Check out XPrivacy. Of course, it requires the Xposed Framework to be installed. Which requires root. Or, of course, the Privacy Guard on the new CyanogenMod 10.1 builds, but which requires CyanogenMod. Or OpenPDroid, but that requires patching your rom.
This exists in Australia, and it is very common indeed to see PVs on house roofs (in Melbourne at least). Originally, there was a feed-in subsidy so you got paid very handsomely for the energy you fed into the grid (~3x the price of purchasing electricity from the grid). Having rooftop PV is not a bad idea, but without subsidies it never pays for itself at current electricity rates. It may well in future, though, with emissions trading schemes etc. The problem is that feed-in subsidies are a very inefficient way to reduce pollution production. Spending the same money on developing offshore wind etc gets a much better bang for buck. One advantage of high feed-in solar rates is that you can supply local houses and so reduce peak load on the grid (because supply doesn't need to be drawn in from distant locations). However, it is not clear to me whether the decreased peak load on transmission leads to enough of a decrease in cost of building distribution capacity that it offsets the money put into the feed-in subsidy. I doubt it. That isn't to say that rooftop PV is a bad idea: just that subsidising it is not a good way for government to spend their clean-energy money.
The 'get' is very true, the 'be able to run' is less true. If you look at some of the current 'budget' phones running 4.x, the specs are equivalent to previous phones which have ended with support for 2.2 or 2.3. Also, many phones have quite functional CyanogenMod releases based on 4.x when the most recent official release is 2.2 (Motorola Defy for example) or 2.3. This reflects a problem of desire on the part of manufacturers. (Perhaps also a problem of a lack of legal obligation to provide at least security updates for a period of time, depending on your perspective).
APK's are signed with what amounts to the normal jar signing process. So either they have found a way to create a hash collision, or there's some other bug in the verification process that allows some unsigned code to be included in the file and executed.
Either way, you will still need to trick people into installing your version of the apk.
My guess is this: android just checks the first files matching in the jar/zip for the names, but installs the files found last in the jar(or vice versa, zip files can have multiples of the same filename).
That's fine for machines. Many humans have these weird drives for some predictability, persisting human relationships, etc. Work is not just about the task.
It will be really interesting to see what this vulnerability is, on the 1st of August, since all that can be gathered from the press release is essentially: It is possible to change an APK without changing its signature, and Android will not notice. That does have big implications, but it isn't enough detail to say anything much more than "Oh, that's not good".
For those of us outside the USA who use US-based VPN providers to avoid data retention by our own countries, these VPN providers ensured our traffic was routed via the US and thus could be collected.
Thus, consequences of this are: 1. People in more oppressive states who were using VPNs are now more exposed (if the VPN was being paid for by credit card, even by someone outside that state) 2. If those VPNs were in the US, the NSA can no longer as readily monitor the communications of those people
According to Mike Berners-Lee's book, How Bad Are Bananas, that is only likely to be the case if: 1. You are getting all of your energy from eating cheeseburgers or something else which involves such a very high level of methane/carbon dioxide/etc production 2. You are comparing to a very small car
And as others have pointed out, that excludes environmental benefits involved in not having to have a quadruple bypass because you get exercise (the environmental cost of which is also discussed in the book).
Note: all this is from memory of reading the book.
We get it. It isn't a problem for you, and thus anything that is done to address it for those who it is a problem for is (doomed to fail | more trouble than it is worth | etc). Furthermore, anyone who it is a problem for should be (paying attention to the big screen | ignoring it | not going to movies | etc ) because they are (inattentive | reflecting an outdated view of society | whining).
I somehow managed to read that as 'ClueBats Spurring Satellite Revolution', which depending on the revolution could have been better news than the real article.
And because of the time required the beer to cool, you have beer-free time for dinner with your wife and kids. Beer fridges - keeping the family together.
In Australia, we boost voter participation by having compulsory voting. If you don't vote, you either have to provide a written explanation of why or pay a fine. Of course, you can simply go into a voting booth and scribble on the slip and then it becomes an 'informal vote' and isn't counted.
Because the virus can't actually reproduce itself, it is limited (at best) to evolving using 'genetic shift' where a virus swaps genetic material with another virus in the cell. However, genetic shift is limited to very similar viruses. For example, genetic shift leads to a new flu virus forming where two other flu viruses infect the same cell. In the case of this virus (which as GenieGenieGenie pointed out is an Adeno-Associated Virus) the wild-type isn't actually dangerous to my limited knowledge.
Yes, although size of the gene to be inserted, the type of cell you want to infect, and other such factors can make it more difficult.
Optogenetics is a pretty cool example of that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics). You infect brain cells with a rabies-type virus which is loaded with DNA for photoreceptors, and the neurons develop photoreceptors. You can then stimulate them using light (which means you don't get the electrical spread effects you do with electrode-based stimulation).
That's mostly a risk if you're using a virus vector which integrates the DNA into an existing chromosome (which this one doesn't, I believe), AND you can't control the site of insertion. That is, unless the specific gene (in this case, the antibody gene) itself can cause a persistent change in the function of the cell - maybe causing the body to produce a compound which itself promotes cell growth or the like. (That's well outside my area of expertise.)
The great thing about inserting into an existing chromosome (which this does not do) is that then cell replication *does* propagate the gene. The downside is the risk of incorrect insertion which can lead to cancer, among other things.
It isn't quite as simple as 'squirt genes for the protective antibodies into people's noses'. It is 'squirt a non-replicating virus into people's noses, so the virus can stick the DNA for the protective antibodies into cells'.
It's a pretty good trick. The cells will start producing the antibody, but they will not pass this property on to subsequent cell generations. That means there is a pretty limited lifespan. That can make it really good for pandemics, especially if it is fast to generate. However, for longer-term protection you really still need vaccines.
Make it a requirement for police handguns and maybe the new technology could be used to make laptop fingerprint reader technology work well at last. Everybody wins!
Different vaccines, different risk profiles. And there is always some danger with a vaccine - just generally a very, very, very small danger (or more accurately, a very, very, very small risk).
As the saying goes, the 'The dose makes the poison'. MSG and formaldehyde are certainly not good for you if there is too much, and indeed too much doesn't have to be a very high level. However, saying 'it is bad because it has formaldehyde in it' is silly. Saying 'it is bad because it has too much formaldehyde in it' where 'too much' > 0 can be very sensible and valid.
(Note: I know that 'the dose makes the poison' isn't universally applicable, but for your example it certainly is).
Chicken pox? The disease is less dangerous than home cooked meals
Driving a car is probably more dangerous than eating meat left of the bench overnight, but we still use refrigerators. Improving safety in one area doesn't preclude increasing safety in another.
The bad news: Chicken pox is 10x more dangerous to adults and the prevention of the disease during childhood without protection as an adult will likely lead to higher rates of Chicken pox in adults.
That isn't quite what the research (or the subset of which I've read) indicates. Yes, chicken pox vaccination may currently increase the risk of shingles as an adult, but that is because the immunity is not maintained due to a lack of exposure to chicken pox in the environment, and thus no natural 'booster' effects as a result of exposure post-immunity. That is: the problem isn't that vaccination doesn't provide long-lasting protection - although that is the case; the problem is that the lack of exposure over time (because there isn't much chicken pox in the community) means that what immunity there is doesn't get natural boosters from exposure when already immune, which triggers the immune system to create antibodies and 'refreshes' the immunity. Much like a booster shot.
The current use of the Chicken pox vaccine is totally irresponsible. The vaccine should not be used on people until after puberty. Unfortunately, everybody makes money off of giving it to small children. (except the children who run a higher risk of have to pay for it in adulthood) The money angle isn't a 'conspiracy theory'. The CDC lists a primary reason for giving the Chicken Pox vaccine as a cost savings to the parent by not having to care for their sick child.
Or alternatively, not providing chicken pox vaccine booster shots to adolescents or adults is totally irresponsible. Depends on whether you think it is ok to try to prevent chicken pox or not. There is an economic argument for the vaccination, and there is a cost of the vaccination, and there is a risk (however small) of a reaction to the vaccine. These can be assessed as a whole to determine whether vaccination is a good or bad idea (although it will necessarily give weightings to each priority which may not match with parent's priorities).
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Check out XPrivacy. Of course, it requires the Xposed Framework to be installed. Which requires root.
Or, of course, the Privacy Guard on the new CyanogenMod 10.1 builds, but which requires CyanogenMod.
Or OpenPDroid, but that requires patching your rom.
This exists in Australia, and it is very common indeed to see PVs on house roofs (in Melbourne at least). Originally, there was a feed-in subsidy so you got paid very handsomely for the energy you fed into the grid (~3x the price of purchasing electricity from the grid).
Having rooftop PV is not a bad idea, but without subsidies it never pays for itself at current electricity rates. It may well in future, though, with emissions trading schemes etc. The problem is that feed-in subsidies are a very inefficient way to reduce pollution production. Spending the same money on developing offshore wind etc gets a much better bang for buck.
One advantage of high feed-in solar rates is that you can supply local houses and so reduce peak load on the grid (because supply doesn't need to be drawn in from distant locations). However, it is not clear to me whether the decreased peak load on transmission leads to enough of a decrease in cost of building distribution capacity that it offsets the money put into the feed-in subsidy. I doubt it.
That isn't to say that rooftop PV is a bad idea: just that subsidising it is not a good way for government to spend their clean-energy money.
This case, of course, is totally different.
The 'get' is very true, the 'be able to run' is less true.
If you look at some of the current 'budget' phones running 4.x, the specs are equivalent to previous phones which have ended with support for 2.2 or 2.3.
Also, many phones have quite functional CyanogenMod releases based on 4.x when the most recent official release is 2.2 (Motorola Defy for example) or 2.3. This reflects a problem of desire on the part of manufacturers. (Perhaps also a problem of a lack of legal obligation to provide at least security updates for a period of time, depending on your perspective).
From a previous AC comment:
APK's are signed with what amounts to the normal jar signing process. So either they have found a way to create a hash collision, or there's some other bug in the verification process that allows some unsigned code to be included in the file and executed.
Either way, you will still need to trick people into installing your version of the apk.
My guess is this: android just checks the first files matching in the jar/zip for the names, but installs the files found last in the jar(or vice versa, zip files can have multiples of the same filename).
That's fine for machines. Many humans have these weird drives for some predictability, persisting human relationships, etc.
Work is not just about the task.
It will be really interesting to see what this vulnerability is, on the 1st of August, since all that can be gathered from the press release is essentially:
It is possible to change an APK without changing its signature, and Android will not notice. That does have big implications, but it isn't enough detail to say anything much more than "Oh, that's not good".
For those of us outside the USA who use US-based VPN providers to avoid data retention by our own countries, these VPN providers ensured our traffic was routed via the US and thus could be collected.
Thus, consequences of this are:
1. People in more oppressive states who were using VPNs are now more exposed (if the VPN was being paid for by credit card, even by someone outside that state)
2. If those VPNs were in the US, the NSA can no longer as readily monitor the communications of those people
You do realize that solar power is another example of 'causes more pollution during production than it will ever save during its lifetime' right?
Funny, that's not what some think
According to Mike Berners-Lee's book, How Bad Are Bananas, that is only likely to be the case if:
1. You are getting all of your energy from eating cheeseburgers or something else which involves such a very high level of methane/carbon dioxide/etc production
2. You are comparing to a very small car
And as others have pointed out, that excludes environmental benefits involved in not having to have a quadruple bypass because you get exercise (the environmental cost of which is also discussed in the book).
Note: all this is from memory of reading the book.
We get it. It isn't a problem for you, and thus anything that is done to address it for those who it is a problem for is (doomed to fail | more trouble than it is worth | etc). Furthermore, anyone who it is a problem for should be (paying attention to the big screen | ignoring it | not going to movies | etc ) because they are (inattentive | reflecting an outdated view of society | whining).
Sounds like you need a preferential voting system so voting for a 3rd party doesn't effectively facilitate your least favorite party.
Scott Ludlum looks like the sole political torch bearer for the view that Australians shouldn't have communications data routinely harvested. e.g. the bill to require a warrant to retrieve telecommunications metadata: http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/news/greens-8216get-a-warrant-bill8217-to-curb-government-spying/story-fniho3wq-1226662303872
In fact, I'm going to write him a nice letter this afternoon.
I somehow managed to read that as 'ClueBats Spurring Satellite Revolution', which depending on the revolution could have been better news than the real article.
These days, it is Marmite in Australia too.
And because of the time required the beer to cool, you have beer-free time for dinner with your wife and kids.
Beer fridges - keeping the family together.
In Australia, we boost voter participation by having compulsory voting. If you don't vote, you either have to provide a written explanation of why or pay a fine.
Of course, you can simply go into a voting booth and scribble on the slip and then it becomes an 'informal vote' and isn't counted.
About 3-6% of votes are informal (according to the Australian Electoral Commission: http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/summary.htm)
Because the virus can't actually reproduce itself, it is limited (at best) to evolving using 'genetic shift' where a virus swaps genetic material with another virus in the cell. However, genetic shift is limited to very similar viruses. For example, genetic shift leads to a new flu virus forming where two other flu viruses infect the same cell. In the case of this virus (which as GenieGenieGenie pointed out is an Adeno-Associated Virus) the wild-type isn't actually dangerous to my limited knowledge.
Yes, although size of the gene to be inserted, the type of cell you want to infect, and other such factors can make it more difficult.
Optogenetics is a pretty cool example of that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics). You infect brain cells with a rabies-type virus which is loaded with DNA for photoreceptors, and the neurons develop photoreceptors. You can then stimulate them using light (which means you don't get the electrical spread effects you do with electrode-based stimulation).
It is awesome.
That's mostly a risk if you're using a virus vector which integrates the DNA into an existing chromosome (which this one doesn't, I believe), AND you can't control the site of insertion. That is, unless the specific gene (in this case, the antibody gene) itself can cause a persistent change in the function of the cell - maybe causing the body to produce a compound which itself promotes cell growth or the like. (That's well outside my area of expertise.)
The great thing about inserting into an existing chromosome (which this does not do) is that then cell replication *does* propagate the gene. The downside is the risk of incorrect insertion which can lead to cancer, among other things.
It isn't quite as simple as 'squirt genes for the protective antibodies into people's noses'.
It is 'squirt a non-replicating virus into people's noses, so the virus can stick the DNA for the protective antibodies into cells'.
It's a pretty good trick. The cells will start producing the antibody, but they will not pass this property on to subsequent cell generations. That means there is a pretty limited lifespan.
That can make it really good for pandemics, especially if it is fast to generate. However, for longer-term protection you really still need vaccines.
That's ok, for two reasons:
1. The 'gene modification' disappears over time
2. Who here would want to date someone that boring anyway?
Make it a requirement for police handguns and maybe the new technology could be used to make laptop fingerprint reader technology work well at last. Everybody wins!
Different vaccines, different risk profiles. And there is always some danger with a vaccine - just generally a very, very, very small danger (or more accurately, a very, very, very small risk).
As the saying goes, the 'The dose makes the poison'.
MSG and formaldehyde are certainly not good for you if there is too much, and indeed too much doesn't have to be a very high level. However, saying 'it is bad because it has formaldehyde in it' is silly. Saying 'it is bad because it has too much formaldehyde in it' where 'too much' > 0 can be very sensible and valid.
(Note: I know that 'the dose makes the poison' isn't universally applicable, but for your example it certainly is).
Chicken pox? The disease is less dangerous than home cooked meals
Driving a car is probably more dangerous than eating meat left of the bench overnight, but we still use refrigerators. Improving safety in one area doesn't preclude increasing safety in another.
The bad news: Chicken pox is 10x more dangerous to adults and the prevention of the disease during childhood without protection as an adult will likely lead to higher rates of Chicken pox in adults.
That isn't quite what the research (or the subset of which I've read) indicates. Yes, chicken pox vaccination may currently increase the risk of shingles as an adult, but that is because the immunity is not maintained due to a lack of exposure to chicken pox in the environment, and thus no natural 'booster' effects as a result of exposure post-immunity.
That is: the problem isn't that vaccination doesn't provide long-lasting protection - although that is the case; the problem is that the lack of exposure over time (because there isn't much chicken pox in the community) means that what immunity there is doesn't get natural boosters from exposure when already immune, which triggers the immune system to create antibodies and 'refreshes' the immunity. Much like a booster shot.
The current use of the Chicken pox vaccine is totally irresponsible. The vaccine should not be used on people until after puberty. Unfortunately, everybody makes money off of giving it to small children. (except the children who run a higher risk of have to pay for it in adulthood) The money angle isn't a 'conspiracy theory'. The CDC lists a primary reason for giving the Chicken Pox vaccine as a cost savings to the parent by not having to care for their sick child.
Or alternatively, not providing chicken pox vaccine booster shots to adolescents or adults is totally irresponsible. Depends on whether you think it is ok to try to prevent chicken pox or not. There is an economic argument for the vaccination, and there is a cost of the vaccination, and there is a risk (however small) of a reaction to the vaccine. These can be assessed as a whole to determine whether vaccination is a good or bad idea (although it will necessarily give weightings to each priority which may not match with parent's priorities).