I'm a developer support engineer for a company that sells several SDKs - It is absolutely invaluable tor our customers (and ourselves) to be able to see the change logs as they're depending on our product to work in certain ways and could be interacting with dozens of systems/components.

I can't tell you how many times I've found that a claimed bug in our product was actually an issue in Weblogic or Websphere or Tomcat, etc.. that was corrected in a given fix (sadly, its often a case of customers coming to us and saying "this is a bug" and us diggin in only to find that yes it was a bug in that outdated version of the web application server they're using and they should have been doing their homework..

So both our own change logs and those of others are absolutely crucial in troubleshooting problems.

My personal $0.02: saying "here's what was fixed and when is not going to draw ridicule. However, having your software be a "big magic black box" is likely to alienate highly technical customers.

"""
* 'There's not that much known about Canadian intelligence.'*

As A Canadian, I kinda resent that :)
"""

that just means they're doing a really good job. :)

My opinion is that we shouldn't shut the NSA down - they DO serve a valuable purpose for National Security.

What we SHOULD DO is force them to obey their charter and the law. If they want to spy on foreign nationals, crack enctyption, etc.. go right ahead.

If they DO sweep up some US citizens not involved in plotting against the US.. ok, that may happen tooo - but they should NOT be allowed to share results of illegal wiretaps/surveilance with law enforcement - and any evidence obtained in such an illegal manner should be inadmissable in court.

Basically, let the spooks spy all they want for actual National Security purposes, but don't allow that to become yet another extension to the already too long arm of the law.

I know... it's such a juicy target:
"We were watching this guy because we thought he might be a terrorist but instead we uncovered that he's a drug smuggler... here you go FBI / Local Law Enforcement, you can use this to get him off the street."

well... as much as it might suck to let some guilty people get away with it because the evidence wasn't obtained legally... it sucks more to treat your citizens as the proles and outer party folks in Orwell's 1984 - the damage to society from pervasive surveillance and selective prosecution using the results of said surveillance is (to me) far greater.

Let the police do their own footwork - hell, if you can get a court order to "wiretap" someone fine... but we are a nation of laws and when the government forgets that, we all suffer.

Considering how important this is, YES!I would listen, openly and honestly, then vote to hang the guy. :P

Seriously though, I'd serve on that jury gladly and do my best to be fair and decide based on issues of law and evidence presented, not my own preconceptions.

Of course, it's easy for me to say - I'm a geek, this is important, and my company has a pretty good jury duty policy.

There were also POCs demonstrated at Black Hat where they put a fake charger up that had built in smarts and would hack the iPhone being charged - quite ingenious.

Granted, a charger condom would be a lot cheaper (a fitting that blocks the data lines and ONLY allows the power lines through so you can use an unknown/untrusted charger)

So, basically, I figure its part money grab from Apple and part intent to lock things down with software... of the two, I honestly think that a cable condom for using untrusted chargers, being the simpler solution, would be more reliable and less prone to countermeasures.

You know what? I really long for the "bad old days" when getting hacked just meant that some douche bricked your computer or maybe made it go "ha ha n008, you got h4x0r3d" - now, they brick your life and spam your contacts and steal your identity... with near impunity.

William Gibson's vision of cyberspace with the network being an incredibly hostile place and everyone out for themselves - well, it's pretty much come true.

So, I figure Apple has just enough plausible deniability - they can say 'no, we're doing this to protect you from faulty chargers and hacked chargers" and there's enough truth to the dangers that they can get away with also locking you out of the competition - win, win, win Apple, the only way to win for us is not to play (with them)

This will not end well.

At first, the military will be all like "YAY, autonomous killer robots!"

Then someone will hack some of them... and they'l be all like "boo, they're using it against us and we never saw taht coming"

And then Politicians will be all "we gotta pass laws against being smart n stuff, because Turrhurrerristz"

And then a few years later, we're all just banging rocks together.

ok so my real answer is basically just /facelamp (for when facepalm is not sufficient)

IE10 is available for Win7 - in fact, you need to apply an "IE10 Blocker" to keep MS Automatic Updates from forcing it down your throat.

Granted, from my experience, IE10 on Win7 is a bit different under the hood from IE10 on Win8 - I've run into quite a few issues where there was a problem in IE10 on Win7, but it was ok on Win8 - or vice versa.

The sad reality is that you should assume that any electronic communication you make - any electronic transaction you're a part of - is at least ~able~ to be read by the NSA if not actively being seen.

Now, from a practical standpoint, chances are that unless you're being explicitly targeted by federal agencies or law enforcement, no human being is actively looking at YOUR records.. but they ~could~.

However, it chills me to the bone that our government has and uses that power and the potential for abuse is massive... I really do feel that our government has seriously crossed the line... and we the people ~let it happen~... hell, a large number of us (I was not one of them, but I use "us" collectively) screamed to congress in September 2001 "DO SOMETHING" and they did.

The only way this can stop is if the American people decide that the level of surveillance and eavesdropping is unacceptable and demand that it stop. We need to elect lawmakers that value our privacy and freedom and we need to vote out those who would trade our essential liberties for security theater.

We did this to ourselves, and we are the only ones who can stop it... by speaking loud and strong that we DO NOT WANT.

Back in the late 90's up to about 2001, I worked as a web author/web developer at a not so huge newspaper... we in the web department (Known as Electronic Publishing internally) had a pretty free hand to try and figure out how to keep the paper on top of technology.

We were pretty innovative for the time - we got our classifieds and real estate and obits online and we were able to publish breaking stories immediately and get our content online before it was in the physical paper ... a bunch of neat stuff.

Then, sometime in mid 2000, our paper got bought by a big conglomerate.... they had their own very cookie cutter online approach and gutted the soul of our department - there was no innovation - hell, we lost a huge number of features that we had been doing for a couple years, but they didn't have equivalents for in their system.

They homogenized their "online strategy" and threw out the baby with the bathwater... Now, I think they're still struggling with trying to stay relevant as the world moves farther and farther away from paper - they are too big and too stuck in their ways to have the kind of entrepreneurial innovation that our smaller paper had...

Ok, sorry for rambling on - the point is that some papers - the ones who "got" the web may have been able to innovate and stay relevant ... but the big media behemoths have had a much harder time adjusting... they're simply not agile enough and not willing to embrace "disruptive technologies" (tech that threatens their current business model)

The bigger they are, the more slowly they turn.

It's more likely the reduction in carbs that did it - but the direct side effect of Paleo is that you're likely cutting way back on those anyway.

You see it as "I went gluten free and I feel better" but that's just confirmation bias - you don't objectively know that it was gluten itself.

(Not trying to pick on you, but merely to illustrate how easy it is to fall victim to the same type of logical reasoning errors that lead (also) to these "mass hysteria" outbreaks.