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belandrew

49 karma · joined March 12, 2013

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belandrew··on Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline
It can be considered contributory copyright infringement if you're knowingly linking to copyright infringing material.

In the US, abiding by any DMCA takedown notices is enough to be fairly certain you are not going to be in trouble for contributory infringement. That's how Google covers itself.

belandrew··on What Xfinity Internet Data Usage Plans will Comcast be Launching?
Comparing prices in different countries isn't that simple. You have to take into account what that price means compared to wages. Someone in Poland on average (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...) has about 28% the disposable income as someone in the US. So you paying $10 a month feels about the same as someone in the US paying $35.
belandrew··on Swedish hacker finds 'serious' vulnerability in OS X Yosemite
All of my US credit cards have a verification number that is required as well as the CC number for any online transaction. It's not that much different from a PIN.

We also have zero liability for unauthorized CC charges. So even if someone were to do that, the bank would be on the hook, not the user. Banks rely on a lot of computer analysis to determine whether a charge should be allowed.

It's much more of a pain to get money back into your bank account after it's been withdrawn. So although it's technically true that a bank card with PIN is more secure, to the end user, it's not any better.

belandrew··on React vs. Ember – EmberNYC slides
Ember isn't smashing anything. Besides the obvious Google, Angular is used by Udacity, Nike, Virgin America, HBO's mobile app, MSNBC, Salesforce, Amazon AWS, Sony's PS3 Youtube app, and General Motor's in-car interface. Sounds like plenty of big apps to me.

Edit: Added GM.

belandrew··on Google’s $1B purchase of Twitch confirmed
If your business has improved the lives of tens of millions of people, which Twitch has, I think you do deserve to become a billionaire or multi millionaire. I figure the rewards for a business are relative to the number of people it impacts.
belandrew··on Yogscast Kickstarter failure is a painful reminder of the risks of crowdfunding
Kickstarter's terms are very clear that you may receive nothing in return for your money, just like with other investments.
belandrew··on The new 501(c)(3) and the future of free software in the US
You're definitely confused. Mozilla is the reverse of the described scenario. If Mozilla corp owned the non-profit, rather than how it currently is, then it would fit.
belandrew··on Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin
Visa and Mastercard settled so there was no decision needed.

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262867...

I believe American Express settled later.

belandrew··on Inside the Mirrortocracy
The fundamental argument is that if you hire more similar people, you will get similar results. Are you a billionaire yet? If not, maybe you should hire some different types of people in order to deliver different results.

People with different mindsets will challenge you. They will disagree with your decisions. They will think of different approaches that may be much better than what you are doing. If you let them, they may drastically improve your business.

Are your friends the best fit for the job? What if someone likes different music and whatever but is ten times as effective at that type of position? I would consider the latter far more important. You're hiring people to do a job, not socialize with.

belandrew··on PythonJS now faster than CPython
> Python is more dynamic than JavaScript, in that it has __getattr__, __setattr__, __getitem__, etc.

No, it's not. You can do equivalents to all of those in Javascript. Javascript objects are all mutable with a few exceptions. They are just maps of properties, very similar to Python's. Properties can be added or changed at runtime.

For example, setattr(obj, item, value) in python is basically just obj[item] = value in js.

belandrew··on jSpy: Automatically detect user's history
This really didn't work at all. I'm using the latest stable Chrome on a Mac. Roughly 3/4 of the results (there's too many to bother counting) are sites I've never been to.
belandrew··on JavaScript as an alternative to AppleScript on OS X Yosemite
They're very different use cases.

Applescript is used for automation of already existing applications which will still be written in C++ or Objective C. Applescript, a proprietary language with no other uses, is just being replaced by a much more common language in Javascript so people won't need to learn a new one to automate apps. People don't generally write applications using Applescript and they probably won't be using Javascript, so there's little overlap.

In GNOME Javascript is being used to write the applications in the first place. There is total overlap between Javascript and C/C++.

People see the GNOME choice as both redundant and reducing performance of desktop apps while people see the Apple choice as simply using a common language instead of a proprietary one for scripting.

belandrew··on Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)
As another native speaker, no, there is no difference. "peek" and "peak" are both pronounced identically \ˈpēk\ They are homophones. Pick is pronounced \ˈpik\.

Piece and peace are also homophones and pronounced identically \ˈpēs\ while piss is pronounced \'pis\.

Apparently you have trouble distinguishing between ē and i sounds but there are only two different sounds in those word triplets, not three.

belandrew··on Dark spot under cockpit of A-10s
> Most drones only carry IIRC a single hellfire missile. Not particularly useful against Infantry, and a 1 shot and you're done.

Typical payloads on MQ-9 Reapers go up to 4 Hellfires and 2 500 pound bombs at one time. It's still a lot less than an A10 but it's enough for many situations.

belandrew··on New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws
That article is horrible.

That's because if you carry too much you automatically get charged with distribution, not possession. That despite the fact you never sold it to anyone else. I knew someone in my college economics class who had his life ruined over just that. He was just a smoker, not a dealer, but he carried a bit over the weight limit. Goodbye to his future.

belandrew··on Sherlock Holmes Is in the Public Domain, American Judge Rules
Copyright includes rights to the work itself as well as rights to creating derivative works, such as sequels, movie adaptations, etc. This does effectively mean anything using the same characters or settings, although the characters themselves are not technically copyrighted.

This is a decent review of the issues involved: http://io9.com/5933976/are-fan-fiction-and-fan-art-legal

belandrew··on Low-end laptops:The rise of the Chromebook
You can definitely wipe out the entire ChromeOS partition and replace it with some other Linux if that's what you want. Some people do that but it's definitely less common than dual booting or a chroot.
belandrew··on Firefox 25 is released
They stopped a couple of years ago. For the first few small releases 5-7 the IE team sent a cupcake instead but they stopped with 8.
belandrew··on Microsoft Launches Remote Desktop App for Android and iOS
Chrome has its own Remote Desktop which allows it to connect to a Chrome server on another machine. It currently supports Windows and Mac as the remote desktop. Chromebooks are supported as one of the clients.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desk...

belandrew··on Zuckerberg Seeks Personal Privacy, Then Removes Online Privacy Feature
It's not that simple. Facebook has two classes of shares. While Zuckerberg only kept 28% of the shares, he kept 57% of the voting rights. So it's still entirely his decisions.
belandrew··on W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards
Zynga only had one profitable year in 2010. They have lost $600 million since then.
belandrew··on Flat Surface Shader
By default it's using a canvas to render, though you can also choose SVG or WebGL. Canvas is hardware accelerated in most browsers.
belandrew··on Mozilla’s WebGL2: an experimental WebGL implementation based on OpenGL ES 3.0
ES is a subset of OpenGL for embedded systems since it requires less die space on the hardware and is lighter on the software side as well. Anything that runs on ES should also run on standard OpenGL implementations but the reverse is not true.

ES is supported on mobile phones and tablets, like Android and IOS, where people would obviously like browser support. If they used full OpenGL, they would lose out on those markets.

belandrew··on The Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks
Minecraft made $240 million in 2012 and did nothing besides provide good gameplay with regular updates.

Evil tactics like these are not needed.

belandrew··on Python at Netflix
Besides Google using Go for some things like part of Youtube and dl.google.com, CloudFlare, Heroku, Canonical, Torbit, SoundCloud, BBC, and others are using Go for parts of their back-end infrastructures.
belandrew··on Python at Netflix
My Netflix password is 20 characters. Where did you get that it only allows 4-10?