Ilkka Nissila

US allows spectacularly large campaign contributions from companies and billionaires and so their interests are heavily weighed in elections, making the candidates they support (who then later owe them favors, legislative and executive decisions) more visible. The underlying belief that rich people should have political influence proportional to how much money they can spend is astonishing. Additionally, currently there are contributors from foreign countries and domestic entities to Trump's vanity projects such as Trump's Inauguration and the White House Ballroom project which seem to correlate with tariff exceptions to those who donated to Trump. The level of corruption is just mind-boggling. I think US needs to set term limits to Supreme Court justices and somehow change the system so that they cannot make political decisions but have to strictly follow the law. The constitution should be updated so that it's more clear in what is meant. The executive's ability to change the career officials should be limited so that the qualifications and experience are the deciding factors rather than political affiliation or willingness to break the law when the Great Leader says so. Another thing is that the election districts should be redrawn so that they can only be simple shapes such as squares or rectangles with limited aspect ratios to put an end to gerrymandering. The system's performance should be measured by how well the popular vote matches the actual election results, if there is too much of a discrepancy, then adjustments should be made. Otherwise there is no equal voting rights in effect. Politicians should be put out of office if it turns out they lied before electrions about what they were going to do if elected. And possibly prosecuted. I don't think there is such a thing as a "benevolent dictator". When given power, people's morality tends to crumble and soon enough they become malignant and won't leave office.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fueling hatred and chaos allows ordinary people's attention to be redirected from the fact that ever larger part of the money goes to the super-rich, and by having the working class and regular people fight with each other they cannot organize and demand fair wages and working conditions, and solutions to regular people's problems. The billionaires just want all the money to themselves and they want to bypass democracy using technological means. And now they have an autocrat who does their bidding. Yes, they are cruel people. They behave like they wanted to use up all the planet's resources before all things end (which they will not see in this current generation of billionaires, but their children or grandchildren might). However, only a part of the population believes the lies. Better education accessible to everyone is the solution. In Europe, education is a lot more egalitarian.

To host a large quantity of videos for streaming probably requires quite a bit of money and if there is no paywall then someone has to pay the bills and how to attract enough advertisers to cover them later. US has a lot of filthy rich people who can afford to arrange for these things to happen and take the risk. Europe spends its money taking care of people and so this money for investment is not as easily available unless funded by government or EU money. Since we don't want the business model to be based on data collection & IP theft, what would the business model be based on? Subscription doesn't work because US companies offer free services (but you are targed ads and your data is given to everyone somehow through intermediates and may be used for surveillance, political manipulation etc.) I think basic IT services (including video and photo hosting, forums, social media, basic tools) in Europe should be government funded or at least subsidized and all the infrastructure, code, and data must be located in Europe and preferably the code should be open source so that any manipulation or other illegality can be detected. And the platforms should be considered legally co-responsible for any illegal content or activities.

I don't quite understand what the problem is. Metadata giving instructions for interpreting the exposure (such as a "soft" ISO setting which does not actually affect the stored image data) can work for proprietary formats such as raw video but is there a similar option for non-raw video formats in any camera? If the video is to be used "as is", with minimal editing, all the major editing and playback software would need to know what to do with the data and the instructions that come in the metadata. If the file is meant to be always edited (as in log video) then it may make some sense to offer this as an option but the user always has the option of using just one of the base ISOs in the camera if they so wish, so I'm not sure what added value there is from having a separate brightness adjustment; just to see the image better? The problem is that by doing that you likely become disconnected from how much exposure latitude you have in either direction as the brightness of the image shown is just an adjusted brightness for viewing pleasure and does not reflect the actual exposure or values stored in the file. To compensate for this loss of visual connection between what is shown on the screen and the actual position of the values stored then would require additional exposure monitoring tools, such as colors indicating how many stops you are from saturation at each point of the image, and this then can lead to screen clutter in a small camera with a small screen. The Nikon ZR, as far as I've understood, does offer such an option by choosing R3D recording: the camera lets you choose one of two base ISOs and then adjust the brightness using the ISO sensitivity adjustment which does not affect the stored data. I already see people asking Nikon to add "traffic lights" for monitoring to help deal with the disconnect. Does the ZR waveform display reflect only the actual stored values or is the brightness adjustment or ISO sensitivity also affect the waveform?

There is a 100% tariff on electric vehicles from China, so BYD is not sold in the US. EVs from Europe have a 25% tariff (based on what I could find out). Tesla is being given relatively free reign. I don't think this will actually help Tesla in the long run as it allows them to operate (in the US market) without really being competitive (on the world market). Tariffs can be useful to help some industries grow but Tesla kind of started the EV boom and they should have had enough time to develop their production so that they can compete on the world market without subsidies or tariffs.

I don't understand how the US expects to solve potential security problems caused by these products if they allow them to be operated as before. My guess is that there is a longer-yerm perspective and they want to hinder DJI and other manufacturers' sales in order to allow American companies to take the market and a soft transition would mean the customers can fly their drones until they crash them or wear them out, and then replace with new US products. My guess though is that the US companies will never make competitive products for the consumer market and the government policy can change as soon as they realize that. It should be simple enough to verify that the code on the device does not transmit data to China without the user's permission and DJI could easily host any flight log analysis within the US rather than send it overseas. This is about something other than security IMO.

Very witty. If WW III starts, photographers with drones can then make films about it, so drones may be very useful. I would imagine the operation of unapproved drones can be shut down in the US territory based on GPS data, so IMO it would be pretty risky to invest in equipment that is not approved.

How about using Dolby Vision? On supported devices, streaming services, and suitably prepared videos it adjusts the image based on the device's capabilities automatically, and can do this even on a scene-by-scene basis. I have not tried to export my own videos for Dolby Vision yet, but it seems work very nicely on my Sony xr48a90k TV. The TV adjusts itself based on ambient light and the Dolby Vision adjusts the video content to the capabilities of the device. It seems to be supported also on my Lenovo X1 Carbon G13 laptop. High dynamic range scenes are quite common, if one for example has the sun in the frame, or at night after the sky has gone completely dark, and if one does not want blown lamps or very noisy shadows in dark places. In landscape photography, people can sometimes bracket up to 11 stops to avoid blowing out the sun and this requires quite a bit of artistry to get it mapped in a beautiful way onto SDR displays or paper. This kind of bracketing is unrealistic for video so the native dynamic range of the camera becomes important. For me it is usually more important to have reasonably good SNR in the main subject in low-light conditions than dynamic range, as in video, it's not possible to use very slow shutter speeds or flash. From this point of view I can understand why Canon went for three native ISOs in their latest C80/C400 instead of the dynamic range optimized DGO technology in the C70/C300III. For documentary videos with limited lighting options (one-person shoots) the high ISO image quality is probably a higher priority than the dynamic range at the lowest base ISO, given how good it already is on many cameras. However, I'd take more dynamic range any day if offered without making the camera larger or much more expensive. Not because I want to produce HDR content but because the scenes are what they are, and usually for what I do the use of lighting is not possible.

Voters need to see more damage before they will admit fault in their own thinking and having been conned big time.

Okay, so there are two separate issues: foreign made drones, and DJI products with wireless capabilities. But that doesn't make much sense; how would a DJI gimbal affect US national security? It would seem that they approached the banning on two avenues: DJI products speicifically, and foreign-made drones. Maybe they can realize a double ban is not needed and DJI camera and stabilizer products that are not drones could be allowed. Though it is possible they just want to support US businesses while pretending it is about national security. Since RED is now owned by Nikon, are there any competing products that are owned by Americans and produced in the US? What is likely to happen is that movie and TV products that would benefit from a Ronin 4D will simply be done in other countries with no such limitations, and Hollywood gets smaller. Is that what the US government wants?

Notice that the ban is not on DJI but on future non-approved models of non-US made drones. You can still get stabilizers, action cameras, microphones from DJI (and existing drones).

Nonetheless he said the videos were shot with a Ronin 4D which does not support "open gate" video recording; ergo, illustrating that it was not necessary and other camera characteristics were more important to the project than open gate. Nothing comes free; open gate at full resolution without line skipping would mean the sensor read time increases and so there would be more rolling shutter and possibly it might need more processing power to handle that data (or at least it would generate more heat). These may be appropriate compromises for some users. However, seriously one can ask whether all cameras need to have open gate or if it is sufficient that a few do, enough to satisfy this market. Short form videos are considered to be tiring to the brain are reduce the viewer's ability to concentrate and control themselves. I believe most of not all of the vertical videos belong to this class. For long form content video, I believe the horizontal format is much more suitable. Times square, huh? I recently checked hotel prices in NYC and they were in the $500+. I wonder where the tourists are coming from given these prices. I have stayed in Manhattan many times before but the prices were 1/4th of today's prices.

I don't quite see it that way; if social medial platforms are viewed on a computer, the browser takes up all the display area available and fits the content using the whole window, this can be vertical or horizontal or square for that matter. Basically only when the social media is viewed on a mobile device do some apps and websites default to vertical viewing, but that's a limitation of the device basically, and the typical way people default to using it. Originally instagram photos were square, not vertical or horizontal. Some social media platforms assume that a video is shot vertically on a mobile phone, and for a time it wasn't even possible to shoot in horizontal oritentation and have the social media site or app display it correctly; it would always force it to the vertical format. This, however, is incompatible with the way most news media sites present videos, which are horizontal only, mimicking TV. When these news media sites then displayed social media videos or cell phone videos, they would not be able to technically display the video as a vertical, instead they generated blurred sides to the video to turn the vertical video into horizontal. This is all a bunch of nonsense really. Vertical videos make it difficult to show the context and environment in which something is happening. This is why cinema and TV are in landscape orientation: it's better for displaying the content. Photos have been always shot both vertically and horizontally (probably most still horizontally, for the same reason as video), as the continuity can be broken in stills and one can simply flip the camera quickly to vertical and shoot some (portrait) shots that way and return to the landscape orientation to show context; in video, one can not do such flipping without causing problems to the viewer. Books and magazines naturally lend to images in portrait orientation or in some cases, square; for displaying a landscape image in large size one would need to use a double page spread, which of course is commonly done, but it does create some issues if an important part of the image is in the mid section. What's more the verticals in (still) photography were traditionally not anything remotely like 9:16 but 4:5, 3:4, and 2:3. I think seriously social media apps and sites should consider making the vertical format something like 4:5 rather than 9:16 as the latter is just not very good. It's too narrow. Device fitting inside a pocket in an extreme limitation. Clearly, if the main reason vertical videos are requested by advertising clients is people looking at their mobile phones in tube or bus, or wherever, the quality loss from cropping from 16:9 is hardly going to be visible on those tiny displays. Sure, the angle of view is narrrower but it's always going to look awkward having such an extreme aspect ratio in a vertical image. Interesting to hear that there are now high-resolution displays which show video content in public. I can't remember for sure seeing such things myself, though it's possible that I have seen it but didn't pay attention to it. I would be very surprised if those displays are as elongated as 9:16 though. It just doesn't make any visual sense to use such an extreme aspect ratio for vertical content when there is a choice to stick to 4:5 or 2:3. And when those much more suitable aspect ratios are used for the vertical content, the cropping from landscape 16:9 is less extreme and easier to manage.

Sounds like random people making stuff up; the ZR has a fast read time in video mode (for a relatively low-cost mirrorless camera); it doesn't make any sense to make a video-first camera based on a sensor that is more than 10 years old and has a very slow read time. I couldn't find any reports of it on NR.

AI is not a person or a human being and it doesn't share evolutionary history or biological safeguards with us. It's therefore more unpredictable what it might do. I share a lot of the concerns you express in your article. It's worth following what Bernie Sanders has been saying about AI and the impact on the workforce and that the benefits of AI should be shared among all of humanity and not concentrated in the hands of a few ultra-rich people. Although Musk has been claiming that work becomes optional in the future and there can be universal income that allows us to do anything we want but everything that the big seven companies and their billionaire owners have been doing suggests that they only care about power and getting even more rich and are not at all likely to share the riches with the people. What in their past and current behavior would make anyone believe this would ever change, without society and its political leaders forcing a change? Musk seems to think he is player 1 in a computer simulation (the world) and so everything that happens is part of a game and an adventure to him. World destroyed? No matter. Restart simulation. As long as he gets to try to get to make it to the next level (Mars) in the game, that's all that matters. We are all just extras in the game. What concerns me the most is that in the race for Mars and superpowerful AI, the Earth's environment, the climate, and its people are sacrificed and yet Mars is and will likely always remain hostile and unsuitable for human life, so all that we have could be sacrified on a useless and pointless goal by a person who doesn't have all the birds at home. The situation is a clear demonstration of why individual wealth must be limited and redistributed when it gets out of hand.

The only principle that they follow is defined by their self-interest. If a law or moral principle exists which they think would help them gain more power or wealth, they use it argument why others should follow it. But they never feel the need to obey laws or ethical principles if it would be disadvantageous to their attempts to increase their power or wealth. Similar to the Russia which cries wolf when Western countries freeze their foreign assets, but do not see any problem in the looting & killing of Ukrainians. These are examples of people who are guided by only their self-interest and will do anything to gain more and more power and wealth. What is amazing is how the common people actually voted those people into positions of power.

The high dynamic range (using DGO technology) in the Sony A7 V is for low to middle ISO stills when using the mechanical shutter; DGO is not used for video, and certainly there won't be any 16-stop dynamic range at ISO 3200 or 8000. The claimed 16 stops is likely achieved on a signficantly downsampled ISO 100 still image and criteria based on engineering dynamic range (SNR = 1). Do the EOSHD website and browsers used by visitors support high dynamic range photos on Super Retina XDR and other HDR screens? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the OP is looking to see. Having lower noise can't harm the image and it's up to the user to make use of the higher fidelity, or not make use of it.

I believe it's just mainstream social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn etc., that they care about, not small niche forums on very specific topics not related to politics. I think it's safe to visit the US unless you have a written record of publicly speaking against Trump or his policies, in which case it might not currently be safe.

I think in any given time window, a truly good movie is a rare thing. It's not that there are no good films being currently made, rather we remember those old films which left a lasting impression on us, and tend to forget those films which were not good. For films made in the 1980s and 1990s we remember the very best ones. For films made in the 2020s we are more likely to remember the latest ones we saw. High image quality (be it high dynamic range or resolution) cameras don't make things worse in terms of the quality of the outcome but it may be that they motivate the production to aim for greater perfection in some sense and then not realize that technical perfection is not necessarily a worthy goal on its own if it leads to losses in other areas, such as the story and dramatic intent. I think visual aesthetics have been changing with the ubiquity of the mobile phone camera and the kind of processing that phone manufacturers apply to the images by default and also the kind of post-processing that people apply to their images in instagram etc. People who have grown up on these devices are used to the auto-HDR AI look and they may think that kind of a look is normal and looks good. Cinema cameras that capture high dynamic range allow that kind of post-processing to be applied, but they also allow other options; it is how they are used that is important. As camera and TV (particularly streaming) resolution has been increasing, it is possible that to get technical perfection, the producers think all the actors need to be really beautiful with perfect skin etc. as they are shown in such great fine detail in the movie. Post-processing edits to how skinny models look in magazine covers or online, and fixing of imperfections in plastic surgery por post-processing also have lead to new aesthetics which is like a race that got out of hand, leading to ever less realistic photographs and movies. If they process everything to look a tone-mapped fake HDR image with local tonal variations everywhere and no contrast between the different elements in the scene, and all the characters are super perfect then there is a huge disconnect with reality. Classical films often had rough characters along with the beautiful, which made things look realistic even if the lighting was hard and stylized (by necessity, as the film material required a lot of light, so hard lights were used and there had to be intent). Actual HDR technology can help avoid the tone-mapped HDR look and have shadows dark all the while showing details (preserving the global contrast between parts of the image). However, how this technology is used is up to the people making the movie, of course. I have to admit that most of my favorite movies were shot on film, although I do like several which were shot on digital. I don't think shooting on film per se makes those movies look good but it may be that the filmmakers were able to choose an aesthetic (by film and lighting and costume choices etc.) and hold creative control over it with a more firm hand when using traditional techniques. This could also be why camera manufacturers have been adding "looks" and "grain" baked into the footage as options recently. They can help to lock in a certain look and the added grain prevents excessive mucking up with the image in post-processing. However, to me this seems like less than an ideal solution which would be for the team members to communicate and understand the intent and work together to achieve it. I notice there is no agreement as to what look is good online, people will have wildly differing opinions on such topics. Thus it is up to us as viewers to select our favorites and enjoy them rather than hope that every new movie follows the same aesthetics. This will never happen, of course, as there are so many opinions.