Pictures look like there is no home button - or am I just looking at fuzzy shots?

Let's try a thought experiment:

You have won the Publisher Clearing House sweepstakes and will receive $10 MILLION dollars - all that is necessary to collect is you have to deliver a signed response back to PCH by noon on Friday. (we're just using delivery service here, no driving, flying...)

Would you trust your financial future to:
                          A) Post Office Mail
                          B) FedEx (profit driven)

Personally, I trust the execution, SLA and customer service level of the profit driven organization far more than the government bureaucracy.

actually not - because this can be timed.

Say I have a barrel of oil to sell for $100, and you as a market maker know of someone willing to pay $101 for that barrel of oil.

You can execute the buy order almost simultaneously with the sell order. If you know your trade engine take 10ms to execute the buy, then
a few picoseconds after you execute the 'Buy', you initiate the sell. This would result in you owning that barrel of oil for a few picoseconds.
A picosecond trade.

Similar to buying tea in china, shipping it across the ocean, and 3 months later, selling it for a profit.

Another example is at retailers. The goods on the shelf may actually be 'owned' by Proctor & Gamble who provide flooring (financing). When you put the shampoo
in your cart, it is still owned by P&G. When you check out, your friendly local retailer 'owns' that shampoo for precisely the amount of time it takes to
scan and process the bar-code until you pay, at which point it goes in the bag and you own it.

No argument on composition, lighting being the key ingredients for a good shot, but as a parent with pimply teenagers, and wrinkly parents, I have been very impressed with an application called Portrait Professional. It is a dead-nuts simple program that removes pimples & wrinkles, whitens teeth, brightens eyes and thins jowels in about 5 mouse clicks...then offers a bunch of sliders to fine tune of you like.

My portrait 'editing' in photoshop usually results in a look more like a smallpox survivor that improvements so I much appreciate the automated features.

My point is, the 'beauty' algorithms are pretty well developed at this point and it is not hard to imagine that built into a point&shoot camera.

My cousin is a pretty smart guy (he has numerous patents in optelectronics ) and worked at HP Labs before they spun out into Agilent.

He said it was a regular occurrence to have his budget ( for optical research) slashed/raided to give more money to the Printer division
who needed new plastic molds for the next model of Inkjet.

That was the main reason he left, even if it was the correct investment from a shareholder perspective, it was insulting to him to
see the low priority placed on research.

I am a semi-serious photographer - mainly because is is a tech fiddle where I can tell the wife new toys are 'for the family' and I have a longer budget leash.

Photo nerds are as addled as anybody on this forum and have pretty well developed best practices for this.

'In-the-field' backup. - use your laptop or a self-powered HD with built in Card reader and you can save your photos on a daily basis.

Once at home, a small NAS or RAID system will save you from losing data due to a HD crash

For true archival, by archive grade Optical media and keep them in Jewel Boxes (not plastic sleeves) and stash them somewhere else. (that is a whole 'nother can of worms here on /. ... you may prefer tape, or stone tablets depending on your opinion)

On-line services are OK, but maybe a bit slow for big data sets. I can come home from a sports event with a couple hundred new photos, and uploading all that can be slow.

...but I don't trust many peoples' motives

Not every bit of corruption will get government/law enforcement attention (particularly if involves the government or law enforcement) so there is a role for 'public commons' disclosure.

How we as a community evaluate the merits of those is the question.

I could claim my neighbor is a tax cheat, or my mayor is a crook...and perhaps even come up with 'incriminating' evidence to support my point of view - but what is MY motivation? There is no guarantee that information is unbiased or even real.

Going up the ladder of business and government malfeasance - the same questions apply.

Knowing someone's motivations and anonymity are opposing dynamics... I guess that's why we have courts in the first place.

If someone robbed the Federal Reserve of a Billion dollars, and then bragged for 6 months over his intent to buy a Mansion and a Yacht, a government would be considered within their rights
to arrest and extradite him and recover property, right?

These documents are US government property and declaring them as stolen would prevent any legitimate business from posting them, and to take aggressive action against Mr Wikileaks.

(Yes, I'm sure he has a hundred cached sites with this info and they will never all be tracked down....but allowing this to become public record is unacceptable. It is unlikely anyone was surprised by this in any event. If the security was so piss-poor that a nincompoop could steal all this materiel, I'm sure smarter and more subtle spies have been reading through this like the morning paper for years. )

I say 'Look, but don't Touch'

I've traveled twice since the new protocols went into effect and both times it has taken all the self control I have not to snap
at the TSA agents patting me down.

For the record, I DID go through the scanner... this does not spare you from the guy downstream running his hands over me squeezing
my chest and ass. The first time this was because I left my watch on and a pen in my pocket. So the next trip I took off my belt,
watch, pens and anything else remotely metallic.

It turns out the wallet in my pocket was flagged and so I stood there with my hands over my head while a troglodyte thumbed through my
wallet and I bit my tongue while my blood pressure rose.

We are actually waaay past the point of the old WWII films with the Gestapo asking for 'your papers, bitte'. This is certainly unreasonable
search... and ineffective. Why does a pen in my pocket subject me to a groping, while the same pen in my briefcase passes without mention?

Stupid and insulting - like almost anything any government gets their hands on.

I haven't played games regularly since SNES, but my kids are all over PS3 games.

My experience as a fuddy-duddy Dad who picks up a controller every now and then is I can't even get past the training levels...so there is a base level of
skill that needs to be there that I don't have (or have the patience to acquire). This is true on Assassins Creed, MW2, and a few others that go bang and splat.

I think the gameplay has to be easy enough that a 1st timer with a reasonable amount of patience could pick it up. If you have been playing for 10 years,
that will probably make it seem facile. I know my kids can get through a game in a weekend if I let them....but I'm sure I couldn't get through those same games
in 2 months (assuming I stay employed, married and otherwise continue as a productive member of society)

I like the idea for 2 reasons

One - it shuts them down or at least limits the effectiveness/scale of the botnets. As far as how to fix it - my company shunts both internal and external users to a DMZ where you can fix things if you have out of date virus protection (internal) or seem infected (after host-checking business partners). ISPs should be able to do a similar thing and provide
limited / protected connectivity with a big flashing homepage saying ' You are infected'

The real reason I like it is if there were some penalty (no/reduced access) people would take more serious care of security. If everyone ran firewall, passwords and Antivirus...the ability of the botnets to propagate would be greatly reduced. Right now...no one is telling infected users and incenting them to change behavior.

As the parent of teens and pre-teens, I've wrestled with some of this myself.

Like most of the /. crowd, I'm savy enough to do some web research and figure out what the games are about. I've drawn our line at 'crime-theme' games like GTA and Mafia, but we have several versions of COD and I've played Halo with them at an internet cafe... my high-schooler clearly has the cash and unsupervised time to walk into a store and buy a game without my knowing and could pick up a 'forbidden' game.

I'd rather know that there is some level of firewall, similar to the movies, that would prevent easy access to games without my supervision. For parents who are working too many hours, or don't have the free time / web research to makes those calls...this would be even more valuable.

The fines should be minimal however - so that finding a 16 year old with a mustache to play gotcha with retailers would not be a profit center for lawyers.

It is very simple really - the constitution says we have a 'limited government' versus the unlimited regal powers of a king.

Every increase in centralized power is a reduction in our freedom. I am nauseated at the government takeover , via incomprehensible multi-thousand page bills that no one can accurately predict the effects of, of healthcare, finance, the Internet and other fundamental aspects of our society.

I have at least a dozen commercial providers for internet access and I can vote with my pocketbook, or take them to court, if I don't like how they treat me.

If the I don't like how the government handles something my recourse is???

We have handed a huge chunk of our lives to bureaucrats who have no experience, and no incentive to listen to us. why does that make you feel good? Why do you want them to have more authority?