what you're missing is that there's an mpeg header for every mpeg frame in the file. you have to scan to find the first frame (sometimes at the beginning of the file, sometimes after some cruft like id3 tags) then go through, and for each frame, flip the bit, then read the headers to see where the frame ends and the next frame starts.
brainfuck wouldn't say anything intelligible. it would run around blackjacking people, occasionally shouting a letter, seeming disconnected from everything else.
if you took the time to put those letters together, though, it would say something coherent, but completely irrelevant.
No episode affects the next, with minor exception (eg. Maude flanders death), and because of that the creators are not limited as to what can happen; A fact they seem to relish, even mock with in-jokes: "Oh look, we've won a trip to Delaware"
the general rule is that no episode affects the scripts of later episodes unless ther is a real world reason for it (except for occasional references, for instance referencing sideshow bob's previous antics whenever he gets out of jail). for instance, lisa stayed a vegetarian because it was a condition in the mccartney's contract when they appeared to be on the show. maude flanders died because the voice actress quit.
I know i saw a library a while ago on freshmeat that supplies a new unlink() function. This version will move the file into a trashcan area rather than just delete it. it could be worth investigating. after a quick search, it's apparently called libtrash.
I don't really know the software, so i can't vouch for it, but it seems to be taking a sensible approach. of course, the whole idea breaks if you use the kernel nfsd, so be careful with that.
(And look watch for the sellouts.. several used-to-be indie artists are now minions of the RIAA... and if they are, speak your displeasure and add them to your avoid list too.)
ooh, you're so punk you're making me hot over here. fight the man! fuck the system!
what you don't realize is that most of the bigger indie labels are in the riaa, as well. it's not just the big 5. epitaph, fat wreck cords, moonshine, 4ad, six degrees, rykodisc, and rhino are all members. go ahead, take a look at the list. my policy is to (get this) buy the music i like enough to shell out the money for. i like the pixies who are on 4ad. i like tweaker, who's on six degrees. i like soul coughing who was on warner, but their greatest hits were put out by rhino. i like jane's addiction who was on warner for most of the time they were together. i can't remember off hand who put out the gorillaz album, but i know it was one of the big ones.
don't be so sanctimonious about your record buying habits. buy what you like, not what sticks it to the man.
The question should not be why shouldn't there be a law. The question should be why must there be a law? The federal government of the U.S. certainly does not have jurisdiction over the internet. It's simply not one of the enumerated powers in the constituion.
i agree, but i already said why i think there should be a law.
The biggest problem is that enforcement costs money, and the federal government should not go around policing private systems.
so if i took my privately owned can of spray paint, and painted a big, hideous smily face on your privately owned house, that's not vandalism, because it's all private? if i used privately owned equipment to tap into a privately owned cable system so i could watch hbo, that's fine? how about if i used that privately owned equipment to screw up other people's cable service?
i realize that it was a shitty example, but the point you're trying to avoid is that dos attacks do cause damage. why should something that serves no purpose other than to cause damage not be illegal if both the originator and the target are in the same country?
we're not requiring anything of isps, we're giving government money toward prevention. we're just talking about making an activity that serves no purpose than to cause damage within a single country illegal. what's the problem with that?
Simple, I don't want my tax money going to policing your internet connection.
nobody is arguing that the government should require isps to implement filters, or that it should be paying to put boxes in at isps that do it. anybody that does say that probably deserves a good smack upside the head. all we're saying is that activities which serve no other purpose than to damage other people's property and custmer base and cost them money should be illegal.
I don't think any government should have jurisdiction over the internet.
for the record, i agree when it comes to laws regarding what content can be served. for instance france's suit against yahoo comes to mind as a praticularly assinine example. however, if both the originator of a dos attack, and its target are in the same country, it should certainly be considered an crime.
international trade is not only possible, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have any laws regulating trade within individual countries, or that there should be no international standards regulating trade between countries.
if i mailed a bomb within my country it would certainly be illegal, even if nobody was hurt in the explosion. there would still be property damage. if i mailed a bomb to another country, that would most certainly be illegal. why should the internet be so fundamentally different legally?
DoS attacks shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
care to explain your reasoning? they use bandwidth paid for by the victim, often crash the victim's computers, and prevent potential customers from accessing the victim's content. at the same time, dos attacks benefit absolutely.
the only person who gets anything out of a dos attack is some lamer script kiddie who thinks he's l33t because he ran some code he got from irc. everybody else is inconvenienced at the least, possibly even cost some money. it's not speech, so it's not a first amendment issue. so tell me -- why shouldn't it be illegal?
the fallacy here is that he's considering slashdot a single entity. are the people that say "i'm never buying a dvd again" the same people that drool over the latest dvds in these threads? doubtful.
if you find somebody who contradicts themselves like that, then rather than accusing all of slashdot of hiporcisy, respond to the specific post, and cite the previous post. don't assume that everybody thinks the same way, and accuse these mythical thought patters of self-contradiction.
granted the first three are tv movies, so ignore them if you see fit. but that's by no means a full list, either. there's plenty that i'm missing. and wasn't "howard the duck" marvel?
not to mention that i have some serious complaints about some of those films you list as "fan successes". every comic book movie to date has destroyed large aspects of the comics ("gwen stacy? who's that?") and i don't expect much better from daredevil, and the rest of the upcoming pack of comic flicks.
i had to go through the source to figure out what they meant by pi in higher dimensions. at first i assumed it had to be something interesting, since they bothered to post it, but it's not. they're just useing simple calculations to find the volume of spheres and hyperspheres, and plugging that into the known, proven formulas to find pi.
for a circle, A=pi*r^2 for a sphere, V=4/3*pi*r^3 for a hypersphere, V=pi^2*r^4/2
by "proving" that pi is the same in multiple dimensions, they merely demonstrate these well-established identities. of course, since they're using a clumsy "brute force" method to initially calculate the volume, they're not actually proving anything, since they only get an approximate answer.
while i appreciate the who, they're not my heroes. it's just that every time an obituary is posted on slashdot, somebody jumps on it for not being news for nerds, displaying blatant disrespect for those that DO mourn the death. this has really irked me for quite a while, and for some random, unknown reason, your post set me off on a rant.
i'll definitely miss one of the most innovative bands of the last half-century though.
a man who is loved and respected by a lot of people here has died. if you don't care that he died, then don't post. have some bloody respect.
this has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. whenever slashdot posts about somebody dying, there's a pile of insensitive clods like you that post about how it's not news for nerds and doesn't matter.
even if you have no inclination to mourn yourself, let other people deal with his death in peace, without having to deal with fuckwads who find it appropriate to comment that the death is irrelevant, and it shouldn't have been posted. go lurk under a bridge somewhere, and if you don't like the tread, leave it alone.
and now for a moment of silence to honor the departed:
it's more like you found somebody who offered to do free gardening for you, but would only do it if you let his buddy "improve your magazine-reading experience." then his buddy replaces ads in your magazines with new ads, except he does it in such a way that it's hard to detect unless you're a magazine expert.
when you ask about getting rid of the magazine-improving friend, the gardener tells you that you can't get rid of him directly, but you can trust that he'll leave on his own when you fire the gardener.
Re:An even better solution...
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 3, Informative
record companies are the same way:
them: your album isn't selling well enough, so you're fired, and your album is being deleted from our catalog. you: but it's critically acclaimed, and we have a growing cult following! them: but if we hire a group of dancing monkeys and dress them up like 30-year olds pretending to be teenagers, we'll sell millions. you: fine, i'll take my album elsewhere. them: no you won't. we're holding onto it in case you become popular on another label. you: but it's my album. them: no it's not. check your contract and then fuck off.
sometimes they even refuse to release an album but won't let the artist have the masters. buncha pricks.
this guy has been doing some interesting work on the regex engine. he's added functionality so that you can have recursive regular expressions without the clumsy postponed subexpression ("(??{...})") mechanism. on the one hand, it's far less readable that way, but on the other hand, you don't have to predeclare a variable for every production rule in your grammar.
and the current system is even more convoluted since the postponed subexpressions are evaluated in the environment in which they are checked, not where they were declared. this means that all variables referenced when you built the regex have to be in scope when you use it. that's a restriction i'd like to do away with, although i'd rather see it done by making postponed subexpressions support closures.
as i recall there's also an rfc for perl 6 on the perl site to make a stack-based regex engine rather than stat-machine-based, so that it could support CFGs, but i don't think it specified how it would work syntactically.
Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL
on
Apocalypse 5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For instance, Python already has changed regexes; but because they don't come built in to the main language syntax (as they shouldn't; not everything is about text), it was a painless transition for everybody involved.
perl is the practical extraction and reporting language. that's what it was originally designed for, and it's still extremely useful for that. just the other day i had to rip some statistics out of the debug output of a program, and average it together over multiple tests, outputting it into comma separated values. perl was incredibly useful for that. not everything is about text, but perl is designed for the cases where it IS about text.
perl only really starts to fail when you consider it a panacea. it will not do everything for you, and there's some things that it just plain sucks at. all languages are the same way -- they have strengths and weakness. perl will extract your data, and it will act as a quick scriupting engine, for when shell scripting just isn't powerful enough. just don't try to write an officew suite or anything in it.
but, if you'll remember, jabba was watching the pod races in episode 1. and he was looking pretty damn fat. i somehow convinced myself to believe in the weight loss between "a new hope" and "return of the jedi", but i won't buy into the weight loss between "phantom menace" and "a new hope". granted 30 years is enough time to lose a lot of weight, but jabba doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of guy that would go for a run every day and eat healthy.
makeup. through the magic of makeup, they made winona ryder look old in the beginning of edward scissorhands, for instance. it works the other way too -- you can look younger. in addition to all the 30-something high school kids in aaron spelling dramas, they can still make dick clark look alive once a year for new year's eve.
i don't care so much about greedo shooting first, when you compare it to that horrile jabba scene. i had almost managed to rationalize it away, thinking, "well he must have put on a few pounds between movies." after all, isn't it supposed to be several years in between episodes 4 and 6?
then i saw episode 1 and realized that george lucas just didn't see how hideous that scene was because his colon was blocking his view.
Slashdot Mirror
what you're missing is that there's an mpeg header for every mpeg frame in the file. you have to scan to find the first frame (sometimes at the beginning of the file, sometimes after some cruft like id3 tags) then go through, and for each frame, flip the bit, then read the headers to see where the frame ends and the next frame starts.
brainfuck wouldn't say anything intelligible. it would run around blackjacking people, occasionally shouting a letter, seeming disconnected from everything else.
if you took the time to put those letters together, though, it would say something coherent, but completely irrelevant.
the general rule is that no episode affects the scripts of later episodes unless ther is a real world reason for it (except for occasional references, for instance referencing sideshow bob's previous antics whenever he gets out of jail). for instance, lisa stayed a vegetarian because it was a condition in the mccartney's contract when they appeared to be on the show. maude flanders died because the voice actress quit.
I know i saw a library a while ago on freshmeat that supplies a new unlink() function. This version will move the file into a trashcan area rather than just delete it. it could be worth investigating. after a quick search, it's apparently called libtrash.
I don't really know the software, so i can't vouch for it, but it seems to be taking a sensible approach. of course, the whole idea breaks if you use the kernel nfsd, so be careful with that.
you ought to learn sed. it's a one-liner. just pass it the name of the file of business practices as the first argument.
#!/usr/bin/sed -f
s/\(\w\+\)/\1 using a computer/g
ooh, you're so punk you're making me hot over here. fight the man! fuck the system!
what you don't realize is that most of the bigger indie labels are in the riaa, as well. it's not just the big 5. epitaph, fat wreck cords, moonshine, 4ad, six degrees, rykodisc, and rhino are all members. go ahead, take a look at the list. my policy is to (get this) buy the music i like enough to shell out the money for. i like the pixies who are on 4ad. i like tweaker, who's on six degrees. i like soul coughing who was on warner, but their greatest hits were put out by rhino. i like jane's addiction who was on warner for most of the time they were together. i can't remember off hand who put out the gorillaz album, but i know it was one of the big ones.
don't be so sanctimonious about your record buying habits. buy what you like, not what sticks it to the man.
what, you mean because linux gives him a woody?
i agree, but i already said why i think there should be a law.
so if i took my privately owned can of spray paint, and painted a big, hideous smily face on your privately owned house, that's not vandalism, because it's all private? if i used privately owned equipment to tap into a privately owned cable system so i could watch hbo, that's fine? how about if i used that privately owned equipment to screw up other people's cable service?
get the idea?
i realize that it was a shitty example, but the point you're trying to avoid is that dos attacks do cause damage. why should something that serves no purpose other than to cause damage not be illegal if both the originator and the target are in the same country?
we're not requiring anything of isps, we're giving government money toward prevention. we're just talking about making an activity that serves no purpose than to cause damage within a single country illegal. what's the problem with that?
nobody is arguing that the government should require isps to implement filters, or that it should be paying to put boxes in at isps that do it. anybody that does say that probably deserves a good smack upside the head. all we're saying is that activities which serve no other purpose than to damage other people's property and custmer base and cost them money should be illegal.
for the record, i agree when it comes to laws regarding what content can be served. for instance france's suit against yahoo comes to mind as a praticularly assinine example. however, if both the originator of a dos attack, and its target are in the same country, it should certainly be considered an crime.
international trade is not only possible, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have any laws regulating trade within individual countries, or that there should be no international standards regulating trade between countries.
if i mailed a bomb within my country it would certainly be illegal, even if nobody was hurt in the explosion. there would still be property damage. if i mailed a bomb to another country, that would most certainly be illegal. why should the internet be so fundamentally different legally?
care to explain your reasoning? they use bandwidth paid for by the victim, often crash the victim's computers, and prevent potential customers from accessing the victim's content. at the same time, dos attacks benefit absolutely.
the only person who gets anything out of a dos attack is some lamer script kiddie who thinks he's l33t because he ran some code he got from irc. everybody else is inconvenienced at the least, possibly even cost some money. it's not speech, so it's not a first amendment issue. so tell me -- why shouldn't it be illegal?
the fallacy here is that he's considering slashdot a single entity. are the people that say "i'm never buying a dvd again" the same people that drool over the latest dvds in these threads? doubtful.
if you find somebody who contradicts themselves like that, then rather than accusing all of slashdot of hiporcisy, respond to the specific post, and cite the previous post. don't assume that everybody thinks the same way, and accuse these mythical thought patters of self-contradiction.
you're forgetting some marvel movies in there. all the bad ones, in fact. for instance:
captain america (1979)
captain america ii: death too soon (1979)
the incredible hulk returns (1988)
the punisher (1989)
the fantastic four (1994) (it was so bad it was never released.)
granted the first three are tv movies, so ignore them if you see fit. but that's by no means a full list, either. there's plenty that i'm missing. and wasn't "howard the duck" marvel?
not to mention that i have some serious complaints about some of those films you list as "fan successes". every comic book movie to date has destroyed large aspects of the comics ("gwen stacy? who's that?") and i don't expect much better from daredevil, and the rest of the upcoming pack of comic flicks.
i had to go through the source to figure out what they meant by pi in higher dimensions. at first i assumed it had to be something interesting, since they bothered to post it, but it's not. they're just useing simple calculations to find the volume of spheres and hyperspheres, and plugging that into the known, proven formulas to find pi.
for a circle, A=pi*r^2
for a sphere, V=4/3*pi*r^3
for a hypersphere, V=pi^2*r^4/2
by "proving" that pi is the same in multiple dimensions, they merely demonstrate these well-established identities. of course, since they're using a clumsy "brute force" method to initially calculate the volume, they're not actually proving anything, since they only get an approximate answer.
lines are termineted with CRLF, and indents are literal tabs, rather than a couple spaces. my guess is it was written in notepad.
/me suppresses a giggle at the expense of people who code in notepad.
while i appreciate the who, they're not my heroes. it's just that every time an obituary is posted on slashdot, somebody jumps on it for not being news for nerds, displaying blatant disrespect for those that DO mourn the death. this has really irked me for quite a while, and for some random, unknown reason, your post set me off on a rant.
i'll definitely miss one of the most innovative bands of the last half-century though.
jackass.
a man who is loved and respected by a lot of people here has died. if you don't care that he died, then don't post. have some bloody respect.
this has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. whenever slashdot posts about somebody dying, there's a pile of insensitive clods like you that post about how it's not news for nerds and doesn't matter.
even if you have no inclination to mourn yourself, let other people deal with his death in peace, without having to deal with fuckwads who find it appropriate to comment that the death is irrelevant, and it shouldn't have been posted. go lurk under a bridge somewhere, and if you don't like the tread, leave it alone.
and now for a moment of silence to honor the departed:
your analogy doesn't work.
it's more like you found somebody who offered to do free gardening for you, but would only do it if you let his buddy "improve your magazine-reading experience." then his buddy replaces ads in your magazines with new ads, except he does it in such a way that it's hard to detect unless you're a magazine expert.
when you ask about getting rid of the magazine-improving friend, the gardener tells you that you can't get rid of him directly, but you can trust that he'll leave on his own when you fire the gardener.
record companies are the same way:
them: your album isn't selling well enough, so you're fired, and your album is being deleted from our catalog.
you: but it's critically acclaimed, and we have a growing cult following!
them: but if we hire a group of dancing monkeys and dress them up like 30-year olds pretending to be teenagers, we'll sell millions.
you: fine, i'll take my album elsewhere.
them: no you won't. we're holding onto it in case you become popular on another label.
you: but it's my album.
them: no it's not. check your contract and then fuck off.
sometimes they even refuse to release an album but won't let the artist have the masters. buncha pricks.
this guy has been doing some interesting work on the regex engine. he's added functionality so that you can have recursive regular expressions without the clumsy postponed subexpression ("(??{...})") mechanism. on the one hand, it's far less readable that way, but on the other hand, you don't have to predeclare a variable for every production rule in your grammar.
and the current system is even more convoluted since the postponed subexpressions are evaluated in the environment in which they are checked, not where they were declared. this means that all variables referenced when you built the regex have to be in scope when you use it. that's a restriction i'd like to do away with, although i'd rather see it done by making postponed subexpressions support closures.
as i recall there's also an rfc for perl 6 on the perl site to make a stack-based regex engine rather than stat-machine-based, so that it could support CFGs, but i don't think it specified how it would work syntactically.
perl is the practical extraction and reporting language. that's what it was originally designed for, and it's still extremely useful for that. just the other day i had to rip some statistics out of the debug output of a program, and average it together over multiple tests, outputting it into comma separated values. perl was incredibly useful for that. not everything is about text, but perl is designed for the cases where it IS about text.
perl only really starts to fail when you consider it a panacea. it will not do everything for you, and there's some things that it just plain sucks at. all languages are the same way -- they have strengths and weakness. perl will extract your data, and it will act as a quick scriupting engine, for when shell scripting just isn't powerful enough. just don't try to write an officew suite or anything in it.
but, if you'll remember, jabba was watching the pod races in episode 1. and he was looking pretty damn fat. i somehow convinced myself to believe in the weight loss between "a new hope" and "return of the jedi", but i won't buy into the weight loss between "phantom menace" and "a new hope". granted 30 years is enough time to lose a lot of weight, but jabba doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of guy that would go for a run every day and eat healthy.
there are several possibilities here:
i don't care so much about greedo shooting first, when you compare it to that horrile jabba scene. i had almost managed to rationalize it away, thinking, "well he must have put on a few pounds between movies." after all, isn't it supposed to be several years in between episodes 4 and 6?
then i saw episode 1 and realized that george lucas just didn't see how hideous that scene was because his colon was blocking his view.