It's called Deep Canvas, and it was first used in Tarzan. Here's the presentation note from SIGGRAPH '99:
Deep Canvas in Disney's "Tarzan"
What if you could paint a painting, then have the brushstrokes themselves come alive and move around? Rather than texture mapping, where the end result of the painting process is wrapped onto a surface, Deep Canvas animates the events that make up a painting: the brushstrokes themselves.
Almost all "traditional" cel animations have a substantial digital component these days. Entire TV productions are being done in Flash!
Incidentally, it may be me (I'm a CGI trench soldier), but this entire article and sebsequent commentary seems very quaint and at least four years late. CGI has been booming in Hollywood for a long time, and this year's crop seems to fit the smooth progression of quality and quantity.
Now everybody go see Jimmy Neutron! Lots of great geek humor.
I would like Hollywood--especially Disney--to learn that it is pointless to throw big names on the marquis unless they are also great voice talents. Claire Daines just about did in Princess Mononoke. Lord knows she's not hard to look at, but Ye Gods!: "I'm, like a wolf? And I, like, hate all humans?"
For my money, John Dimaggio, who does Bender on Futurama, and had credits in Monsters Inc. among many others, is absolutely brilliant: these guys should have mile-long limousines in the new digital Hollywood, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were them.
Of course I think the animator should get a credit next to the character, so I'm obviously a dangerous lunatic.
Totoro is an unqualified masterpiece in my semi-informed opinion (I'm a CG animator). Even beyond the constraints of the imaginary cat-owl-bear genre.:) I've inflicted it on any number of friends and acquaintances, always with happy results.
At SIGGRAPH two years ago I was fortunate enough to see a presentation by a Ghibli AD in which he talked the audience through a bunch of scenes from this movie. "Here," he would say (through his translator), about a scene where the younger daughter picks flowers in the garden and stands on tiptoe to put them on the edge of her father's desk while he is working, "everything in the scene is intended to emphasize the innocence of Mai and the fatherliness of her father." Or waiting at a bus stop: "We kept the camera here for two more seconds to give the proper sense of spacial composition in time." (I've heard people call it slow, but I blame MTV fast-cut editing for salting the earth for more subtle techniques.) Amazing work.
Miyazaki himself is a gruff, chain-smoking perfectionist by all reports, but he writes some beautiful stuff, the acting is subtle, some of the backgrounds look like Maxfield Parish, in Totoro for once the dubbing is excellent, and the whole is greater than any description of the elements can convey.
Re:An important novel - but under feminist attack
on
The Left Hand of Darkness
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I remember this book getting criticism from leading lights in the gay community as well, to wit that her attempt to show adults with the characteristics of both genders (not to mention both sexes, for those of you who make the distinction) supposedly hit on sensitive stereotypes. Cattiness, in-fighting, etc. Never saw it myself.
A telling detail in Le Guin's bio: she's the daughter of an anthropologist and a writer of children's stories. As I am far from first to point out, the sciences in Le Guin's science fiction are sociology and anthropology.
Of course,the feminists who decry her work after the fact need to be--no, that joke was going to get me into serious trouble. Not that feminists are humorless or anything. I'll just leave quietly now.
If you can get your representative to draw a distinction between therapeutic cloning (make young healthy cells to repair damage in the host) and reproductive (make a baby), hats off to ya. Want to go for the jackpot? Explain it to the satisfaction of the religious right. I agree with your position, but adopting it would lose a congressman votes among the enormous "no attention for an argument longer than a bumper sticker" constituency.
As for the posts which talk about the weaker DNA and shortened life of clones, RTFA! There's a difference between cloned embyonic cells and cloned adult cells. But try explaining that to Slashdot. Much cleverer to say "Three thumbs up for cloning!" or the like and move on to other matters.
Re:Red Cross Needs Tech Help
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
Could someone who has gotten a response from them please post details on where to send the requested items? It says on the site they're email is slammed.
I've got a number of gadgets here they could use, I just need to write an address on the box.
Installing Linux on the 505VE:
You can only boot off the CD-ROM if you are using a Sony CD-ROM drive.
I had a related problem trying to get Redhat 7.1 onto a Thinkpad 240 with a USB CD-ROM a few weeks ago. I wound up putting the ISOs on the hard drive, where Redhat's installer can find them just fine.
(Not that this was genius or anything, but I had a lot of people smarter than me wonder how to do it. Once Linux is installed, the CD-ROM worked fine.)
This is clearly not the solution for everyone, but, if you can live without English, the Archives of Studio Ghibli is the way to go. This regionless DVD boxed set was released in Asia by Animation Japan International, Inc., and has ten Ghibli films, Japanese language track, with Chinese subtitles that can't be turned off. The films are:
1. Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (1984)
2. Laputa (Castle in the Sky) (1986)
3. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
4. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
5. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
6. Only Yesterday (1991)
7. Porco Rosso (1992)
8. Pom Poko (1994)
9. Whisper of the Heart (1995)
10. Princess Mononoke (1997)
Bought mine on Amazon for $75, still in the shrinkwrap. I've been watching them with the translated scripts, which you can get from Nausicaa.net, and I'm very happy with them.
Whether this is positive or negative depends on your point of view, but I don't think any money from this collection goes to Disney.
I read this as 2.5 frames per second. Or about 1/10 the frame rate you see when you go to the theatre. I wonder if this is an average for the whole film, surely it must vary somewhat from frame to frame.
I'm curious...so they render it in real time, but what about the physics and such? Precalculated, or did they do all that on the fly as well?
No matter how you slice it, this is some amazing stuff.
"The gray goo problem - accidentally releasing a self-replicating device that turns the entire world into copies of itself - is going to be a huge spur for close regulation of nano-devices."
Maybe so, but there are arguments to be made against the gray goo scenario based on energy availability, such as this one
I think it's most likely that this will degenerate into the kind of global warming he-said she-said which lets lawmakers do whatever the hell they want, and justify it with the science they prefer.
What you were seeing in the film were texture maps. You have a set of maps which control the diffuse color of a pixel, how it interacts with diffuse and ambient light, its opacity, specularity, roughness (you can make those blemishes 3D if you want, with a displacement map), and so on. Getting all this right is the job description of a Texture Artist in a 3D shop, and if you're really good and have a lot of time to spend with PhotoSh^h^h^h^H^H^H^HGIMP, the results can be pretty good.
What this new approach seems to do is model translucency in such a way that you don't have to separately and painstakingly paint in all of these characteristics to make realistic skin. I'm pretty sure that the example has no texture map, or a very simple one...the point is that all the effects are the result of rendering, not texturing. Nice work.
Keep your John Williams, this is some of the best soundtrack work I've ever heard. These guys can sound like Duke Ellington, Ry Cooder, Vince Guaraladi, half a dozen other styles, in the space of 24 minutes. Great stuff.
Re:Quite simply the best...
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 1
Seeger may in turn have been inspired by Woodie Guthrie.
Like so many of Zelazny's protagonists (Conrad from This Immortal and Sandow from Isle of the Dead being just two examples), Sam is very, very old at the time of the story, hinting that he may have been around long enough to actually know who Seeger was. No doubt Sam is to a certain extent Zelazny himself, projected into the future...as a vehicle for commenting on the present.
One of those books you can talk about all night long.:)
Winner-take-all future
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 2
I've re-read lol every few years since I first encountered it in the early eighties, and the themes wriggle around on me each time. The bit that struck me when I read it last year, perhaps because I read Age of Spiritual Machines about the same time, was the denial of reincarnation for political/religious beliefs.
Sure, there is the religious/secular, technologist/antitechnology, Buddhist/Hindu, stuff going on, (and check out Creatures of Light and Darkness, for his treatment of the Egyptian pantheon), but the aspect that I find chilling and relevant these days, and why I still buy copies of this book for friends, is the exploration of what it means to have a winner-take-all society (like ours), when winning means god-like powers and eternal life while losing means a life of hardship followed by ashes to ashes.
Incidentally, iBooks (http://www.ibooksinc.com/) is in the process of reprinting all (they say) of Zelazny's books, in nice-looking trade editions. Lord of Light is out yet, though.
Cliff Hanger, unless I am mistaken, was based on Castle of Cagliostro, a movie directed by none other than the great Hayao Miyazaki (of Princess Mononoke fame). He clearly knew how to direct action already by that time. The movie is far and away the more satisfying experience.
Anyway, I remember plunking pounds of quarters into this machine and never getting more than halfway, then one day I was possessed by the Force and finished it in one miraculous session of random twitches.
Lap-disolve to fifteen years later, scanning the video store for work by my new favorite movie-maker, pick up Cagliostro.
Carpal tunnel is a specific and rather rare (among keyboard users) instance of repetitive strain injury, and one can only hope the interchangeable use throughout the article comes from the writer, not the researchers.
No doubt other posters are disassembling the various logical departures in this article, so I'll restrict myself to this one: there's an inconsistency and logical break in mentioning carpal tunnel syndrome in the same damning breath as "imaginary" diseases which cause the suffere to become maniacally obsessed with the volume and texture of their semen discharges", while admitting that the former is a genuine condition seen in meat packers. "Hysterical illnesses exist" does not support "RSI claimants are hysterical." I also find it curious science to say that because a condition went away, it must have been hysterical. What about rest, ergonomics, or removal from the conditions under which it was incurred?
If I were to use the same journalistic standard, I would note that claiming a famous illness is hysterical could do much to raise the profile and lecture circuit fees of a medical historian such as Dr. Edward Shorter. But though true, that would hardly be fair, would it?
Of course, if my TOS goes away tomorrow, I'll owe these guys a big apology.
...please let this version have a complete keyboard interface! Or a certificate for free repetitive strain injury surgery (I have the graphics professional's version, worn out mouse arm). How many thousands of clicks does the average Civ game entail, especially if you're not willing to let your auto-engineers wander around on brain-dead pork barrel projects?
With games as addictive as this series, simple keyboard--or better yet command line--control should be in the product requirements from the beginning. Maybe this is like arguing that methamphetamines should come in sugar-coated, easy-to-swallow caplets shaped like your favorite cartoon characters, but there's a certain responsibility to the customer, damn it!
Posting very late here, so I don't know if anyone will see this, but I'm an animator and I've refused this kind of work several times.
I was impressed with the single-shooter magic-bullet simulations which were done with the JFK assasination a few years ago, but that standard was a far cry from what my potential clients wanted. "Can we show the other driver as a little more reckless?" is a more typical request than "are you sure this trajectory matches the skid marks?"
Look, there's too much persuasion going on in even the most faithful "recreation." The choice of camera angle and editing alone can be used to control the viewer. The camera is not an eye, and seeing something on television is vastly different from seeing it with your own eyes, as anyone who's ever been on a movie set can verify. A skilled animator can make someone look menacing by tweaking the walk cycle, showing them from a low camera angle, and messing with the lighting. Remember OJ's darkened face on the cover of Time? Tip of the iceberg.
I'm too cynical to claim that this has no place in the courtroom, but include me out.
Yes, choice is bad. Ever try to argue with someone who geot all their news from Rush Limbaugh? But a survey of dedicated listeners who rejected all other news sources showed that they considered themselves more, rather than less informed than the average citizen.
The old saw goes "everyone is entitled to his opinion." But I would argue that I am entitled to my opinon only if that opinion is informed. By choosing to listen only to the news I agree with, I am abdicating my responsibility to inform myself. Therefore I am not entititled to my opinion. So I listen to Marketplace on NPR, even though, or perhaps especially because I find its slant on the news disturbing.
An interesting thing about Slashdot is the occasional reminder you see to read at -1, newest first. I think you'd have a hard time finding a traditional news source which even occasionally reminds you "hey--don't trust our filtering." That message is the first thing that tends to get filtered out.
What infuriates me about this practice, i.e. both signed and implied noncompetes, is that it is used to suppress compensation. "We know your work is valuable and innovative. For that reason, we won't let you work for anyone else. Since you can't go work for anyone else, we don't have to pay you what you're worth."
It's not exactly slavery, but it is revolting. Intellectual property as a slippery slope to human cargo.
Weather Diversions. Angel will pursue a certificate under FAR23 regulations and will be authorized to operate in the full range of normal instrument flight conditions. Angel's operational plan will be conservative for it will allows the HALO aircraft to avoid significant weather by diverting to alternate municipal airports with current and forecast conditions approaching visual flight rules. Even the largest storm systems, a few hundred miles across, can be avoided, since such a distance will be readily traversed with the flight speed and fuel margin offered by the airplane.
And while we're at it, why not unmanned? Regulations, apparently:
Piloted Aircraft. In order to streamline the aircraft development and FAA certification processes, the HALO aircraft will be manned with two pilots. Over time, Angel may decide to transition to single pilot operation, to be followed by unmanned operations, if the regulatory climate becomes more favorable.
Hey, maybe it is in fact a stupid idea. It's just not stupid in that simplistic a way.
Won't there be tremendous pressure to extend this technique to land where the water table isn't already salty?
Suppose you are an official of a nation facing a food shortage. Will you really be able to resist opening up useless, but salt-free land to the technique? How about if you're the governer of a district with a clean water table and lots of useless land? A subsistance farmer in such an area? Salt irrigation spreads further and further inland, entire biosystems are poisoned, etc.
Or maybe it works perfectly, coastal land feeds entire nations and makes them prosperous so that their birth rate drops to 1st world levels, and so on. I'd very much like to think so. But honestly, what's the track record with new crop technology ending third world hunger?
Slashdot Mirror
Deep Canvas in Disney's "Tarzan"
What if you could paint a painting, then have the brushstrokes themselves come alive and move around? Rather than texture mapping, where the end result of the painting process is wrapped onto a surface, Deep Canvas animates the events that make up a painting: the brushstrokes themselves.
Almost all "traditional" cel animations have a substantial digital component these days. Entire TV productions are being done in Flash!
Incidentally, it may be me (I'm a CGI trench soldier), but this entire article and sebsequent commentary seems very quaint and at least four years late. CGI has been booming in Hollywood for a long time, and this year's crop seems to fit the smooth progression of quality and quantity.
Now everybody go see Jimmy Neutron! Lots of great geek humor.
I would like Hollywood--especially Disney--to learn that it is pointless to throw big names on the marquis unless they are also great voice talents. Claire Daines just about did in Princess Mononoke. Lord knows she's not hard to look at, but Ye Gods!: "I'm, like a wolf? And I, like, hate all humans?"
For my money, John Dimaggio, who does Bender on Futurama, and had credits in Monsters Inc. among many others, is absolutely brilliant: these guys should have mile-long limousines in the new digital Hollywood, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were them.
Of course I think the animator should get a credit next to the character, so I'm obviously a dangerous lunatic.
Totoro is an unqualified masterpiece in my semi-informed opinion (I'm a CG animator). Even beyond the constraints of the imaginary cat-owl-bear genre. :) I've inflicted it on any number of friends and acquaintances, always with happy results.
At SIGGRAPH two years ago I was fortunate enough to see a presentation by a Ghibli AD in which he talked the audience through a bunch of scenes from this movie. "Here," he would say (through his translator), about a scene where the younger daughter picks flowers in the garden and stands on tiptoe to put them on the edge of her father's desk while he is working, "everything in the scene is intended to emphasize the innocence of Mai and the fatherliness of her father." Or waiting at a bus stop: "We kept the camera here for two more seconds to give the proper sense of spacial composition in time." (I've heard people call it slow, but I blame MTV fast-cut editing for salting the earth for more subtle techniques.) Amazing work.
Miyazaki himself is a gruff, chain-smoking perfectionist by all reports, but he writes some beautiful stuff, the acting is subtle, some of the backgrounds look like Maxfield Parish, in Totoro for once the dubbing is excellent, and the whole is greater than any description of the elements can convey.
YMMV, but I hope not.
...but where's my sonic screwdriver?
I remember this book getting criticism from leading lights in the gay community as well, to wit that her attempt to show adults with the characteristics of both genders (not to mention both sexes, for those of you who make the distinction) supposedly hit on sensitive stereotypes. Cattiness, in-fighting, etc. Never saw it myself.
A telling detail in Le Guin's bio: she's the daughter of an anthropologist and a writer of children's stories. As I am far from first to point out, the sciences in Le Guin's science fiction are sociology and anthropology.
Of course,the feminists who decry her work after the fact need to be--no, that joke was going to get me into serious trouble. Not that feminists are humorless or anything. I'll just leave quietly now.
If you can get your representative to draw a distinction between therapeutic cloning (make young healthy cells to repair damage in the host) and reproductive (make a baby), hats off to ya. Want to go for the jackpot? Explain it to the satisfaction of the religious right. I agree with your position, but adopting it would lose a congressman votes among the enormous "no attention for an argument longer than a bumper sticker" constituency.
As for the posts which talk about the weaker DNA and shortened life of clones, RTFA! There's a difference between cloned embyonic cells and cloned adult cells. But try explaining that to Slashdot. Much cleverer to say "Three thumbs up for cloning!" or the like and move on to other matters.
Could someone who has gotten a response from them please post details on where to send the requested items? It says on the site they're email is slammed.
I've got a number of gadgets here they could use, I just need to write an address on the box.
I had a related problem trying to get Redhat 7.1 onto a Thinkpad 240 with a USB CD-ROM a few weeks ago. I wound up putting the ISOs on the hard drive, where Redhat's installer can find them just fine.
(Not that this was genius or anything, but I had a lot of people smarter than me wonder how to do it. Once Linux is installed, the CD-ROM worked fine.)
This is clearly not the solution for everyone, but, if you can live without English, the Archives of Studio Ghibli is the way to go. This regionless DVD boxed set was released in Asia by Animation Japan International, Inc., and has ten Ghibli films, Japanese language track, with Chinese subtitles that can't be turned off. The films are:
1. Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (1984)
2. Laputa (Castle in the Sky) (1986)
3. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
4. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
5. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
6. Only Yesterday (1991)
7. Porco Rosso (1992)
8. Pom Poko (1994)
9. Whisper of the Heart (1995)
10. Princess Mononoke (1997)
Bought mine on Amazon for $75, still in the shrinkwrap. I've been watching them with the translated scripts, which you can get from Nausicaa.net, and I'm very happy with them.
Whether this is positive or negative depends on your point of view, but I don't think any money from this collection goes to Disney.
I read this as 2.5 frames per second. Or about 1/10 the frame rate you see when you go to the theatre. I wonder if this is an average for the whole film, surely it must vary somewhat from frame to frame. I'm curious...so they render it in real time, but what about the physics and such? Precalculated, or did they do all that on the fly as well? No matter how you slice it, this is some amazing stuff.
Maybe so, but there are arguments to be made against the gray goo scenario based on energy availability, such as this one
I think it's most likely that this will degenerate into the kind of global warming he-said she-said which lets lawmakers do whatever the hell they want, and justify it with the science they prefer.
What you were seeing in the film were texture maps. You have a set of maps which control the diffuse color of a pixel, how it interacts with diffuse and ambient light, its opacity, specularity, roughness (you can make those blemishes 3D if you want, with a displacement map), and so on. Getting all this right is the job description of a Texture Artist in a 3D shop, and if you're really good and have a lot of time to spend with PhotoSh^h^h^h^H^H^H^HGIMP, the results can be pretty good.
What this new approach seems to do is model translucency in such a way that you don't have to separately and painstakingly paint in all of these characteristics to make realistic skin. I'm pretty sure that the example has no texture map, or a very simple one...the point is that all the effects are the result of rendering, not texturing. Nice work.
Keep your John Williams, this is some of the best soundtrack work I've ever heard. These guys can sound like Duke Ellington, Ry Cooder, Vince Guaraladi, half a dozen other styles, in the space of 24 minutes. Great stuff.
Like so many of Zelazny's protagonists (Conrad from This Immortal and Sandow from Isle of the Dead being just two examples), Sam is very, very old at the time of the story, hinting that he may have been around long enough to actually know who Seeger was. No doubt Sam is to a certain extent Zelazny himself, projected into the future...as a vehicle for commenting on the present.
One of those books you can talk about all night long. :)
I've re-read lol every few years since I first encountered it in the early eighties, and the themes wriggle around on me each time. The bit that struck me when I read it last year, perhaps because I read Age of Spiritual Machines about the same time, was the denial of reincarnation for political/religious beliefs.
Sure, there is the religious/secular, technologist/antitechnology, Buddhist/Hindu, stuff going on, (and check out Creatures of Light and Darkness, for his treatment of the Egyptian pantheon), but the aspect that I find chilling and relevant these days, and why I still buy copies of this book for friends, is the exploration of what it means to have a winner-take-all society (like ours), when winning means god-like powers and eternal life while losing means a life of hardship followed by ashes to ashes.
Incidentally, iBooks (http://www.ibooksinc.com/) is in the process of reprinting all (they say) of Zelazny's books, in nice-looking trade editions. Lord of Light is out yet, though.
Cliff Hanger, unless I am mistaken, was based on Castle of Cagliostro, a movie directed by none other than the great Hayao Miyazaki (of Princess Mononoke fame). He clearly knew how to direct action already by that time. The movie is far and away the more satisfying experience.
Anyway, I remember plunking pounds of quarters into this machine and never getting more than halfway, then one day I was possessed by the Force and finished it in one miraculous session of random twitches.
Lap-disolve to fifteen years later, scanning the video store for work by my new favorite movie-maker, pick up Cagliostro.
Nostalgia rising! Rising!
ROTFL! No mod points, sadly.
Carpal tunnel is a specific and rather rare (among keyboard users) instance of repetitive strain injury, and one can only hope the interchangeable use throughout the article comes from the writer, not the researchers. No doubt other posters are disassembling the various logical departures in this article, so I'll restrict myself to this one: there's an inconsistency and logical break in mentioning carpal tunnel syndrome in the same damning breath as "imaginary" diseases which cause the suffere to become maniacally obsessed with the volume and texture of their semen discharges", while admitting that the former is a genuine condition seen in meat packers. "Hysterical illnesses exist" does not support "RSI claimants are hysterical." I also find it curious science to say that because a condition went away, it must have been hysterical. What about rest, ergonomics, or removal from the conditions under which it was incurred? If I were to use the same journalistic standard, I would note that claiming a famous illness is hysterical could do much to raise the profile and lecture circuit fees of a medical historian such as Dr. Edward Shorter. But though true, that would hardly be fair, would it? Of course, if my TOS goes away tomorrow, I'll owe these guys a big apology.
...please let this version have a complete keyboard interface! Or a certificate for free repetitive strain injury surgery (I have the graphics professional's version, worn out mouse arm). How many thousands of clicks does the average Civ game entail, especially if you're not willing to let your auto-engineers wander around on brain-dead pork barrel projects?
With games as addictive as this series, simple keyboard--or better yet command line--control should be in the product requirements from the beginning. Maybe this is like arguing that methamphetamines should come in sugar-coated, easy-to-swallow caplets shaped like your favorite cartoon characters, but there's a certain responsibility to the customer, damn it!
Posting very late here, so I don't know if anyone will see this, but I'm an animator and I've refused this kind of work several times.
I was impressed with the single-shooter magic-bullet simulations which were done with the JFK assasination a few years ago, but that standard was a far cry from what my potential clients wanted. "Can we show the other driver as a little more reckless?" is a more typical request than "are you sure this trajectory matches the skid marks?"
Look, there's too much persuasion going on in even the most faithful "recreation." The choice of camera angle and editing alone can be used to control the viewer. The camera is not an eye, and seeing something on television is vastly different from seeing it with your own eyes, as anyone who's ever been on a movie set can verify. A skilled animator can make someone look menacing by tweaking the walk cycle, showing them from a low camera angle, and messing with the lighting. Remember OJ's darkened face on the cover of Time? Tip of the iceberg.
I'm too cynical to claim that this has no place in the courtroom, but include me out.
Mail your burned copy to the record company! Preferably postmarked the day of release...
Yes, choice is bad. Ever try to argue with someone who geot all their news from Rush Limbaugh? But a survey of dedicated listeners who rejected all other news sources showed that they considered themselves more, rather than less informed than the average citizen.
The old saw goes "everyone is entitled to his opinion." But I would argue that I am entitled to my opinon only if that opinion is informed. By choosing to listen only to the news I agree with, I am abdicating my responsibility to inform myself. Therefore I am not entititled to my opinion. So I listen to Marketplace on NPR, even though, or perhaps especially because I find its slant on the news disturbing.
An interesting thing about Slashdot is the occasional reminder you see to read at -1, newest first. I think you'd have a hard time finding a traditional news source which even occasionally reminds you "hey--don't trust our filtering." That message is the first thing that tends to get filtered out.
What infuriates me about this practice, i.e. both signed and implied noncompetes, is that it is used to suppress compensation. "We know your work is valuable and innovative. For that reason, we won't let you work for anyone else. Since you can't go work for anyone else, we don't have to pay you what you're worth."
It's not exactly slavery, but it is revolting. Intellectual property as a slippery slope to human cargo.
Weather Diversions. Angel will pursue a certificate under FAR23 regulations and will be authorized to operate in the full range of normal instrument flight conditions. Angel's operational plan will be conservative for it will allows the HALO aircraft to avoid significant weather by diverting to alternate municipal airports with current and forecast conditions approaching visual flight rules. Even the largest storm systems, a few hundred miles across, can be avoided, since such a distance will be readily traversed with the flight speed and fuel margin offered by the airplane.
And while we're at it, why not unmanned? Regulations, apparently:
Piloted Aircraft. In order to streamline the aircraft development and FAA certification processes, the HALO aircraft will be manned with two pilots. Over time, Angel may decide to transition to single pilot operation, to be followed by unmanned operations, if the regulatory climate becomes more favorable.
Hey, maybe it is in fact a stupid idea. It's just not stupid in that simplistic a way.
Won't there be tremendous pressure to extend this technique to land where the water table isn't already salty?
Suppose you are an official of a nation facing a food shortage. Will you really be able to resist opening up useless, but salt-free land to the technique? How about if you're the governer of a district with a clean water table and lots of useless land? A subsistance farmer in such an area? Salt irrigation spreads further and further inland, entire biosystems are poisoned, etc.
Or maybe it works perfectly, coastal land feeds entire nations and makes them prosperous so that their birth rate drops to 1st world levels, and so on. I'd very much like to think so. But honestly, what's the track record with new crop technology ending third world hunger?