Certified Legendary Thread Race for the flag, in squiggly lines

[Donakebab]

Italy would need 2 squiggles

France would disappear after 1940

But I like this idea haha

Nah France would need two squiggles, the original would carry on as the French resistance along with the evacuated units in Britain and the second for Vichy France.

 

[The Swans Blog]

Italy would need 2 squiggles

France would disappear after 1940

But I like this idea haha

UK would be hovering around the 50s mark after being bitch slapped in almost every confrontation. US wouldn't be on the chart yet. Japan would be even further off the chart than Germany considering just how much territory they conquered.
Fortunately, the UK got their act together and the allies did pretty well in the end.

 

[Pugz89]

I'd hate to think what a little bit of water would do to the Dogs, considering they got absolutely flogged with the roof open. Heavens forbid a final in the outdoors, it would be a down right travesty!

This also applies to North who've been absolute tripe in the outdoors too.

The last time we played with any significant amount of rain was when we knocked you guys off last year. As a contested footy side, we'd lose our transition but at least we'd have an excuse for kicking 1:10 goal to behind ratio.

 

[The Swans Blog]

The last time we played with any significant amount of rain was when we knocked you guys off last year. As a contested footy side, we'd lose our transition but at least we'd have an excuse for kicking 1:10 goal to behind ratio.

Excuse the weekend away, please.

 

[Pugz89]

Excuse the weekend away, please.

We were well off the mark last weekend, so not trying to make excuses but to question our ability to play in the wet is an odd one. Hinkley questioned our ability to play outdoors, and we won there along with 2 games at the G. 75% win rate outside of Etihad this year.

Considering wet weather footy is typically a game with plenty more contested footy situations, and we're already well ahead in those stats, i think we'd do well.

But keep deflecting, please.

 

[Lensen]

UK would be hovering around the 50s mark after being bitch slapped in almost every confrontation. US wouldn't be on the chart yet. Japan would be even further off the chart than Germany considering just how much territory they conquered.
Fortunately, the UK got their act together and the allies did pretty well in the end.

No doubt you'd be commenting every eight minutes about how wrong it is and that Australia should be ranked #1 and is underrated and it's all so unfair

 

[Crankyhawk]

No doubt you'd be commenting every eight minutes about how wrong it is and that Australia should be ranked #1 and is underrated and it's all so unfair

Well we would always be playing with away game disadvantage so could outperform the squiggle.

 

[Final Siren]

Round 13, 2016

Animated!

A great week for the Cats, scoring 100 while holding the Dogs to only five goals. And in an away game, too! That's the best time to do it.

It was extra-good for Geelong, because of the top 8, only Sydney made something like a positive move. And even Sydney didn't go in the ideal direction, albeit only because of the weather.

That was the Giants' worst chart move of the season, which is really something given it's Round 13 and they won by 27.

North and Hawthorn turned out pretty much as expected. Fremantle did better, which means Port need even more good fortune to make the finals than they did already.

A bit of spread in the Ladder Predictor! Not much. But some.

And the Cats overtake the Giants on Flagpole:

Live squiggle!

 

[Final Siren]

Hey Final Siren, I noticed that you said your algorithm downloads results through a Perl script. Where does it download them from, if you don't mind me asking?

Okay first let me explain why this is a tricky question to answer.

Ten years ago, Channel Nine and Channel Seven were fighting against devices that could record TV onto a hard drive (PVRs like Foxtel iQ or smart DVD players).

You could buy them, but they were pretty useless, because they had no Electronic Program Guide (EPG). So instead of being able to set them to record your favourite shows whenever they happened to be on, you had to manually program the right channels and times, as if they were 1990s VCRs.

The TV stations feared that people would be able to ad-skip, which would hurt revenue. They also had some bizarre ideas about piracy, and how they could fight it by running shows at unpredictable times. Channel Seven actually said: "Precise start times (in an EPG) would allow people to burn DVDs of our programs like crazy and push them out over the internet."

Why you would want to burn a file to a DVD before pushing it out to the internet, I don't know. But Seven and Nine were worried about it, and prepared to aggravate their audience in order to make it marginally harder.

Fortunately for them, Australian law offered a unique weapon, which would allow them to successfully delay the arrival of DVRs and PVRs for years. Copyright! In most countries, copyright law protects artistic works only, like books. But in 2002 in Australia, a famous lawsuit over the White Pages established that simple collections of facts like a phonebook could be a creative work, too.

So the TV stations claimed that their EPG must be protected by copyright, too, and issued legal threats to everyone who was sharing it without their permission. That included a couple of high-profile nerds who, like myself, had built home theatre PCs to record TV and wanted guide data, as well as a company, IceTV.

The rest of us went underground. Thus began a long war of attrition began between script writers, who would post code that people could use to download guide data, and TV stations, who regularly re-arranged their websites in order to break these scripts. Sometimes we found amusing comments in the source code of these websites, asking us to stop.

Now it was unclear whether what we were doing was illegal. If the TV stations were correct in their assertion that EPGs were protected by copyright law -- which did seem likely, given the White Pages case -- then certainly it was illegal to distribute copies. (Which is what IceTV were doing.) But we were doing something a bit different: distributing our own code that allowed home PCs to read online EPGs. That was against the websites' Terms & Conditions, but those aren't laws. So we were in a gray area, half-expecting cease & desist letters the whole time.

At first, the war went badly. It was an arms race, and whenever a TV station reformatted its website, anyone whose home PVR relied on that script would lose their EPG. They would need to jump online and hope the author had posted a fix, or switch to a different script.

Then I had the idea of collecting everyone's scripts together in a flock, under the guidance of a shepherd. Then instead of relying on a single data source, the shepherd would deploy scripts as necessary until it had all the data it needed. When one of the flock broke down, it would send out others that could do the job instead, using different data sources.

This moved home users away from the war's front line. The TV stations kept breaking our scripts, but they weren't co-ordinated enough to break all of them at once. We could repair breakages at our leisure, and so long as there was at least one still in action, for home users the data kept flowing.

Then the TV stations gave up.

Then they lost a court case against IceTV. So EPGs weren't copyright after all.

Then Telstra lost a court case over the White Pages. Now even phonebooks aren't protected by copyright.

In the meantime, DVRs and PVRs flooded the country, and the TV stations switched from trying to block them to trying to manage them, striking deals with manufacturers to provide guide data in exchange for weakened ad-skipping.

And here we are!

So anyway, to answer your question: Squiggle gets data from a popular news site.

 

[Mad_Hatter]

Okay first let me explain why this is a tricky question to answer.

Ten years ago, Channel Nine and Channel Seven were fighting against devices that could record TV onto a hard drive (PVRs like Foxtel iQ or smart DVD players).

You could buy them, but they were pretty useless, because they had no Electronic Program Guide (EPG). So instead of being able to set them to record your favourite shows whenever they happened to be on, you had to manually program the right channels and times, as if they were 1990s VCRs.

The TV stations feared that people would be able to ad-skip, which would hurt revenue. They also had some bizarre ideas about piracy, and how they could fight it by running shows at unpredictable times. Channel Seven actually said: "Precise start times (in an EPG) would allow people to burn DVDs of our programs like crazy and push them out over the internet."

Why you would want to burn a file to a DVD before pushing it out to the internet, I don't know. But Seven and Nine were worried about it, and prepared to aggravate their audience in order to make it marginally harder.

Fortunately for them, Australian law offered a unique weapon, which would allow them to successfully delay the arrival of DVRs and PVRs for years. Copyright! In most countries, copyright law protects artistic works only, like books. But in 2002 in Australia, a famous lawsuit over the White Pages established that simple collections of facts like a phonebook could be a creative work, too.

So the TV stations claimed that their EPG must be protected by copyright, too, and issued legal threats to everyone who was sharing it without their permission. That included a couple of high-profile nerds who, like myself, had built home theatre PCs to record TV and wanted guide data, as well as a company, IceTV.

The rest of us went underground. Thus began a long war of attrition began between script writers, who would post code that people could use to download guide data, and TV stations, who regularly re-arranged their websites in order to break these scripts. Sometimes we found amusing comments in the source code of these websites, asking us to stop.

Now it was unclear whether what we were doing was illegal. If the TV stations were correct in their assertion that EPGs were protected by copyright law -- which did seem likely, given the White Pages case -- then certainly it was illegal to distribute copies. (Which is what IceTV were doing.) But we were doing something a bit different: distributing our own code that allowed home PCs to read online EPGs. That was against the websites' Terms & Conditions, but those aren't laws. So we were in a gray area, half-expecting cease & desist letters the whole time.

At first, the war went badly. It was an arms race, and whenever a TV station reformatted its website, anyone whose home PVR relied on that script would lose their EPG. They would need to jump online and hope the author had posted a fix, or switch to a different script.

Then I had the idea of collecting everyone's scripts together in a flock, under the guidance of a shepherd. Then instead of relying on a single data source, the shepherd would deploy scripts as necessary until it had all the data it needed. When one of the flock broke down, it would send out others that could do the job instead, using different data sources.

This moved home users away from the war's front line. The TV stations kept breaking our scripts, but they weren't co-ordinated enough to break all of them at once. We could repair breakages at our leisure, and so long as there was at least one still in action, for home users the data kept flowing.

Then the TV stations gave up.

Then they lost a court case against IceTV. So EPGs weren't copyright after all.

Then Telstra lost a court case over the White Pages. Now even phonebooks aren't protected by copyright.

In the meantime, DVRs and PVRs flooded the country, and the TV stations switched from trying to block them to trying to manage them, striking deals with manufacturers to provide guide data in exchange for weakened ad-skipping.

And here we are!

So anyway, to answer your question: Squiggle gets data from a popular news site.

 

[Catfish Alley]

I don't get the Eagles being so high on the flagpole. Home record i guess. Nice move by me team though and I like the prediction From what I've seen, Cats, Swans and Crows look good. Wary of the Hawks.

 

[GreyCrow]

Squiggle obviously doesn't know what BF supporters want. Richmond wont finish 9th

 

[vonn]

I want to make my child's middle name
Squiggle.

 

[MarcusP2]

I don't get the Eagles being so high on the flagpole. Home record i guess. Nice move by me team though and I like the prediction From what I've seen, Cats, Swans and Crows look good. Wary of the Hawks.

The flagpole rewards thrashings and the Eagles have dished them out to all the low-ranked teams they have played at home.

 

[Rotayjay]

Okay first let me explain why this is a tricky question to answer.

Ten years ago, Channel Nine and Channel Seven were fighting against devices that could record TV onto a hard drive (PVRs like Foxtel iQ or smart DVD players).

You could buy them, but they were pretty useless, because they had no Electronic Program Guide (EPG). So instead of being able to set them to record your favourite shows whenever they happened to be on, you had to manually program the right channels and times, as if they were 1990s VCRs.

The TV stations feared that people would be able to ad-skip, which would hurt revenue. They also had some bizarre ideas about piracy, and how they could fight it by running shows at unpredictable times. Channel Seven actually said: "Precise start times (in an EPG) would allow people to burn DVDs of our programs like crazy and push them out over the internet."

Why you would want to burn a file to a DVD before pushing it out to the internet, I don't know. But Seven and Nine were worried about it, and prepared to aggravate their audience in order to make it marginally harder.

Fortunately for them, Australian law offered a unique weapon, which would allow them to successfully delay the arrival of DVRs and PVRs for years. Copyright! In most countries, copyright law protects artistic works only, like books. But in 2002 in Australia, a famous lawsuit over the White Pages established that simple collections of facts like a phonebook could be a creative work, too.

So the TV stations claimed that their EPG must be protected by copyright, too, and issued legal threats to everyone who was sharing it without their permission. That included a couple of high-profile nerds who, like myself, had built home theatre PCs to record TV and wanted guide data, as well as a company, IceTV.

The rest of us went underground. Thus began a long war of attrition began between script writers, who would post code that people could use to download guide data, and TV stations, who regularly re-arranged their websites in order to break these scripts. Sometimes we found amusing comments in the source code of these websites, asking us to stop.

Now it was unclear whether what we were doing was illegal. If the TV stations were correct in their assertion that EPGs were protected by copyright law -- which did seem likely, given the White Pages case -- then certainly it was illegal to distribute copies. (Which is what IceTV were doing.) But we were doing something a bit different: distributing our own code that allowed home PCs to read online EPGs. That was against the websites' Terms & Conditions, but those aren't laws. So we were in a gray area, half-expecting cease & desist letters the whole time.

At first, the war went badly. It was an arms race, and whenever a TV station reformatted its website, anyone whose home PVR relied on that script would lose their EPG. They would need to jump online and hope the author had posted a fix, or switch to a different script.

Then I had the idea of collecting everyone's scripts together in a flock, under the guidance of a shepherd. Then instead of relying on a single data source, the shepherd would deploy scripts as necessary until it had all the data it needed. When one of the flock broke down, it would send out others that could do the job instead, using different data sources.

This moved home users away from the war's front line. The TV stations kept breaking our scripts, but they weren't co-ordinated enough to break all of them at once. We could repair breakages at our leisure, and so long as there was at least one still in action, for home users the data kept flowing.

Then the TV stations gave up.

Then they lost a court case against IceTV. So EPGs weren't copyright after all.

Then Telstra lost a court case over the White Pages. Now even phonebooks aren't protected by copyright.

In the meantime, DVRs and PVRs flooded the country, and the TV stations switched from trying to block them to trying to manage them, striking deals with manufacturers to provide guide data in exchange for weakened ad-skipping.

And here we are!

So anyway, to answer your question: Squiggle gets data from a popular news site.

Great story. I always wondered how Squiggle got its score data, and live too. To this day, if I want to record shows off TV and burn them onto DVD for future personal entertainment (NOT selling), I can't get my DVR to recognise the EPG. So I have to do it manually.

'What about that one?'
'That's the VCR, kid. Not even I, Chronos - Master of All Time, can set one of those!'
-Johnny Bravo

 

[funk44]

Surely results are available in json/XML somewhere or could be scraped off any one of a dozen websites which post results with a bit of python?

 

[manicmagpie]

Final Siren it would be great to see a squiggle of world war 2.

Id imagine Germany around 1940 would rate through the roof and be in the conquering zone after the defeat of Poland and France. But Russia, would be flying late into calculations after Stalingrad

I think I've found the animated squiggle for WWII:

 

[Engimal v2]

Surely results are available in json/XML somewhere or could be scraped off any one of a dozen websites which post results with a bit of python?

That would have been my first thought if I were setting something like this up.

 

[Final Siren]

Surely results are available in json/XML somewhere or could be scraped off any one of a dozen websites which post results with a bit of python?

I don't know of anywhere that openly offers a feed like that, but nowadays a few of the commercial sites are sophisticated enough to have a backend server tucked away somewhere, supporting their web frontend, and that will indeed serve you data as JSON or similar, if you can find it. Those are about as good as it gets, since they don't often change format.

 

[Tippett2Goal]

I want to make my child's middle name
Squiggle.

Where is the commitment, first name or bust

 

[Shane Hird]

Lurve that squiggle.

 

[1990crow]

I dont get how it predicts adelaide winning every match from here except against geelong but somehow has them losing two games. Went through and checked, it has adelaide beating Carlton by 8 goals and yet the ladder adds a loss to the crows and hence pushes them down the ladder. Kind of important.

 

[Hobbes]

I dont get how it predicts adelaide winning every match from here except against geelong but somehow has them losing two games. Went through and checked, it has adelaide beating Carlton by 8 goals and yet the ladder adds a loss to the crows and hence pushes them down the ladder. Kind of important.

It takes into account that probable wins aren't certainties, so it will take into account the 25% chance that we drop this game, the 10% chance that we drop that game.

 

[sverik25]

If I had a dollar...

 

[Gralin]

If I had a dollar...

I know right