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stonemetalon US Will Screen Air Passengers for Signs of Ebola. Will It Work?

Of course it won't work. It wouldn't have prevented the incident it is a reaction to. Why would anyone think it would prevent any future incident similar to the first one?

stonemetalon [dead]

Human power to weight ratio is to low. Birds that can fly are optimized for low weight: hollow bones, simplified digestive track with only one type of waste output, no major amount flesh on their feet.

stonemetalon Monit's DMCA takedown notice for Inspeqtor

There is no concept of "clean room" in copyright law

Sure there is. "Clean room" just means you have good legal evidence that you created an original work not a derivative one. It is a bit like having an alibi during a murder trial. There is no law that says you must have an alibi to not be convicted of murder, just like there is no law requiring clean room to dodge the copyright bullet, but having one is strong evidence that you are not guilty.

even APIs (see Oracle vs Google) are not protected by copyright

You need to check the news more. The Federal Circuit Court ruled APIs are copyright able, and handed it back to the lower court to rule on fair use. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/dangerous-ruling-oracl...

stonemetalon Monit's DMCA takedown notice for Inspeqtor

You might want to find a different example until it is settled. From the wikipedia article on the matter Oracle currently is currently winning From wikipedia: the judgement was released on May 9, 2014. The circuit court reversed the district court on the central issue, holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable. It also ruled for Oracle regarding the small amount of literal copying, holding that it was not de minimis. The case was remanded back to the district court for reconsideration of the fair use defense

stonemetalon Monit's DMCA takedown notice for Inspeqtor

I am not sure I get your meaning. A license is how you access a copyrighted work. Therefore they are speaking about the same set of laws.

Antirez is taking a very narrow copying must include a figurative Ctrl-c Ctrl-v. Where as tomp is taking the wider and I think more legally supported(at least as far as art goes) stance that a work can be 100% your own effort but still be a derivative work if it was inspired by an existing work.(i.e. taking a photo of a sculpture is a derivative work )

stonemetalon How Exercise May Protect Against Depression

is no more effective than the best possible treatment sounds pretty good especially when used in conjunction with rather than instead of.

stonemetalon Postgres 9.5 feature highlight: row-level security and policies

clustered read scalable deployments in minutes with no special skills

Full integration with high availability solutions such as Red Hat's Cluster Suite

With Postgres Plus Advanced Server, you can build sharded systems or other replication architectures with a variety of bundled solutions.

Master-to-Master, and similar styled applications are fully supported

Then their marketing copy is full of shit because they promise what rather sounds like a clustered setup with very little effort, maybe not zero config but doable with no special skills.

stonemetalon Postgres 9.5 feature highlight: row-level security and policies

Don't expect it anytime soon. A large number of Postgres' key developers work for EnterpriseDB and that is a feature they charge for as part of Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

stonemetalon Postgres 9.5 feature highlight: row-level security and policies

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CasMIHS...

stonemetalon Dollar a Day

From their site:

We’re a nonprofit too! Dollar a Day makes no money, in any way, from donations on this site. Dollar a Day was built by a team of (almost entirely) volunteers.

stonemetalon Ask HN: Why has there not been large scale adoption of digital pens?

What is the use case being solved? Old fashioned people who like notes on paper don't care about digital copies. Newfangled people who don't like to write would prefer to type or record audio.

stonemetalon Marc Andreessen Sounds Warning on Startups Burning Cash

No, not really. They have been saying that they are scaling back with eye toward ending it, but not before the unemployment rate is under control. For example this is from July 2013.

Fed Chief Ben Bernanke announced in late May that the central bank intends to start slowing down the pace of its purchase “later this year” if the economy continues to improve. He said the purchases could conclude by mid-2014 if the unemployment rate is close to 7%.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-gives-no-hint-on-qe-tap...

stonemetalon Nimrod is being renamed to Nim

So, is he going to change the logo to a rat?(after the children's book Rats of NIMH) Seriously though the name was good for a chuckle but made the language slightly more memorable. Mostly I tend to think of the British spy plane when I hear the name, not the insult.

stonemetalon Uber Drivers “Strike” and Switch to Lyft Over Fares and Conditions

Someone will still need to manage the fleet of self driving cars. Who is going to fill them with gas, do routine maintenance, clean them after some drunk dude puked all over the back seat, etc?

stonemetalon Rust Guide

First you have to say if you are talking about () the type or () the value. () the type is fairly close to void in meaning. () the value is fairly close to null in meaning. Thus both comparisons are accurate, which is applicable depends on which () you are referring to.

While your post is correct for () the type, if I consider () the value, your post could be transformed without loss of accuracy to:

Void is not a value either, and you cannot return it from a function. I think null is a closer match.

Value or type neither half is the whole story.

stonemetalon D’s Garbage Collector Problem

I wonder if selectively disabling D's collector would help? Turn it off during the allocation phase to prevent thrashing. The runtime would be forced to allocate from the OS rather than try to collect. It could then be enabled and run when there was known to be garbage to collect.

Another option would be fall back to pre-allocated object pools rather than naively calling new. I know it is a fairly common optimization in Java\C# when the GC is causing performance issues.

stonemetalon How Memorizing “$19.05” Can Help You Outsmart the MTA

That is great when you are buying the card new, but why do that for the refill screen? Surely the typical rider refills more often than buys new, so you are going to make change more often than you would with round number charges for all transactions.

stonemetalon JavaScript: Servo’s only garbage collector

Is there any plan to write a javascript engine in Rust as part of the servo project?

stonemetalon Vermont Quits War on Drugs to Treat Heroin Abuse as Health Issue

>even though there are cops everywhere. ... you will be offered drugs ten times a day while just walking down the street. It's all fake, they're just out to scam you and steal your stuff, and they're pretty good at it.

That is a step in the right direction? What was it like before beaten by the cops and robbed 10 times a day?

stonemetalon Burger King in Talks to Buy Tim Hortons

Field hockey or ice hockey?

stonemetalon Glowing Plant Is One of Y Combinator’s First Biotech Startups

What plants are you working with? Are they pet and kid safe? Even at your current brightness levels it could make a cool nightlight for kids, as long as it doesn't kill them or the cat.

stonemetalon Banned for Life

What is your definition of pirated? Accessing content, and helping others access content in ways that you have not been given permission to rather sounds like piracy to me. The method of access doesn't really matter weather it be boot leg DVDs or youtube.

stonemetalon Banned for Life

>What's wrong with packaging other people's content as long as you're not profiting from it?

Say I made a show and sell DVDs of the show for $20 to cover all the costs of the show. When you buy the DVD you agree to not reproduce them so that I can continue to sell more copies to cover the cost of the show. You then start reproducing them and selling them at your cost(no profiting right?) which is about $0.05. Obviously some will get it from you instead of me because it is so much cheaper and I will make less profit, or not meet costs. If you don't see what is wrong in breaking your word (and a legally binding contract) and causing harm to someone just because you didn't profit from it, I don't know what argument would.

If they had given you access to the content under a license which allowed you to share it then yeah sure who cares repackage away. If they shared it with you with the specific previsions that you can do this but not that, then you turn around and do that. Then why would you think it is OK to do that?

stonemetalon Ask HN: What project would you work on if you had half a year of free time?

Academic wise I am interested in data, and human factors in programming. It might be interesting to develop a database API that is resistant to attacks. ORMs typically provide such an interface so maybe pick one of the NoSQL databases that doesn't already have a ton of ORM support.

stonemetalon Just let me code

I believe we would. Mobile platforms would evolve or die. What we ended up with is the simplest(for the platform) thing that developers would use. Sure, it is a horrible experience but as long as there isn't too much developer revolt then why bother improving it? That would add cost that doesn't contribute value to the bottom line. No one buys a phone because the dev tools are nice.

stonemetalon StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers

Joel worked at MS on office, Excel if I recall correctly. Jeff's blog is named for a feature from a book published by MS. I would be more surprised if it was MS free.

stonemetalon Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

More like continued employment. Why have a customer retention agent on the payroll if they retain few or no customers?

stonemetalon GameCentral talks to the creator of Oddworld, gains insight into games industry

I did read the article. It didn't mention if they were owed 20 bucks or 2 million. It said EA gave them their company back but there hasn't been a major use of their IP since they went under so obviously EA doesn't think it is worth much. Giving back the company but no cash could be EA saying "yawn we didn't really want it anyway thanks for taking out the trash" or "OMG! we just avoided a serious day in court". I am curious which it is.

stonemetalon Looks by Dr. Dre

Does Apple care what audiophiles think? iPods and the default ear buds are low quality compared to most audiophile gear.

stonemetalon GameCentral talks to the creator of Oddworld, gains insight into games industry

Sure, I was more questioning the amount. Getting the company and all the IP back seems like it would be worth a few million. It just makes me wonder what the real difference in value was.