Snow Crash"? Where there's all that information-gathering so that "it got so there was no real difference between the CIA and the Library of Congress, so they merged and kicked out a big stock offering". Book was before the internet became big, but this sounds like the way it's going to go!:-)
Grab.
Re:Not all gas weapons are inhalation agents. . .
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
Plenty of gases do affect by skin contact. The trouble is that skin is pretty tough stuff, so in order to make it effective by skin contact, the gas has to be quite potent. This automatically makes it insanely damaging to eyes and lungs, which are not as tough. Mustard gas springs to mind here.
Nerve agents are by definition indiscriminate, ie. they'll affect every nerve in your body. There is no other way - the nerves in your arms and legs to allow you movement are identical in structure to the nerves in the muscles around your chest which allow you to breath. So a nerve agent which will immobilise a person will also kill them in ~2 minutes from lack of oxygen to the brain. Leaving someone braindead in a coma may be technically non-lethal, but it doesn't sound to me like a good option!
What would be needed is something with intelligence. I can only think of nanotech here - design little critters programmed with a map of the human body that know which nerves to go for. The kind of thing that Bill Joy goes apeshit over.
Grab.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But once they're all in prison, what then? A typical mass protest will consist of a few tens of thousands of people. If they're protesting on a single-issue point (eg. the truckers during Britain's recent fuel protest, or the farmers during Britain's Countryside Alliance campaign), chance are they're a key part of your infrastructure. You arrest all the truckers, and the whole country starves instantly! You arrest the farmers, the country starves a bit later (or food prices go through the roof). Meantime you've got to find food, accomodation and guards for 10,000 people. It's not a winning solution.
A mob is one thing - consider the anti-globalisation riots. But if the Million Mom March was broken up by police with teargas, how would that look? Non-lethal force doesn't necessarily mean that the enforcers look good - think of the images of the police training firehoses on protesters in the 60's. And even non-lethal force can go wrong - think of the flammable teargas used in Waco.
The non-lethal weapons being developed are designed to be used on individual opponents. You can't reasonably sticky-spray an entire crowd! Ditto the bolo-net only works on a single person. It's designed to give the police an option other than lethal force when faced by someone with a gun or a knife - this is also an important issue for peacekeepers in places like Kosovo, where shooting someone is likely to kick off a major incident at an international level.
Only gas is a reasonable mass-effect weapon. But even that has its downside - knockout gases are all lethal if inhaled in too great a quantity, and all that's required against it is a gas mask which can easily be home-made. If the police start routinely using gas on protesters, all protesters will routinely start using gas masks.
16-bit sound for the pre-mix stage isn't really good enough (BTW, it's 44kHz sample rate) - you don't really get an accurate enough recording of the sound to apply scaling factors in the mix. Maybe OK for a demo/CDR, but not if you want to sell the results.
Except that monitors put out mucho RF, even new ones. When you've deliberately put the sound-card outside the box to remove RF noise, why place it somewhere it's guaranteed to get even more RF noise? Unless it's a 19" LCD in which case you're probably OK, and a 19" LCD wouldn't be that heavy either.
The airfoil will be one object, likely composed of sub-objects like surfaces. The air itself may also be a large collection of objects to do your finite element analysis. The fluid-flow modelling will be an object linking them using some standard "hooks", so that if you want to change to a new modelling method, you just have to change the one object. And there'll be a solver object which adjusts the airfoil and watches the results.
Exactly. The more difficult (and expensive) it is to use Microsoft software on corporate machines, the more likely it is that Microsoft won't be the chosen solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe this is actually the British Columbia Freedom Fighters Front for the Liberation of the Trees? "Blame Canada"... ;-)
Grab.
I would suggest that some ppl (especially the bozo who posted the whole thread) actually _read_ "The Diamond Age".
No mention of every kid having a PDA. What they had was a book with a program built into it which would teach the kids to read, write, interact with people, play sports, learn self-defense, and at the same time promote a system of values. Anyone reckon we could even _begin_ to write this kind of thing, never mind fit it into the limited capacity of a PalmPilot?!
As for mediaglyphs, we've already got them. Think of signs to the mens room, or the Mickie D's Golden Arches. That's what "The Diamond Age" mediaglyphs were - just logos representing companies or common concepts. They certainly were NOT a method of communication between ppl - no-one in "TDA" ever wrote a mediaglyph.
You want to invent a method of global communication, look at the stunning failure of Esperanto - it's only marginally more successful than Klingon! - and then think long and hard about whether all that money should be totally wasted. To _really_ benefit kids, build schools in Third World countries, provide scholarships for kids to attend college, do stuff like that. It's not big and flashy, and it won't get you in any newspapers, but it might just stand a chance of working.
Let's be honest though, the world culture is here and it's American. Us Brits did a good job of promoting English throughout the world over the previous century, and the US has taken that up with its massive superiority in media and marketing. The de facto world language is English - ppl may not like that, but that's how it's gone, the same way that the de facto office document formats are Microsoft's. This may change in the future if some culture gets wildly ahead (remember that English took over from Latin as the previous world language), but not in any short timespan, and CERTAINLY not by some little charity giving handouts.
Grab.
Yep, sure it is. The same way that a PC is a PC, regardless of whether the CPU is made by Intel or AMD, or the mobo is made by Abit, Asus, etc. It's defined by what it does, not by how it's made.
:-) I'd be prepared to treat it as a person.
And by that logic, if someone showed me an AI which made use of concepts such as self-awareness (ie. awareness of its own consciousness), humour, learning through experience, creativity, a problem-solving ability equal to or greater than a typical human, then I'd say it was close enough to human for us to have to rethink our boundaries. And I think (I hope!
Grab.
Sure, but at age 11 I hadn't heard about Alan Turing yet! :-)
The movie DARYL said this even better:-
"A robot becomes human when you can't tell the difference any more".
That one film influenced me more than all the other sci-fi films I ever saw as a kid. It's the only one that really got that concept and went for it. OK, Asimov did it first ("Bicentennial Man") but cinema still hadn't really got there.
Grab.
The characters were certainly the closest to synthespians that we've seen yet - on that level it was incredibly impressive (although watch the forearms of the characters - at least twice I saw flat sides to their arms! :-). On the polygon-count level, it was great.
Unfortunately, the animators were complete crap - it made Dragonball Z and Scooby-Doo look realistic! Facial expressions don't work properly, every character waves their arms around wildly in an unrealistic attempt to compensate for this, and none of them move realistically. Animated characters moving like humans works, and animated characters with super-realistic gestures also works. But humans (and they are superficially human) moving with super-realistic gestures just makes them look like bad amateur actors, and that was how the whole film felt - a bad amateur film made with a good computer.
My guess is that the computer team would be a benefit to any animation studio. But the guys actually responsible for character movement, and ESPECIALLY the 1st-grade scriptwriters, should be dumped on the unemployment line, and good riddance to them.
Seriously, I'm glad this has happened, bcos after FF I would NEVER spend my money on another film by those ppl, unless like the entire world said it was good, and even then I'd be unsure if I should risk my money again. A film is far more than just a polygon count, and that is all FF could offer.
Shrek OTOH showed that animation could be fun, witty, intelligent and appeal to agegroups other than kids. Antz started it - that was pretty good - but Shrek went one step better and really nailed it. The best example is that with Shrek you don't notice how good the animation is, bcos you just believe in the characters - with FF you were sat there thinking "well, at least the pictures are technically good".
Grab.
Same way as any other engineering project. You work out what you want it to do, then you find out what you can actually afford, then you hook all the bits together.
The hooking together is the fun bit - welding, screwdrivers, etc - but you need some theory to start with to work out whether your robot will be competitive with the motors and weaponry you give it. It's that first stage of deciding what to do which is all-important - if you don't get that right then you'll have to modify your gear once it's all built, which is usually very difficult or impossible. And that's the difference between a good engineer and someone who just whacks something together randomly out of junk. The _real_ talent though is to look at a pile of junk and work out how you can use it constructively to meet your requirements!
Grab.
Please remind me how Americans can't get treatment in hospitals, whilst universal accesss to medical care is a fundamental right in the UK? Or how it isn't possible for anyone born in poverty in the US to get a university education except if they're lucky enough to score a scholarship, whereas anyone in the UK can go to university provided they meet the grades? Admittedly you have to pay some tuition fees in England, but even that isn't such a big deal since you get government-sponsored rate-of-inflation-interest-only loans for your tuition and living expenses - poor Americans are totally denied a shot at uni since they simply couldn't afford it. Or how American Indians are shut away in areas without jobs and with zero healthcare?
The stories about a girl denied access to Oxford/Cambridge are bollocks, and the girl in question said so. The papers thought it'd make a good story, politicians jumped on it as an Issue, and bugger the truth.
Britain certainly has many ancient laws which have never been repealed, simply bcos they're never used. OTOH, America has some perfectly sensible laws which aren't used bcos of the rank of the ppl concerned - JFK getting away with a woman's death without even an investigation, JFK jnr getting away with rape, the Clintons getting away with Whitewater, the current Bush using his office to advance the interests of oil companies, Microsoft getting away due to large quantities of money - need I continue?
At the top level, Britain acknowledges the Royal family as figureheads, but doesn't grant them any power; but the US isn't prepared to acknowledge that certain families get more rights than others, and that those families have more power than others. American hypocrites.
Grab.
No, that's exactly the case. The US was already planning to attack Afghanistan when 9/11 happened - read the news reports. All that 9/11 did was speed the process up and grant it legitimacy. Of course, the pre-9/11 justification was to free the ppl of Afghanistan from the oppressive Taliban, but that's it. Afghanistan doesn't have any oil resources of its own, but it's a key region for getting a oil pipeline built from the oil-producing *istans to the coast.
Grab.
Sure, but not many. In the US you've traditionally built your houses out of wood, so there ain't many houses dating back 50 years, never mind 150. If it's going to last centuries it needs to be brick and stone, and only public buildings and warehouses/factories tended to get that treatment. So there's some old churches, old government offices and old factories, but there's next to no rows of old houses like you'll find in every European city.
Grab.
In a word, yes.
;-)
Britain is much less class-oriented than Americans think. Certainly I've noticed more class-consciousness in the States than I've ever seen in Britain - the difference is that the States thinks it's class-free. In one sense of that phrase, it's mostly right...
Grab.
The problem in most countries is that cities weren't designed for cars, or for the number of ppl. So you've got a large number of ppl trying to drive on very small roads. And the roads can't easily be expanded, bcos there's bloody big tower blocks, offices, churches and other good stuff on each side. Added to this, much of the inner city in a European city is _old_ and is basically irreplaceable - any bozo could rebuild the Empire State and all other US landmarks bcos they're all simple concrete-and-glass skyscrapers with little historic value (none over 80 years old), but you couldn't do the same with the Tower of London!
So think in terms of computer files. If you can't improve your network connection, you compress your files to make the most of the bandwidth. That's the idea the rest of the world uses, getting more ppl onto buses, trams and trains to transport as many ppl as possible per unit of road space.
But even the US has this problem - think Manhattan in the rush hour. In spite of the number of roads, there's still terrible traffic problems. Trouble is, the US places a stigma on public transport - using a bus is an admission that you can't afford a car, and that's some kind of venal sin in the States. Cars for Americans aren't penis substitutes, they're more a way of demonstrating your wages and status. You might as well paint a big sign on that SUV saying "I earn more than $60,000 - suck my dick you cheapass losers". Until this attitude changes, the US will (1) continue to get worse traffic problems, (2) get worse pollution, (3) continue to use more energy per person than any four other countries, and (4) have to bend over and take it up the ass any time the Arabs decide the Yankee Infidels are getting too big for their boots.
Grab.
Think of the possibilities. All those songs...
;-)
"The Iris Rover"
"I want to be a part of it, Ne Yor Ne Yor"
I could keep these going all day, but I think it's best I stop now.
Grab.
Really? When did this happen?
Most infectious diseases are controlled by antibiotics, but many are now resistant. What we've been doing to diseases is roughly like spraying the swamps with DDT - it works to start with, but eventually the bugs become resistant and then you're screwed and need to find something else. We're rapidly approaching the "screwed" state in infectious diseases, without much in the way of ideas when everything's resistant to the latest *cillin.
Then there's cancer, where the only cure so far is either to hit the patient's body with something incredibly toxic and hope it kills the cancer before it kills the patient, or to cut it out and pray to God you got it all.
Then there's congenital disorders, which are utterly unsolved.
The best we can say for diseases is that we understand the symptoms - they're the devil we know. Are you happy with that status quo, or would you rather investigate the devil we won't know, just in case he's going to screw you over less?
Grab.
If you go drinking that water, you've got more problems than just the nanobots!
Like Weil's Disease from the raw sewage, chloracne from the dioxins, breakdown of the central nervous system from the mercury, poisoning from the oil spills...
Basically, you're not going to be drinking it! And anything that's living in there (if anything can!) is not going to form part of our food chain, and likely not part of any animal's food chain either.
Grab.
Consider the water they are placed in. Or more accurately, consider the pollution. Dioxins, PCBs, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, oil spills, raw sewage, etc... And then consider the nanobots.
Basically, if we're sticking these things in the water then it's already polluted enough that it doesn't _have_ an ecology!
Grab.
Anyone else remember "Snow Crash"? Where there's all that information-gathering so that "it got so there was no real difference between the CIA and the Library of Congress, so they merged and kicked out a big stock offering". Book was before the internet became big, but this sounds like the way it's going to go! :-)
Grab.
Plenty of gases do affect by skin contact. The trouble is that skin is pretty tough stuff, so in order to make it effective by skin contact, the gas has to be quite potent. This automatically makes it insanely damaging to eyes and lungs, which are not as tough. Mustard gas springs to mind here.
Nerve agents are by definition indiscriminate, ie. they'll affect every nerve in your body. There is no other way - the nerves in your arms and legs to allow you movement are identical in structure to the nerves in the muscles around your chest which allow you to breath. So a nerve agent which will immobilise a person will also kill them in ~2 minutes from lack of oxygen to the brain. Leaving someone braindead in a coma may be technically non-lethal, but it doesn't sound to me like a good option!
What would be needed is something with intelligence. I can only think of nanotech here - design little critters programmed with a map of the human body that know which nerves to go for. The kind of thing that Bill Joy goes apeshit over.
Grab.
But once they're all in prison, what then? A typical mass protest will consist of a few tens of thousands of people. If they're protesting on a single-issue point (eg. the truckers during Britain's recent fuel protest, or the farmers during Britain's Countryside Alliance campaign), chance are they're a key part of your infrastructure. You arrest all the truckers, and the whole country starves instantly! You arrest the farmers, the country starves a bit later (or food prices go through the roof). Meantime you've got to find food, accomodation and guards for 10,000 people. It's not a winning solution.
A mob is one thing - consider the anti-globalisation riots. But if the Million Mom March was broken up by police with teargas, how would that look? Non-lethal force doesn't necessarily mean that the enforcers look good - think of the images of the police training firehoses on protesters in the 60's. And even non-lethal force can go wrong - think of the flammable teargas used in Waco.
The non-lethal weapons being developed are designed to be used on individual opponents. You can't reasonably sticky-spray an entire crowd! Ditto the bolo-net only works on a single person. It's designed to give the police an option other than lethal force when faced by someone with a gun or a knife - this is also an important issue for peacekeepers in places like Kosovo, where shooting someone is likely to kick off a major incident at an international level.
Only gas is a reasonable mass-effect weapon. But even that has its downside - knockout gases are all lethal if inhaled in too great a quantity, and all that's required against it is a gas mask which can easily be home-made. If the police start routinely using gas on protesters, all protesters will routinely start using gas masks.
Grab.
16-bit sound for the pre-mix stage isn't really good enough (BTW, it's 44kHz sample rate) - you don't really get an accurate enough recording of the sound to apply scaling factors in the mix. Maybe OK for a demo/CDR, but not if you want to sell the results.
Grab.
Except that monitors put out mucho RF, even new ones. When you've deliberately put the sound-card outside the box to remove RF noise, why place it somewhere it's guaranteed to get even more RF noise? Unless it's a 19" LCD in which case you're probably OK, and a 19" LCD wouldn't be that heavy either.
Grab.
Spot on. Shame I don't have mod points...
Grab.
The airfoil will be one object, likely composed of sub-objects like surfaces. The air itself may also be a large collection of objects to do your finite element analysis. The fluid-flow modelling will be an object linking them using some standard "hooks", so that if you want to change to a new modelling method, you just have to change the one object. And there'll be a solver object which adjusts the airfoil and watches the results.
Grab.
The word is "aliasing". Hence "anti-aliasing". :-)
Grab.
Exactly. The more difficult (and expensive) it is to use Microsoft software on corporate machines, the more likely it is that Microsoft won't be the chosen solution.
Grab.