...the connection between the manual focusing ring and the lens part is electronic rather than mechanical...

Just because a lens has electronic focus doesn't mean that it doesn't have mechanical manual focus. At least on the Canon side of things, focus-by-wire lenses are rare. Most of the focus-by-wire lenses are old, discontinued models like the 50mm f/1.0. The only current focus-by-wire lenses I'm aware of are their STM lenses (mostly low end) and the 85mm f/1.2L II. The rest of their L line is mechanical, including the 50mm f/1.2 L (popular for movie work), the 135 L II, their various zooms, etc.

The big advantage that fully manual lenses have over autofocus lenses when it comes to manual focusing is that most manual lenses have a longer throw. This makes it easier to get a more precise focus when focusing manually. They don't do that on autofocus lenses because it would make focusing slower.

With that said, I think the industry's obsession with manual focus is badly misplaced. When you're dealing with 4K video, you want the focus to be right, not just close, and autofocus is a lot more precise than any human can possibly be, even with static subjects, with the best long-throw lenses, and with a separate person doing nothing but handling the focusing. The only thing holding back autofocus for video use was the slowness of contrast-based autofocus (and its tendency to seek). With the advent of on-die phase-detect autofocus capabilities, that limitation is rapidly disappearing. Add a bit of eye tracking into the mix, and I think you'll find that within the next ten years, nobody in their right minds will still be focusing manually, particularly when they're shooting 4K.

it is often better if the aperture can be set in a step-less fashion

AFAIK, that's fairly rare even in fully mechanical lenses unless they've been modified. Perhaps dedicated cinema lenses are different in that regard. I'm not sure. But even some of my old screw-mount lenses from back in the black-and-white TV days had mechanical stops, so I'm guessing stopless lenses aren't exactly common.

So I can conclude that while having a powered mount is very much desirable on Axiom cameras (and so it will come just a bit later) it is also true that the old lenses are in fact more suitable to the task of shooting movies and so the decision to deliver a fully manual Nikon-F mount first is justified

The problem with old lenses is that they're designed for a world where cameras had relatively poor spatial resolution, and for much less reflective sensor material (film). I enjoy playing with old lenses on a 6D, and they create an interesting artistic feel, but they don't even approach the level of flare resistance, sharpness, etc. that you'd want for a digital 4K cinema camera. So if you're limiting yourself to mostly old lenses, you might as well limit yourself to 720p as well, because you'll be lucky to out-resolve that with most lenses designed more than about a decade or so back.

And if you have the money for modern, full-manual cinema lenses, chances are you aren't in the market for anything less than a highly polished, turnkey camera system.

So I really think that they need to at least lay the groundwork (in hardware) by making the plastic plates in front of the sensor removable and by including USB and DC connectors near the back side of that plate so that the system will be readily extensible in the future. That small change shouldn't require a huge amount of effort, and it will future-proof the design in a way that nothing else will.

Or, if USB isn't feasible, a high-speed serial port capable of at least 230 kbps would probably be good enough.

Just my $0.02.

Did you see the stats for the growth of their middle class over the past 15 years or so?

I'm not disputing that the country is ardently capitalist and has tightly guarded elite circles. But for most people in there, that's not where they are aiming for. What they want is basically just comfortable living, and their standard for it is getting pretty close to what the West enjoys. And with every new generation, there are millions more actually enjoying it - even though there's still hundreds of millions locked out. But for now, the trend is good.

I think you missed my point. If they don't provide an electrical interface near the front of the hardware as part of the core design, there's no way that users can develop any electronic mount hardware, because there's no way to communicate with said mount hardware... or at least none that doesn't involve a box fastened to the back of the camera with a wire wrapped all the way around the camera to the front.

That said, so long as they provide a multipin connector with full-voltage DC and USB pins on the interior of the body, just inside the mount, that's good enough to make it possible to add electronic mount hardware by replacing the mount with a redesigned mount. That's the minimum that the core developers must do. If they don't, first-generation hardware users will be stuck with that limitation forever, and folks will try to work around the lack of that hardware with disgusting workarounds, which future hardware users will then get stuck with... probably forever. :-)

Well to be fair the deep-red state Kentucky had a very successful rollout of Obamacare (rebranded as "Kynect"), including it's own health insurance exchange AND medicaid expansion -- the whole Obamacare enchilada.

Under Obamacare, the federal insurance exchange was never intended to serve the entire country. In fact ideally nobody would have to use it, because states were supposed to set up their own exchanges that would better reflect the needs of their citizens than a federal one would. If you are forced to use the federal exhange, it's because politicians who run your state made that choice for you.

Of course some states have had their own exchange rollout disasters -- including blue states like Maryland and Oregon. If you're experienced with this kind of project you'd expect that. But others have had very successful rollouts, including a handful of red states like Kentucky.

The biggest problem I see with this is that the lens mount system appears to be purely manual. This seriously limits the lenses you can use, because these days, 99% of lenses don't have mechanical aperture control. They really need to have some sort of adaptable lens electronics in this thing, so that people can design adapters that actually support modern lenses, similar to the Metabones adapters for NEX. The absolute minimum requirement for such things is a set of electronic contacts inside the lens mount that are controllable through software.

I think if I were designing a camera system to be extensible, I'd make the lens contacts speak USB 2.0, with appropriate short-circuit protection for when the lens is being attached to the mount. That way, the adapters could be very basic USB controllers that speak a particular lens protocol, rather than having to convert one arbitrary lens protocol to another (potentially incompatible) protocol.

There is one caveat to using USB, though. You'd need to also provide a 7.2VDC pin on the lens mount. Many camera lens systems require that much voltage to drive the focus motors, and it would suck to have to boost the voltage from a 5VDC USB supply in an adapter, particularly given that you probably already have the higher-voltage DC supply floating around inside the camera.

" I reserve the right to pick and choose the fonts, to pick and choose the colours, to pick and choose the pictures, and to pick and choose the bits of content of every web page that's offered to me. "

I could guarantee you don't have the right and you don't even have the technological capability to do so unless you're intercepting the packets and re-writing the code on the fly.

Which means you're obviously not using HTTPS and thus you're a moron ripe for security hijacking.

Was it, though? China circa 1960s/70s was a totalitarian dictatorship where Tiananmen square was an impossibility simply because any dissent would be crushed long before it would get to mass protest stage, and the yearly number of victims was far greater, too. Compared to China after Tiananmen, the latter is far more liberal. It's even more liberal today.

I did not suggest doing such a thing. The best thing you can do is just trade (and yes, this doesn't preclude e.g. tariffs to even out the price of labor differences, environmental concerns etc).

As Chinese economy grows, so does its middle class. As its middle class grows, it demands more democratic reforms and more government responsibility - ultimately, a way to better China, for both its people and its neighbors.

So if you want a better China, you should do the exact opposite of what you're doing.

What part is untested? How about the whole thing? Theoretically, it's not that difficult. We won't know about practical difficulties until we actually try it.

You think Project Orion is the solution to interstellar travel? Look, guy, space is big. Mind-bogglingly big.. You may think it's a long way to the chemist's/drug store, but.... If we can get a spaceship going at three thousand kilometers/second, it'd take centuries to reach the nearest star. You may want to calculate how much energy it would take to get something going that fast, and consider the size of a self-contained habitat that will function for centuries.

The characteristic of most deserts is not that there's a lot of salt water, but that there's not a lot of water no matter what. Granted, there are deserts that run into oceans or seas, but there's a whole lot of desert terrain that isn't. The reason why they tend to get an unusual amount of solar power is that they don't get the clouds or precipitation. So, why would we want desert-based desalinization plants?

Strange. I live in the American Midwest, and I see lots of people around me. When I go for a drive in the countryside, I pass through a lot of farms and small towns. You'd think people actually lived here.

Could the US feed the world?

IIRC, feeding plants to cows to get beef is about 10% efficient, so let's assume that each of about 300 million Americans is eating effectively ten times as much as is needed. Then, the US could feed about three billion people, or less than half the population.

Water availability is not just a matter of cities. California has some farmland that is very productive, except that it requires considerably more water than it actually gets.

You could compare the progress under communist dictatorship to progress under Peter the Great. Both were strong top-down pushes for modernization in a very backward country, and both had big effects on Russia's economic progress. However, I don't think Peter was a Communist.