I got my 7D on 12/24 without any obtrusive hot/stuck pixels. Then I took a flight back home on 1/6. Yesterday I happened to find out that I got a very bright stuck pixel on the side (actually, a cluster of 4 stuck pixels forming a bright spot) on every picture I took, even with shutter speed at 1/250 and ISO at 200! And I didn't even have to zoom to 100% to see it; 33.3% would be enough. --Hmmm, I remember some people say that radiation from flying in the sky can induce hot pixels; guess that rumor is not completely without base...

Out of desperation, I suddenly recalled that someone in this forum mentioned that the 7D's firmware can automatically remap hot/dead/stuck pixels every month on startup. I really doubted it, but why not give it a try?

So, I changed the camera's date from 1-10-2005 to 3-10-2005, then turned it off. You know, normally, when you turn off 7D, the red CF write/read indicator will stay on for 0.5 sec or so. But this time, the red LED was on and flashing for about 3 times longer than normal. It seems that something was happening and at that time I thought the camera was writing the new date. Then, I waited for about 30 sec, turned the camera on, took a black picture with the lens cap on (shutter speed: 1s), changed back the date, took another picture, and checked them on my computer: Wow, the bright stuck pixels on the side were gone!!! Instead, I got a much dimmer red pixel at the center, but at least this new guy didn't show up at shutter speed faster than 1/15s. Compared to the bright *stuck* pixels, I think I could live with this new guy.

Then, I repeated this procedure. This time, even the new red hot pixel disappeared! Now I have only 3 tiny hot pixels that will appear only when shutter speed is longer than 1 sec. This, I believe, is absolutely normal since you can never completely get rid of them when using long exposure; it's just a part of the life. A good article to read on this:

http://webpages.charter.net/bbiggers/DCExperiments/html/body_hot_pixels.html

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Sorry for the long post. Just wanted to share this experience with people having this problem. This method is definitely not good to get rid of every single hot pixel that show up only at slow shutter speeds. However, it seems that KM is doing a pretty good job in remapping those *stuck* pixels. Isn't it cool? :)