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I think we will be seeing more and more a decoupling of American interests and European, it'll take the upcoming inevitable AI crash to spur things along though before any real change occurs. The EU needs to build stronger tech and will do so. We have the expertise just get on with it.

This was just an attempt by Nikon to bring the cost of buying the patents down. RED never actually lost a case in court, or ever had the patent invalidated. Settling, and choosing to sell, is very different to losing a legal battle for a patent that didn't stand up.

Of course they know how powerful this anti-fascist tool is and will try to make it unlawful, or an excuse to kill. As the SS saying goes that Kristi Noem is so fond of... "One of ours, all of yours" BTW has anyone ever tried logging out of YouTube, enabling UBlock Origin and putting a few choice keywords into the YouTube home page? It is incredible what the 'other side' is seeing and the sheer amount of propoganda Google is feeding them. When there's the equivalent to the Nuremberg trials, the Google execs should be taking the stands and going down with the rest of the fuckers.

You'd think. But y'all might have a hard time appreciating how normal all of this is for the majority of American history. We mythologize our "E Plurabus Unum" system, especially after WWII, but analyze our past without a filter and it's not exactly encouraging. Egalitarianism doesn't have place in what has, more often than not, been an oligarchy.

Hi Everyone, This week's brand new music tracks are: On my Sci-Fi 14 page: "CYBER INNER CITY" - So sad…but maybe useful for a cut-scene. You can listen to it here: https://soundimage.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Cyber-Inner-City.mp3 And download it here: https://soundimage.org/sci-fi-14/ On my Chiptunes 5 page: "THE GOBLINS OF PIXELTOWN " - (Looping) – Going about their goblin-y business. https://soundimage.org/chiptunes-5/ As always, they're 100% free to use in your projects with attribution, just like my thousands of other music tracks. OTHER HELPFUL (I HOPE) LINKS: https://soundimage.org/ogg-game-music-mega-pack/ https://soundimage.org/attribution-info/ Enjoy and please stay safe. 🙂

Micro Four Thirds is probably not gonna exist in the near future duo to exceptionally poor sales since both Matsushita and OM Group has decided to deinvest, OM-Systems might maintain a lineup for a few years although I am interested in what they will do now that the TowerJazz 20 megapixel photography sensor is getting more difficult to buy in bulk since the 12 day war. Less sales also means higher price for buying fewer sensors, guess they will be forced to take industrial Four Thirds sensors and adapting them to MFT mount. I have used medium format for aurora pictures just as a funny test, but gotta say, I did not enjoy how shallow depth of field even on a wide lens once you crank the aperture wide open. On MFT its much easier to maintain deep depth even with F1.2. Also with MFT you can use Metabones adapter to push physics to its limits, Canon 50mm F1.2 with the Ultra x0.64 XL will essentially give you 64mm F0.8 - it does however perform more like T1.4 however in terms of light transmission when measured accurately - Both the Lumix G9 and G9II basically perform the same in photography, the G9M2 however is an absolute THE best hybrid camera money can buy, everything is very reliable, its got the best video codecs - people praise Sony but their video codecs are absolute garbage and limited choices, Fujifilm still struggles with autofocus specially on their older lenses with the stepping motors. Canon are all heavy, limited glass the Canon R7 and Canon R8 are well priced but suffers from slow sensors and the R8 has no IBIS, the R7 IBIS is mediocre but better than Nikon by miles. At least Canon APS-C has Sigma. Rumours of professional APS-C cameras from all the main characters will probably kill off the MFT cameras in terms of competitiveness, APS-C lenses are not super big compared to MFT.

I think it's more likely that the ICE agents who terrorized ordinary people will find themselves in prison when all has been said than done (and when the authoritarian regime has fallen) and they should probably avoid antagonizing the people they ultimately are responsible to (the American people).

I think the problem is governments have not only voters but powerful supporters which can give financing to campaigns and influence policy in other ways such as lobbying. In particular, the pro-Israel lobby seems very powerful in many Western countries and anything that could be seen as being critical of Israel or its policies can really trigger these groups. Even if it is actually genocide that Israel is carrying out, many Christian groups somehow take it very personally and some may actually believe that friends of Israel get rewarded by their god and others punished; what Israel actually does seems irrelevant to these people, she is always right in their minds. Now, a government may be influenced by the pro-Israel groups and behave like civilized people in other areas of government, with this one exception. I wonder if Netanyahu really needs to kill as many Arabs as Hitler killed Jews before these people wake up, or if they even then would continue to support him. A retribution by killing 100 or 1000 times as many people as the opposing side has killed would seem normal Israeli policy and in their mind there is no need to being proportional or fair. I agree that the data collection both by companies and governments, potential cracking of secure communications between individuals, and facial recognition is government overreaching and the respect for privacy should be restored as a core value. There is nothing so bad happening in UK or EU at the moment that would warrant constant survellaince or reading private messages.

This anti-fascist tool is apparently also an admission to being a terrorist. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-making-list-of-anyone-who-films

Nikon argued that the patents (in the lawsuit RED against Nikon) are invalid because RED demonstrated the patented features more than one year before applying for it, so this is against the rules and the patent should not have been granted. Jinni Tech used this argument before apparently successfully. Since Nikon argued the patents are invalid they should not enforce them otherwise they are being dishonest and opportunistic. The patents have been in any case interpreted too broadly and should be specific to a using particular methods described in the patent and not considered generic to all kinds of visually lossless raw compressions in video. The "invention" is rather trivial in any case since similar things (visually lossless raw compression) were used for stills compression before and the raw video file is just a sequence of stills images. Nikon's method of raw video compression is different from RED's and Intopix has a patent on it anyway. I think the RED patents were enforced in such a broad way simply because it was an American company and the purpose of the US Patent system is just to help American companies gain advantages in the market, whether merited or not.

The HVX200 (not A) was the primary camera at my first paid staff video position back in 2009. I traveled and shot with it extensively. The combination of that camera, the lights that were available to me at the time (Arri tungsten & Kino Flo), and the hoops that we had to jump through for basic color correction did not create a very compelling image. Or, they didn't with my skill level. I remember trying to get a wide shot of all four members of OAR in a tiny hotel room and having to use the Century wide angle adapter, with it's massive distortion and blurry corners. I think we took down one of the hotel curtains and draped it over the couch they were sitting on because its floral design didn't match the subject. It was such yucky footage. The first time I saw 5D, 7, or even GH1 footage, it was profoundly gorgeous by comparison. There's not really any part of me that misses the HVX, though sometimes I'm tempted to track one down just to see what I can get out of it with 17 years of experience and all of the modern support tech. But even that experiment isn't worth a couple hundred bucks to me. I do think that some of the later 2/3" CCD bodies were capable of something unique in the right hands, if you're willing to deal with the bulk and weight of a historical ENG/EFP camera. I'm not. I've mentioned it before but whenever I get the itch to shoot with a CCD camera, I reach for my trusty FZ-47. It has a bigger CCD than the HVX but is a fraction of the size and weight, and costs next to nothing. No, it doesn't have any professional I/O or features, but it is fully manual and I think it's way more fun to shoot with than any of the behemoths that came before. The image is gloriously junky, and it the way it handles skin tones is wierd but kind of cool.

If Brazil can do it with Pix, I'm sure the European Union with twice the population (across all member states) can do it as well. Visa/Mastercard are still plentiful here, but Pix is huge and, being owned/controlled by the Central Bank of Brazil, I suspect that it has both lower per-transaction fees than the commercial counterpart, but also keeps the money in the country vs shipping it abroad.

Except it's Nikon now isn't it? A Japanese company owns the patent. Europe voiding the US patents of a Japanese company... Now that is very risky politics.

Replacing a leech like VISA as just one example should absolutely be done but I don't think it's a lack of self confidence, I think it's just really tough to do, both legally and in terms of the policy and the politics of it, the EU has always been about encouraging big American corporate types to come in and set up shop, and invest, so it would send a very bad message to all US businesses that they're no longer welcome to invest billions in the European economy, and it would cost a heck of a lot of European jobs as well if they all pulled out, they are such big companies. Practically it would be almost impossible, like taking the egg out of a pancake mixture. I personally though, as a consumer, want to see many of these big companies gone. I want to see eBay vanish or be forcibly bought by the EU and split up into multiple European companies, PayPal can fuck off, VISA, Mastercard, many of the US banks, all can go and do their business elsewhere as can Tesla. There are numerous US companies that have a near-monopoly or duopoly, or act like a cartel. Some have built valuable infrastructure, like Amazon - both in terms of physical goods distribution, and online with their cloud services. Kicking them out would be very unpleasant for Europe and for jobs... But it might have to be done if the US doesn't change course.

At least we're not checking people's political persuasion and social media history at airports. If the online posts are right wing incitements to violence, I am on the side of the police. While I disagree with some of the heavy handed methods used, there are certain people who deserve to be prosecuted and only have themselves to blame. And at the same time, the government is also making bad decisions, and some decisions that are straight out of the right-wing playbook rather than what you'd normally associate with a centre-left Labour government. For example the whole approach to the pro-Gaza protests has been baffling, the arrest of peaceful anti-genocide protesters completely wrong, the overzealous roll out of facial recognition technology is wrong, the attempts to roll back encryption, all quite wrong and the police getting involved with online 'hate speech' resulting in them arresting people like Graham Linehan for his opinions, just because a lot of people find him offensive. (It's a real pity that he chose to die on the anti-trans hill and it's classic depression... why couldn't he keep giving us more IT Crowd and Father Ted instead?) The government is reviewing the hate speech policing and quite rightly too... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2922w73e1o But when it's online literal nazis inciting people to attack others, they deserve to have the police at the door and I've no problem with it. That's less about censorship, than it is about law and order.

This sir, is a very good point. Ideally for these situations there should be a mode which transfers automatically to an encrypted server at home and the camera never stores anything, so if it's taken captive, there's nothing to see.

You are correct that the economic impact of European countries replacing those services with our own systems would be huge on the US. Also the loss of influence would be significant. But I suspect somehow that Europe doesn't have the self-confidence to actually go through it. They should, though. But Trump's admin is quick to anger and reacts to even small threats to their plans. Starmer threatened to shut down Twitter/X after the latest scandal (of AI generated sexually explicit images of users based on their photos). JD Vance has said that if UK shut down UK residents' access to X then the US will pull out from Nato. This is how much they are intent on bringing a Trump style admin and politics to UK. I think we need to coordinate action with Canada, UK, EU, Japan, Australia and develop alternatives to all this technology and services and eventually sell all financial assets in the US and shut down Meta, Alphabet, X, use a new financial services system which not US based or influenced and simply live in a world free of US influence and coercion now that that country has revealed its true colors. The remaining problem is the majority of military power is now concentrated under undemocratic, autocratic governments which could cause problems if they feel they are losing the economic and social influence over the democratic and free parts of the world.

Good! But still there is hate speech published daily online on some platforms. Hopefully European countries soon shut those sites down before someone like Adolf or Nigel or Josif or Donald gets elected here alao and does their worst.

Apparently the UK has the strongest censorship for online posts. As bad the present US admin for in-person free speech. It apparently had the highest arrests per thousand in the world.

This is how they act knowing cameras are on them, filming every thing they do, and with witnesses. Imagine what they are doing when there aren't any cameras fixed on them or people watching. What horrors are they inflicting on the people they've locked up? There are still people here in the US who support this. Those are people we'll never be able to get through. I wan't to think it will get better, but I fear it will need to get a lot worse before that happens.

Looks great 👍 Is it still on the Play Store?

This is certainly a sustainable approach, but it might end up being very unpopular with users - that and it would encourage trendy/mass appeal/influencer content vs evergreen content. It's not a wrong decision, but it definitely won't appeal to everybody. It might. Keep in mind that depending on the market, you will also have legal concerns and fees associated with hosting user-generated video content. The second anybody uploads CSAM, you're going to be dealing with international police, regulations, etc. Then add in processing of copyright claims, etc. That many users will also necessitate a user support organization of some sort. Massive economies of scale indeed - plus owning a lot of their own fiber and CDN (reducing transfer costs) as well as owning their own storage, etc. Premium is, IMO, one of the best values in streaming and it's hard to imagine that it doesn't lose google money, at least somewhat. They may look at it as losing them less money than users installing Adblock. Peer to peer, no. Federation, maybe. We'll see how things go for Bluesky and the like.

Anyone here shoot a Panasonic Pro AG-HVX200A recently or even back in the day? I'm thinking I want to go into the past for the final camcorder purchase of my life. I figure I should have a true CCD camcorder just "because" and this one might be it. Looking for any advice, thanks.

There's an interesting conversation to be had about the limitations of images to create positive change in the world, but there's also a conversation to be had about the technical limitations of our gear. What gear is really war-ready? I've long thought that camera manufacturers need to implement some kind of in-camera encryption for serious documentary work. Clearly, filming events like these is crucial. But what happens when your gear is seized in a politically sensitive context? What happens when a fascist state can use high resolution images that you capture to criminalize the people you're documenting, to find and hunt down other witnesses? The camera can be a liability too. And what could be done to upload footage automatically, or a proxy, in the event that the seized gear never comes back? Other than everyone streaming everything live all the time, which carries its own risk. We've seen now footage from people who were arrested or detained - which, I think, is fortunate but far from a certainty going forward. We're still missing a piece of the puzzle - not that ICE isn't clearly guilty of murder here - but they seized Pretti's phone, and now the fascists are the only ones to decide if that footage will be seen.

There is not that much in terms of news coverage from Iran in European and North American media even in normal times let alone when there are demonstrations and the regime is trying to subdue them (and cut off internet connections). I would guess that the government of Iran probably doesn't especially welcome journalists from the West and the European and North American populations are used to not seeing much coverage from that area, apart from the news about major war, missiles flying etc. We tend to want to see news from areas which are close to us geographically and similar to ours so we can understand and feel some closeness to it. There isn't that much news from South America or Australia, either. I would, to be honest, be happy to see fewer news from the USA and have the media focus on our own region and ignore Trump's latest deeds. But it seems that our media get much of their material from the US sources and so this is constantly coming up. What would be good, of course, is to have correspondents living in different parts of the world and living among the people there are really report what is happening from the perspective of the people living there. This includes Iran. But I suppose it's expensive to arrange and there are risks, if they don't like what you've been reporting.