Akira Tanaka just did a lightning talk on IO.copy_stream, a new method added to Ruby 1.9 last night that does a fast stream transfer all in C code, avoiding the intermediate strings. It's a good idea, one I hope takes hold for other IO operations that could use some native lovin. It's so good, in fact, I took five minutes out of my day to produce a crude implementation of it in JRuby (and note, I