I used the CBO estimate of $1.3 trillion. You linked to their revised estimate of $1.38 trillion. Yes, you're right, it'll be 6% more expensive than the estimate I used. :rolleyes:

My numbers don't work. Now I'm not sure how I got that number. Perhaps I should use paper and pencil when calculating Obama-sized costs.
I'm going to show my work like this is fourth grade, so if I blew it again someone can easily point it out.

Direct federal cost: 1 300 000 000 000
people covered: 12 000 000
(roughly double the cost once you include premium increases, but let's start with just the cost we'll pay as federal taxes).

Cost:

1 300 000 000 000
_______________
                            12 000 000

Start dropping zeroes from both to get reasonable sized numbers for numerator and denominator:

1 300 000 000 000 dollars to cover
_______________
                          12 000 000 people

1 300 000 000 dollars to cover
___________
                          12 000

1 300 000 dollars to cover
________
                          12 people

108 333 dollars to cover
______
                          1 person

With premium increases, maybe $200,000 per person. So that's expensive, but not nearly as expensive as I had first calculated.

...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.

> Your math doesn't work out. Care to show your work?

$1.3 trillion (US) federal tax cost / 12 million people = $11.3 million per person covered.
Does that look right so far, or did I fat-finger the calculation? That's US trillion, which is different from UK trillion, I believe.

In addition to the $11.3 million indirect cost to the taxpayers, we have the the significant increase in premium costs since insurance companies now have to cover people who wait until something happens before they buy insurance, and the cost of generally moving away from INSURANCE (protection from catastrophic loss) to having a third- party payer for massage therapy. That cost increase could be anywhere from 25%-140%, depending on where you live and which study you use. One person could make a reasonable argument that the total premium increases minus out-of-pocket reductions is half a trillion, and someone else could make an argument just as strong that it's two trillion. My previous post guesstimated around a trillion. That number isn't solid, of course, but we can certainly say "$11.3 million per patient federal tax cost, plus a lot more in increased premiums".

> I can't help but noticing you left the duration out

That's the ten year cost, per the administration plan. So around $2 million per person per year, assuming cost reductions later as per the Obama administration's plan.
The short term cost is much higher per year, of course. If we recognize that kicking the can down the road doesn't actually work - that a future Congress will kick it again, the actual costs are likely to be higher, but I wanted to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. It's bad enough based on accepting his numbers - we needn't bother trying to be more accurate and figure whether it'll actually be $30 million or $40 million per person.

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. :-)

Let's assume that 12 million estimate is correct, that due to Obamacare, 12 million people who weren't insured before are now insured. Of course, other people give different estimates, but let's give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

The net cost of Obamacare to the federal taxpayers is $1.3 trillion (CBO). $1.3 trillion / 12 million people covered = $11.3 million per person.
I don't think we got a good deal.

The $11 million per person covered is of course just the direct cost to the federal government. In 2013, we saw the following rate increases due to Obamacare:
Connecticut: 37% average rate increase
Florida: 42% average rate increase
Illinois: 33% average rate increase
Michigan: 39% average rate increase
Minnesota: 35% average rate increase

The trend accelerates in 2014:
Delaware 100%
New Hampshire 90%
Indiana 54%
California 53%
Connecticut 45%
Michigan 36%
Florida 37%
Georgia 29%
Kentucky 29%
Pennsylvania 28%

So there's another trillion dollars it cost average Americans, in the form of much higher premiums. A couple TRILLION dollars to (maybe) cover $12 million people. At a cost of around $20 million per person covered, I don't think I'd trumpet that as a victory if I were a Democrat. (And in fact Democrat most candidates are distancing themselves from the mess.)

In response to Tail Hook, Congress passed laws preventing commanders from overturning jury conviction for sexual assault, requiring a civilian review when commanders decline to prosecute, requiring dishonorable discharge or dismissal for those convicted, eliminating the statute of limitations for courts-martial in rape and sexual assault cases and criminalizing retaliation against victims who report an assault. The President did nothing. So who, exactly, demonstrated the power to do something about it?

The Constitution is only a few pages . You ca read it, rather than making wild guesses about what it says. So far, all your guesses are wrong. Article 2 section 2 enumerates the powers of the president. They are:
Make treaties
Appoint certain officers, subject to Senate approval
Serve as commander in chief of the armed forces
Sign or veto bills passe by Congress

There may be one more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head, but "run everything " is not in the list. 99% of what the president does is at the direction of Congress. The Constitution vests most authority in Congress. If you don't believe me, like I said you can easily read it for yourself. It's short enough that I had it memorized at one point in time.

We seriously considered chronic lyme as a possibility and even got testing. The test came back negative, although there can be false negatives. We ultimately ruled it out on the basis of certain key symptoms being absent. Basically, we considered a LOT of things and did our best to rank the changes of each illness that might explain the symptoms. We were open to the idea of more than one cause but considered it a remote possibility; fortunately we were right.

Anyhow, homozygous MTHFR C677T can be serious, especially if there are other complicating mutations. Compared to some people my wife has a moderate problem. She had chronic fatigue (not to be necessarily confused with CFIDS), brain fog, autoimmune disease, gluten intolerance, weight gain, pale skin, hairloss, and many more symptoms. But she never lost feeling in her limbs; some people do. When you mess up the methylation cycle, all sorts of things can go wrong.

I'm not sure why you (an anonymous coward, so why am I feeding the trolls?) think that this mutation is of "dubious clinical significance." It's one of the more serious mutations, and the appropriate treatments have worked. Taking methylfolate, a few different forms of B12, and several other supplements has caused massive improvement in energy, return of proper skin tone, hair regrowth, appropriate weight loss, and so on. In other words THE TREATMENT WORKED.

This is one of those fortunate cases where a hard-to-find single cause has been identified. It explains ALL of the symptoms (many of which are secondary, caused by a deficiency caused by the underlying problem), and the treatment has worked very well. It's a little hard to get the exact dosages of vitamins right, because as soon as you get enough of one thing, the body will start repairing things, which requires other chemicals, and cause a deficiency in another thing, etc. So the fix isn't an over-night sort of thing but the progress is rapid.

And my biggest complaint is not that the MDs didn't know how to diagnose this. My complaint is that they EXPLICITLY REFUSED to help us when we were trying to track down the cause. Seriously. Most doctors just didn't have a clue and were unwilling to "do a lot of speculative testing," while some out-right said they refused to help us. Even if we came in with a list of tests to do to try to narrow down a range of possibilities (like a decision tree), they wouldn't do it. We had to figure this out completely on our own.

I don't expect MDs to know everything or be super-human. But I do expect them to listen and take patients seriously.

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.

The Constitution grants CONGRESS the power to coin regulate money, not the executive. The exact wording is "Congress shall have the power..." The executive has only those powers that Congress grants it, except for a very, very few granted directly by the Constitution.

> that the government had the power to make unreasonable ones before.

The Constitution is the founding document that CREATED the federal government. It didn't exist "before". Before the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, we had only a loose coalition of states, with the confederation itself having virtually no power - not even the power to tax.

... Before that it can't, because Ta^4 - Tb^4 is a positive number so no net radiant energy is absorbed by (a) from (b). That means all the way up to the exact point thermal equilibrium is achieved, all radiant power is a result of electrical power, therefore the power input and power output are constant. It is not a "gradual" process. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-09-20]

So Jane claims:

electrical power per square meter = (s)*(e)*Ta^4

The actual answer is:

electrical power per square meter = (s)*(e)*(Ta^4 - Tb^4)

Since Jane refuses to include a term accounting for radiation from the chamber walls, Jane's equation is saying that no radiation at all is absorbed by the warmer source. Why?

... Since the chamber walls are COOLER than the heat source, radiative power from the chamber walls is not absorbed by the heat source. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-09-15]

Of course it is! Again, this is just Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense. Absorption doesn't work like Slayers imagine. It's controlled by the surface's absorptivity, which doesn't change if the source is slightly warmer or cooler than its surroundings. All that's required for the source to absorb radiation (from warmer or colder objects) is having absorptivity > 0. Since the source has absorptivity = 0.11, some radiative power from the chamber walls is absorbed by the heat source.

Jane's been regurgitating Slayer nonsense for years:

... Warmer objects cannot, and do not absorb lower-energy radiation from cooler objects. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2012-11-20]

Then how do uncooled IR detectors see cooler objects? How did we detect the 2.7K cosmic microwave background radiation with warmer detectors?

... explain how radiation that is of a LOWER "black-body temperature" will be absorbed by a body of a HIGHER black-body temperature. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-30]

... An object that is radiating at a certain black-body temperature WILL NOT absorb a less-energetic photon from an outside source. This is am extremely well-known corollary of the Second Law. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-30]

No, that's a Slayer fantasy. On the atomic scale, absorption of radiation doesn't depend on temperature because individual atoms don't have temperatures. Only very large groups of atoms have temperatures. Individual photons also don't have temperatures. Very large groups of photons from a 10C warm object have slightly different average wavelength curves than a -10C cold object, but they're very similar. This means that even if temperature somehow applied at the atomic scale of absorbing individual photons, an atom couldn't tell if a photon came from the 10C warm object or the -10C cold object.

... You took a badly-worded sentence or two and jumped on them as though Latour made a mistake. But his only mistake was wording a couple of sentences badly. He does in fact NOT suggest that warmer objects absorb no radiation, and he has written as much many times. ... You have refuted NOTHING but a couple of unfortunately-worded sentences, which Latour himself publicly corrected shortly after that post appeared. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-27]

Ironically, Jane's still insisting that warmer objects absorb no radiation from colder objects. Otherwise Jane wouldn't repeatedly object to including a term for radiation from the chamber walls in his calculation of required electrical power. Since Jane doesn't even include that term, Jane's assuming that warmer objects absorb no radiation from colder objects.

... shortly after Latour published that blog post, it became clear that the language he used implied that no radiation at all was absorbed by the warmer body. So a reader could not reasonably be blamed for inferring that. But Latour quickly apologized for the unfortunate wording and corrected himself to make it very clear he was referring to net, not absolute, heat transfer. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-27]

Ironically, Jane's still insisting that no radiation at all is absorbed by the warmer body. Otherwise Jane's calculation of the required electrical power would include a term for radiation from the chamber walls. Since Jane adamantly insists that this term can't be included, Jane's calculation assumes that no radiation at all is absorbed by the source. None. Zero.

It's truly surreal to watch Jane repeatedly double-down on nonsense which Jane claims is too ridiculous even for Sky Dragon Slayers (as if that were possible!).