Maybe they *like* their photos that way. Hell, they're taking photos with (fairly decent, now) smart phone cameras and deliberately injecting the flaws you saw in 30-year old cheap film cameras using software like Retro-Camera and Instagram. The look of such photos is actually a novelty to kids who've always had their photos taken with DSLRs.

Latency is particularly annoying when you are trying to have a two-way conversation. Talking over a mobile phone adds 100s of milliseconds of latency. If both ends are mobile, the latency is double. This escapes most people's direct notice, but it causes those awkward moments when both parties start talking over each other, pause, and then do it again. This is a horrible amount of latency, and they virtually all do it. This is one of the reasons to still prefer a land line.

Another unbelievable latency issue is HDTV. The audio often fails to be synchronized with the video. It is particularly annoying when the video is behind the audio. This happens frequently on all types of telecasts. I have spoken to a TV station engineer about this, and incredibly, there is no standard way to ensure that the audio and video of HDTV are in sync. Someone at the station can make an adjustment for a particular program, but the offset can be completely different in the next program.

I see this often on direct reception via antenna. No telling what weird latency problems are added when the signal is transmitted through a cable or satellite system.

HDTV in general has at least two or three seconds of latency compared to analog. When you're watching a "live" event, you're not.

Individual TV receivers introduce varying latencies. If you have multiple TVs set to the same channel, you can see and hear this. That ought to be a published spec on TVs, as well as the other gadgets mentioned in the article.

Our technical civilization won't really be "advanced" in my view unless we can and do make things that last a long, long time. What technology exists that is still working or workable after centuries or millenia? I think there are a few telescopes over 100 years old that are still in use. Pretty impressive. Older than that, and what?... Stone knives? I heard irrigation ditches and terraces have worked for 100s or thousands of years, but these are pretty static, and have required intensive labor to keep them operating. What *could* we make that would still be operable and interesting in, say 500 years?

PAF aka Personal Ancestral File.
Weirdly, this software, developed by a church, wins my award for the very BEST Macintosh software ever, in the category of Compatible With The Most Versions of Mac OS.

Originally, this program cost money, but not very much. I bought it for the Mac 512 or thereabouts. It came on floppy disk, probably about 1985. Years later, when Macs had color, low and behold, the PAF screens were in color. They had followed the compatibility guidelines, and put in simple color years before anyone could see color on a Mac. The SAME version of software continued to work for decades, through major system and processor revisions that broke almost everything else. I think it finally stopped working with System X, (about 5 computers later, for me) when it wouldn't work under Classic for some reason.

Pretty much everything else became incompatible once or more during that time, including Microsoft and Apple. Amazing!

How last century! What are we going to see next -- how to interface your iPhone to a paper tape reader/punch? Instead of this -- cut the cable, and get an RS-232 - to Bluetooth adapter, similar to this. They are cheaper than the parts for this hack. The iPhone is a wireless device.

"Chupacabra" means different things to different people. Especially in Puerto Rico compared to the southwest USA and Mexico. In Mexico and the southwest we are talking about dog-like things. Puerto Rico had different ideas -- I think some of them were bipeds, and some were flying chupacabras.

(1) It is possible to rent a satellite phone, a lot of places. Why is the OP "waiting" for a satellite phone? They are not any more expensive than a lot of ham radios. The airtime charges are expensive, but presumably limited to important or emergency situations.
(2) Remember that some personal locator beacons can be used to send a simple non-emergency message to a pre-defined email address. Usually "OK" and your lat/long coordinates. Would this solve your problem? Personal locator beacons are the greatest backcountry safety device to come along in years. Get one, and then do everything you can to make sure you never need to use it.
(3) For hiker-to-hiker communications in the US, why not FRS/GMRS radios? These are cheaper than ham radios, and about as likely to give line-of-sight communications in the mountains. Licensing requirements are none (FRS) or trivial (GMRS).

I dunno, BHA (Butt Hole Astronomer) did okay.

Maybe you should. It used to be considered impossible for someone to acheive depth perception later in life if they didn't develop it as a child. This famous story is about a woman neuroscientist who did so: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5507789

Remember, a lot of these are old school systems. I know that a lot of remote SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) equipment was never on the Internet. Why? Because it had a modem instead. The electric utilities upgrade their stuff at glacial speed. I bet a lot of that stuff is still out there, and still has a modem connected and has weak to no security.

I agree, virustotal answers the original question of an online-resource to check a file. A similar scanning service is http://virusscan.jotti.org/. Remember, take the answers with a grain of salt. These are both multi-scanner services, in which the file is examined by multiple virus-scanning software packages.

It's been known for a long time that engines will run very efficiently if you run them very lean. In TFA, you will see that's what these guys are doing. The problem is that the engine then runs very hot, and the thing wears out in short order, or you have to make it out of unobtanium. They are also using unusually high pressures and temperatures. In the fine print, you will see they still have some work to do on verifying that the engines will last very long under this treatment.

So, yes, it will get great miles/gallon, but probably not very many miles/engine.

Whatever cable types I chose, I would make sure to terminate them all in a single, central wiring panel or closet. So you can patch and mix and match later on if you change your mind about what room needs to be wired to what room.

Humm, let's see... What if Egypt (or Mexico) charges $1 for each image of a pyramid, then ... All your one dollar bills are belong to us!

Dirty little secret: All cell phone carriers have high latency for voice. And it's double if both ends are cell phones. It's really annoying, and makes you talk over each other.
Anecdotally: I had a cell phone conversation going simultaneously with a Skype video call from my desktop computer, and the audio via Skype was noticeably faster than the audio through the cell phone. I heard the other end first through Skype, and somewhat later via phone. (My end was Verizon.)