It takes about 10 seconds to remove the memory card and plug it into a tablet/laptop/whatever. Unless you need photos uploaded essentially as you shoot them (which I suspect woudn't work very well at the same time you were taking new pictures), there is no reason to have the camera able to connect to a network.

You're kind of assuming the photographer is right next to the cameras - professional wireless whatsits (e.g. Nikon and Canon) are intended for full remote control of multiple cameras. So at a sports event, a photographer might have one down behind the goal with a wide-angle lens, another pointing at the other goal, etc. etc. etc. - all uploading to the photo agency for up-to-the-moment imagery. Newspapers needed things soon, the internet needs it now.

Still decidedly embarrassing if they are so easily compromised, of course.

Yes, delete button is right there, and will happily help you corrupt all of your data on the card, in $4000 camera. Thats the point.

What on Earth are you doing with your cameras? I've been deleting unnecessary photos from cameras for years, as well as using the memory cards for general file storage (somehow I still have no USB memory whatsits) - and I've yet to suffer from any file corruption. I do tend to reformat cards that need emptying rather than mass-deleting files, but that's mainly 'cause it's much quicker that way. I've frequently had full cards that I've pruned photos from so I can take some more. (Experience mainly with Canon dSLRs, but also with Fujifilm, Minolta, Panasonic etc.)

I suspect my habit of only buying decent memory cards has caught up with me yet again. :-(

If you want an open source, host-it-yourself web-app then there's Tiny Tiny RSS, as recommended by a co-worker.

The site's been up and down all day for some completely inexplicable reason, but the brief glimpse I got of the live demo was pretty impressive. I escaped Google Reader nearly a year ago (the Google Plus 'integration' had been annoying me, and in a fit of pique I got rid of all Google dependencies I had) and while I've been mostly happy with the desktop-app Vienna RSS for Mac OS X, further alternatives are always welcome. I imagine someone will get an open cross-client sync working now that Google Reader is going away...

I'm more worried that a zombie Stanley Kubrick will rise from the grave, wanting to shoot another film with available light.

(Lit by candlelight? Yeah, okay. Lit by a single stick of burning incense? That's just taking the proverbial.)

But I feel like the sentiment of his post is pretty correct.

Indeed - I find I very rarely use continuous shooting on my own cameras, and I don't think I've ever hit the buffer limits in a real-world situation, but faster memory cards are still bloody useful simply for copying stuff over to a computer afterwards.

UHm, no. Top of the line SLR can't handle 20 shots in buffer, and any consumer grade is 1-2 max. You won't get you 3-5 FPS (mid tier) or 5-9FPS (high end) without a fast card.

Definitely not a top-of-the-line camera, but still fairly decent - Canon EOS 7D. With the latest firmware, mine claims to have a 22 shot buffer in RAW, 80 shot buffer in large JPEG. 8fps. Plus it'll potentially shoot for even longer depending on how fast the memory card is - but it does take CompactFlash rather than SD.

Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential.

The stuff they're looking at is rock that's (very) slowly being further exposed through erosion by the wind - the rocks formed early in the history of Mars, then newer, upper layers have eroded away, exposing this particularly old stuff dating from around the time life began on Earth. If Mars had similar conditions, then it's a good place to look for remnants of organic molecules...

The aim of the drill is to get to rock that's not been significantly irradiated by cosmic rays. From this paper on The Sample Analysis at Mars Investigation and Instrument Suite:

Ancient indigenous organic molecules could be also destroyed or transformed by the ionizing radiation in the shallow subsurface of Mars. Due to a thin martian atmosphere and lack of magnetic field, the surface of Mars has been bombarded continuously by the energetic particles of the galactic and solar cosmic rays (GCRs and SCRs) for much of its history. Unlike UV radiation which is absorbed in the first mm of soil (Mancinelli and Klovstad 2000; Cockell et al. 2005), GCRs can penetrate down to 1 meter below the surface (Dartnell et al. 2007). Over the long period of exposure, cosmic rays particles have the capacity to transform complex organic compounds into macromolecules having different, more refractory chemistry and/or into smaller molecules broken from a parent molecule. The latter case may occur either by direct impacts or by secondary reaction with oxidative radicals produced by radiation in the immediate vicinity of the organic molecules (Dartnell et al. 2008). It is not clear how such long-term degradation would affect SAM’s measurements of organic compounds at the ancient geologic outcrops because the rates of erosion are highly variable on Mars (Golombek et al. 2006). Erosion of the ancient rock would naturally expose “fresh” (less irradiated) material to the surface with potentially “unbroken” organic molecules. Furthermore, SCRs, which are less energetic than GCRs, cannot penetrate and destroy organic matter deeper than 2 cm below the surface (Pavlov 2011). Therefore, MSL’s drilling and sampling of outcrops from 5 cm below the surface will exclude the effects of degradation of organic matter by solar cosmic rays. Finally, using the radiolysis constants of amino acids Kminek and Bada (2006) and Pavlov (2011) demonstrated that simple organic compounds with masses below 100 amu, should have a good chance to survive long-term exposure to GCRs in the shallow subsurface even extremely low surface erosion rates. Results from Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) will provide modern radiation characteristics that will help improve long-term modeling of the surface radiation on Mars and possibly constrain its affects on near surface organic chemistry.

You don't embed that in the EXIF information?

Most of it, yes - but Flickr helpfully strips out said EXIF data for the reduced-size versions of the photos. This combined with Google's allow-download-without-seeing-any-attribution-details? Nice!

Actually, doing some more testing - Flickr has an optional (and trivially easy-to-defeat) system to prevent visitors from saving displayed photos to their computers. Google Image Search goes straight past this - so an all-rights-reserved, the-owner-has-disabled-downloading-of-their-photos image can be saved straight from Google with no indication whatsoever of the photographer's wishes.

(While I'm really not protective of my own stuff, I know other people are of theirs - Google's behaviour here is at the very least terribly impolite.)

Something about slashdot makes it really combative. I don't know if it's the karma system, us, or something else. But if you say something people see, no matter how rational, someone is going to disagree just to disagree, and it's probably going to be a little nasty.

I disagree!

Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.

If someone clicks the Google Image Search 'high-resolution' link for one of my photos from Flickr, they get a medium-resolution version with no description, attribution or copyright information. (Example search page here.

If they go to the ad-free Flickr page, they get links to much higher resolution versions, associated images and also get informed that it's under a super-open Creative Commons Attribution licence.

I'm not a photographer so this will probably sound ignorant (because it is), but what makes lenses proprietary? Isn't it just physics, light input/output? Is it really impossible considering the pro-level costs to build mounting adapters to mate different branded components?

There are surprisingly few optical problems (assuming you've got the space to work with) - a Nikon SLR lens (flange focal distance of 46.5mm) can be mounted on a Canon EOS SLR (flange focal distance of 44.0mm) with nothing but an appropriately shaped, 2.5mm-thick bit of metal sticking the two together. (The opposite would need special optics in the way in order to get proper focus, since otherwise the focal plane will be too far from the film / image sensor.)

Mirrorless, interchangeable lens cameras have very short flange focal distances (not being SLRs, they don't have a flappy mirror assembly between the lens and the image sensor). There's much more room to build adaptors that fit - potentially several centimetres when mounting an SLR lens rather than a few millimetres.

The main problem is all the electronic communications stuff present in modern lenses - for autofocus, setting the aperture and for the lens to communicate back its specifications, status and so on. Probably the most impressive range of adapters I've seen is from Metabones - some of which include full electronic compatibility between a Canon EF lens and a Sony NEX camera. (Not affiliated with them, and not a customer - primarily I'm hoping someone gets off their arses and builds a full-featured Nikon-lens-to-Canon-camera adapter. The existing dumb-bits-of-metal are great for video, but I'd like one that does everything, please!)

Cremated remains are already run through a cremulator, to reduce obvious-looking chunks of bone into a fine powder.

"The remains are raked into a steel bin at the bottom of the cremator to cool, before being transferred into a machine called a cremulator, which contains steel balls that grind down the remains into a fine ash. [...] The cremulator may sound callous, but breaking down the remains is important because if you are going to have a scattering it means the remains can be dispersed as a fine ash rather than as bones, which is less distressing for the family."

A blender might also do the job.

I agree. Get an Arduino Uno at first and then you'll start to get a sense of what direction you want to move in from there.

Agreed also. I started off with an Arduino nearly two years ago, and learned a lot of electronics and C/C++ building a camera timelapse gadget. (Videos here!)

The community is definitely incredibly helpful, and if you're trying to do something there's a good chance someone's done aspects of it already. Plus the limited platform means it's difficult to get too sidetracked, and you pretty much have to build things in an efficient manner. It's built over that pretty standard AVR stuff too, so implementing your own Arduino-alike hardware is frighteningly simple.

The ecosystem of Arduino shields is pretty amazing, but often a bit on the expensive and unwieldy side - for example, paying a fair amount for WiFi when an Arduino can barely handle a single connection, or full-colour backlit LCDs when the thing has almost no RAM - at some point you're going to have to make the leap to a Raspberry Pi or similar if projects are heading that way. I built a ridiculous time-travelling radio around a Pi, using some pretty standard UNIXy stuff which would have been impossible on an Arduino.

On the other hand, I've seen many learning projects built with Raspberry Pis which would be far better suited to Arduinos - the Arduino has no real operating system, just the (tiny) bootloader and the standard libraries that get linked in, so it's extremely difficult to break a working, embedded setup. My timelapse gadget? Ideal. Starts almost instantly, has no easy-to-corrupt storage - think of the Arduino as programmable electronics glue. Whereas the Pi is more like software glue - if you need a tiny UNIX box doing software-type stuff, potentially interfacing with the real world, then the Pi and friends win hands-down.

I will ALWAYS find your rootkit. This is because you're trapped in a VM, and I can always checksum the files from another uncompromised system (LiveCD / USB).

This is, of course, assuming that you yourself are not running on another compromised virtual machine.

(There was one hack I was involved in where an investigator tried to get clever and started calculating MD5 checksums with a universal Turing machine operated using pencil and paper. Fortunately, I'd already trojaned base logic itself and managed to subvert alphanumeric characters to return the 'correct' values. Hacking the logical representations of arabic numerals? Now that's pretty advanced stuff. But then, there's always the worry that my own consciousness is running on something other than what I think is my own brain...)

Arses. Working Secret Nuclear Bunker photos link. Oops!