rolling rolling rolling

When I first got my camera I initially thought that Ken Rockwell's talk of "the metering being defective" was a pile of bollocks. It turns out that he's right but only when taking pictures in bright sunshine. Besides occasionally assigning different model names to the same device on different sides of the Atlantic the manufacturers should perhaps tune their exposure programs to the locality (perhaps even using the selected time zone) so that the seemingly unending perpindicular sunshine of southern California can be exposed for as accurately as the gloom of Europe in February. I've noticed an increasing number of occurrences of burnt-out highlights over the past few weeks and have grudgingly accepted that a near-permanent -0.7 to -1.0 works quite well.
What would be even better is a camera which could learn your exposure preferences by seeing how the exposure compensation setting is tweaked and monitoring which pictures are deleted in-camera. Perhaps there could even be a little monitor application installed on the user's computer to see whether the brightness is adjusted upwards or downwards on any pictures taken for further editing so that it can tell the camera so that it can do better the next time.

Maybe that's why they installed all these auto-program mode things in the first place despite there only being a need for two-and-an-half (maximal-DoF, minimal-shutter-speed and minimal-shutter-speed-whatever-the-ISO) besides manual modes.

It's obviously a bit out of reach at the moment but it will be nice when computers, cameras and brains can be meshed seamlessly together: there will be cameras which can be mounted unobtrusively on the shoulder and controlled entirely by thought, focussing where your eyes focus, exposing differentially across the scene like the retina and framing up as required and as controlled by a little HUD-style overlay on your visual field (which would also display the results and automatically reshoot if you were not satisfied). Might take all the fun out of photography, though. It'd probably cost a bomb too.