supercat

Someone claims to have a rare proto that nobody's ever seen. He shows some people alleged screen shots, and he shows other people a ROM cartridge but doesn't actually let them see it do anything. After awhile, people start to wonder about whether the guy is full of it. Which action by him would lend more credence to his naysayers: setting up a video of him actually playing the game, or stomping his feet and saying he's under no obligation to show it to anyone--people saw the screenshots, and saw the board, and if that's not good enough for them, tough. In cases where one speaks truth, but one doesn't have good solid evidence to back it up, it may be better to ignore naysayers than to try to respond. If, for example, Barack had claimed to have been born in a town whose birth records were destroyed in a fire in 1972, he might legitimately not have records to show his eligibility even if he was, in fact, eligible. On the other hand, unless Barack has been lying about his past, there should be no difficulty with him proving his eligibility in such a fashion as to stomp out 99.44% of the detractors. I will not believe that Barack committed a hoax that would require co-conspirators throughout numerous levels of government. That he might commit a hoax that would require only a handful of personally-chosen co-conspirators (none of whom hold official positions) plus a major dose of chutzpah, however, would seem more plausible. When evaluating conspiracy theories, I try to determine what exactly I would have to believe in order to believe the theory true. In the case of most conspiracy theories, I find that there are some things that simply are not plausible. Here, I don't. That an official's statement that electronic copy of a document looks genuine would be made without comparing the document against the records on file (to which the official may not have access). Likely. That someone of moderate skill could electronically alter a scanned document to say whatever he wanted, and have the electronic copy pass muster with a state official who was examining it unofficially. Likely. That there would be ways for people to have birth records on file in Hawaii without having been born there. Plausible. That there exist people who are not eligible for office, but would like to run anyway. Certain. That some people are skilled at bluffing their way through almost anything. Certain. That some people who are not eligible for office, but would like to run anyway, are also very skilled at bluffing. Plausible. That Barack's party might take him at his word about eligibility, at least early on. Plausible. That few people would have a legitimate basis to access Barack's birth records before the primary. Likely. That officials might feel pressure not to call attention to any problems with the eligibility of a candidate who had won the primary, for fear of having riots on his head. Likely that they would feel pressure; plausible that they might accede to it. Etc. etc. I then proceed with the null hypothesis (what would I have to believe for the theory not to be true). That Barack Obama would rather continue his bluff than show his goods would be the expected behavior for a fraud, and not the expected behavior for an honest man. That's my thought process. In what way is it unreasonable? When looking at most conspiracy theories, the thought process ends pretty quickly when I find something that just plain doesn't work. Here, however, I don't. The whole chain of events necessary for an ineligible Barack Obama to have gotten where he is would not have required a conspiracy involving any officials beyond a general unwillingness to blow the whistle, and I come across nothing more implausible than the notion that a candidate wouldn't have gotten someone to make a clear and unequivocal statement that Barack is a natural-born citizen, rather than saying that he shall not be challenged. BTW, if the court were to rule that Barack Obama could not be sworn in until he was proven eligible, there wouldn't be a Constitutional crisis. At worst, he's told that he can become President as soon as he demonstrates eligibility; Biden would fill in the interim. Any delay in Barack becoming President would be entirely under his control.

If a prospective employee tried to do everything in his power to prevent the employer from making that phone call, shouldn't that raise suspicions far above any the employer might otherwise have had? No matter how much the prospective employee's protests claimed "discrimination"? It is impossible to meaningfully proclaim a document genuine based merely upon a scan thereof. Anyone with even a modicum of Photoshop skill could take a real certificate, scan it at 2400dpi, clone the background over any inconvenient text, and then replace the text with whatever they want, all at 2400dpi. A little care might be required with letter spacing, but nothing difficult. Experiment at different resolutions until the letter spacing of re-created original text matches the original document, then change the text and measure the spacing of that. Convert those measurements to 2400dpi and place letters appropriately. An examination of the document at 2400dpi would show the fraud pretty easily, but if the document were down-converted to 300dpi, all traces of forgery would be lost in the JPEG artifacts. It wouldn't require a massive conspiracy. Just a computer geek who wouldn't mind helping Obama cover over some pesky little details about his past. If someone were to send a Hawaii spokesman who didn't know anything of Obama's claimed birth details Obama's certificate along with a few others that were forged (competently) to show different data, how would the spokesman be able to tell which was genuine? Obviously only one could be. If Barack Obama wanted the issue laid to rest, he could have called the Hawaii officials and asked them to make a clear and unequivocal statement: "Hawaii has birth records on file which clearly and unambiguously establish that Obama was born there prior to January 19, 1974, and no records on file which would indicate he was born elsewhere or at a later date." [nb: if he was born after January 19, 1974, but were otherwise eligible, then the Twentieth Amendment ratified in 1993 would make Joseph Biden acting President until Barack Obama's 35th birthday; if Barack stonewalled the release of any information to unequivocally establish his eligibility prior to Jan. 20 and the government wanted to uphold the Constitution, Joseph Biden would be acting President until such time as Barack Obama released the information, whereupon Obama could act as President].

Take a photocopy or a home-computer printout of your birth certificate to the DMV. Do you think they'll accept it? What did she say: Doesn't sound like a terribly strong assertion to me. Why might it be impossible for them to be able to say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents? If they could identify the image as a fair and accurate copy of Obama's records, they would know that's what the image represented. That they cannot identify the image as a fair and accurate copy of the records doesn't mean it's fake (without a valid reason for accessing the records, they wouldn't be able to verify the image's authenticity) but their statement is hardly a proof of legitimacy. When you apply for a job, is the onus on your employer to prove that you're an illegal alien, or is the onus on you to prove that you're not? When you apply for a drivers' license, is the onus on the state to prove that you weren't born when you claim, or is the onus on you to prove that you were? Barack Obama is seeking the most important job in the world. Is there any reason that ascending presidents shouldn't be required to demonstrate eligibility as a matter of course? Not a demonstration to the level of "the registrar thought he could see pieces of the embossed image through it", but something more like "the document is a fair and accurate copy of the information in our files." What is it about Obama that makes people think the former and latter declarations are equivalent? It's bizarre.

Why does nobody actually look at what officials actually say? I am unaware of any statement by any Hawaiian official stating that the records on file bear any relation whatsoever to what Barack Obama posted on his web site. Can you point me to one? What state of Hawaii stated is that Obama's birth records are on file. From what I understand, there are a number of ways a person's birth records can be on file in a state without the person having been physically born there. For example, if an American couple adopts a child from China, I would expect the state where the child was adopted would keep a copy of the Chinese certificate on file and under seal, and issue the adoptive parents a birth certificate in their name. That would certainly seem more logical than asking the Chinese government to issue a birth certificate to the adoptive couple. If Hawaii has filed birth records for any people born overseas in the early 1960's, it would hardly seem unreasonable to want a statement making clear that Obama isn't such a person. Why doesn't he seek to have a court affirmatively find him eligible then, rather than finding that nobody has the right to challenge him? Wouldn't that be better for everyone? If I go into the bar and I'm asked for ID, when younger people aren't, I don't try to argue that I shouldn't have to show ID. I simply get out my ID and show it. If I did try to argue that I shouldn't have to show ID, any doubts the bartender had about my age would be magnified, not diminished. Obama has his doubters calling upon him to prove them wrong. Should not he receive greatest satisfaction by doing precisely that? The most charitable explanation I can figure for Obama's behavior is that he likes playing games and thumbing his nose at the Constitution. Legally, not a disqualifying factor, but hardly one to inspire confidence.

Countless disasters throughout history have occurred because nobody took responsibility for some essential task. All of the people who could have taken responsibility believed that someone else would do so, with the net effect that the task never got done. Yes, it seems absurd that a candidate would get this far without someone actually confirming that he's eligible, but all indications I've seen are that many of the people and agencies who could have checked his eligibility have stated that it's not their responsibility. I've seen nothing to indicate that anyone has actually checked. As for the issue of standing, the Constitution doesn't say "No person shall become President who is not a natural-born citizen, unless nobody is found to have standing to challenge him." It says that no person who is not a natural born citizen (and was not a resident of the US before 1789) shall become President, period. To the extent that the rules of standing would contradict the Supreme Law of the Land, the latter should have priority. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is supposed to swear in each incoming President. He would be forbidden by the Constitution from swearing in someone who was not eligible. Would not his own oath to uphold the Constitution require that he make sure anyone who appears before him to be sworn in is actually eligible for office, at least in any situation where there might be any basis for doubt?

Why? Using back-in-the-day technology, the memory-mapping I described would add one chip and five resistors (or two chips and no resistors). You would have a bitmap screen the first four (160-mode four-color) pixels of which would be accessed at $6000; the four pixels to the right of that at $6100, $6200, etc. up to $7F00. The next row would be $6001, $6101, $6201, etc. I'm not sure what sprites have to do with anything, since those addresses are all for a bitmap screen. I can't think what screen layout could possibly be easier to work with. To set a cursor position: ; gotoXY -- Set cursor X position as given in X register. Y register holds Y position. lda offset_tbl,x; 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 ... (128 bytes) sta ptr+1 ; Assume (ptr)=0 lda bitmask_tbl,x; Sequence of 03 0C 30 C0 (128 bytes) sta bitmask ; putPixel -- Store pixel value in accumulator ($00, $55, $AA, or $FF for color 0, 1, 2, or 3) at current point. eor (ptr),y and bitmask eor (ptr),y sta (ptr),y ; moveUp dey ; moveDown iny ; moveLeft asl bitmask rol bitmask bcc moveLeftDone rol bitmask dec ptr+1 moveLeftDone: ; moveRight lsr bitMask ror bitMask bcc moveRightDone ror bitMask inc ptr+1 moveRightDone: As written, the code will do bad things if one goes outside the (0..127,0..191) coordinate range, but pixel plotting is quick and easy. None of the routines affect the X or Y register; the move routines don't even affect the accumulator. If one wants to bitblt a shape onto the screen, one can use a relatively nice loop. For example, to OR a vertical strip of data with a source bitmask shifted left 2 bits: lp_O2L: lda (src1),y asl asl ora (dest),y sta (dest),y dey bpl lp_O2L One would use 14 such loops (0, 2, 4, or 6 bits shifted left; 2, 4, or 6 bits shifted right; both sets using AND or OR).

Greetings. There are quite a few things about the 7800 Impossible Mission that impress me. I was very happy to see that you used 320 mode where possible on the control panel; one of my pet peeves with the 7800 is that a lot of games use 160 mode even when it's totally silly (e.g. the opening text screen on Klax). Your use of 320 mode is much appreciated. I found it curious that the music room screen was smaller than on the 64 version. Was that because the 7800's TIA can't manage the same range of notes that the C64 can? Were you given a RAM and ROM target to start with, and did you meet or beat the original goal that was set? Would there have been any possibility of getting enough ROM space for a little crude speech or something resembling speech? Probably not enough for Melvin's opening monologue, but the monologue was a great part of what set the atmosphere for the C64 game.

I am unaware of any public official going on record as saying both (1) he has seen Obama's birth record or a certified copy thereof (not a computer scan or other non-certified copy), and (2) such records show that Obama was born in the U.S. I'm aware of a Hawaiian official who has claimed to have seen the official records (but hasn't said what they contain), and many people claim Obama's records show he was born in the U.S. (but don't claim to have seen the official document or an actual certified copy). The official, however, hasn't really said anything about whether Obama was born in the U.S., and nobody who hasn't looked at original documents or certified copies thereof can really know what they contain. As for Obama's vetting, it seems that everyone believes someone else has vetted Obama, but I'm unclear on who if anyone has actually done so.

And MIB doesn't mean "Mint in Box", but "Men in Black" (actually, in some cases, it means "mashed in box").

The right approach would be to have the cartridge map the memory differently for MARIA and CPU fetches. There are many ways this could be done; the simplest would be to have an 8K RAM chip appear at two spots in the memory map (probably $4000 and $6000) but feed the address pins through a multiplexer to 'shuffle' the addresses. Assume the goal is a 128x192 four-color screen (going the full 160 width would be possible, but more complicated). Addresses $4000-$5FFF would be read and written the RAM in normal fashion. When accessing RAM at $6000-$7FFF, however, bits 8-10 of the address would be swapped with bits 0-2, and bits 11-12 of the address would be swapped with bits 6-7. There would be 24 zones of eight lines each, and each zone would have four sprites of eight bytes each. The sprite data for each zone would be fetched from (addresses given for the first byte of the top row of each sprite) 4000 4040 4080 40C0 4008 4048 4088 40C8 ... five zones omitted (add 8 bytes per zone) 4038 4078 40B8 40F8 4800 4840 4880 48C0 ... six zones omitted 4838 4878 48B8 48F8 5000 5040 5080 50C0 ... six zones omitted 5038 5078 50B8 50F8 The entire screen would fit in $4000-$57FF; the RAM from $5800-$5FFF would be free for other purposes. While that organization of screen memory might seem pretty horrible to work with, the screen layout from $6000-$7FFF would be another matter. The first column of bytes would be mapped from $6000-$60BF, the second column from $6100-$61BF, etc. up to the last column at $7F00-$7FBF. How much nicer could things be? Incidentally, if one skipped the swap of bits 11-12 with 6-7, one could still have the nice mapping at $6000-$7FFF, but the free areas of memory in the $4000-$5FFF range would be scattered as 64 bytes in 32 pages, rather than being a contiguous 2K block. The easiest way to understand what's going on is to realize that swapping bits 8-10 with 0-2 transposes rows and columns in each 8x8-byte area of the screen (i.e. each 8-byte by 8-row zone), and the swap of bits 11-12 with 6-7 transposes rows and columns of the 64x64-byte areas of the screen taken as chunks. A layout like that would be far nicer than anything which could be done using indirect mode. I'm unaware of anything significant having been done using memory-map-shuffling tricks. The closest thing to that would be Rescue on Fractalus, which left A8 of the RAM chip disconnected (causing each rows of graphics data to be shown twice).

That is is. Hawaii is the state where he claims to have been born. When I got a summer job twenty years ago, I had to show my employer proof of employment eligibility. I couldn't just tell my employer I was eligible, or give a photocopy of my IDs. I had to give the actual IDs to my employer. It seems to me that being President of the United States is a more important job than packing boxes for mail-order shipment. Why should the former have stricter requirements for demonstrating eligibility than the latter? American soil hasn't been demonstrated, at least not in any way that has been publicized. That's the problem. Hawaiian officials have said they have birth records on file for Obama, but they haven't stated where those records say he was born. Obama has released what he claims to be a scan of a Certification of Live Birth, but a photocopy of an ID wouldn't have been good enough for me twenty years ago, and an alleged scan of a document shouldn't be good enough today. Ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to come down with one of three rulings: Obama has produced admissible evidence which demonstrates that he is a natural-born citizen, and he is eligible for office. Obama is not a natural-born citizen, and is not eligible for office. No petitioner has standing to challenge Obama's eligibility, so there is no need to determine whether he is a natural-born citizen. Obama's lawyers are asking the court to reach decision #3. Should that not set off major alarm bells? If someone offers up reasons why he doesn't have to answer what should be a simple question, shouldn't anyone who's even moderately inquisitive suspect the person is hiding something?

It would take considerable research to discover all the legal issues surrounding McCain's eligibility. Certainly the issue does appear more complicated than I realized. I did not vote for McCain in the primary (he was the person I least wanted to win), and would have favored a candidate whose legitimacy was clear beyond question. Nonetheless, I don't see how McCain's eligibility or lack thereof is relevant. The EC isn't apt to vote for him no matter what happens. What matters is whether Obama is eligible. If he was born in Hawaii as he claims, he is probably eligible even though the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't guarantee 'natural-born' status. If he would authorize the release of his birth records, and if they in fact show that he was born in Hawaii, the matter would be resolved. Why hasn't he authorized the release of at least enough information to confirm eligibility?

He has opposed legislation to protect infants who were born in failed abortion attempts.

On some DB9 connectors the metal part comes off pretty easily (indeed, I've had it come off when it wasn't supposed to).

They have been asked. Citing confidentiality, they won't answer. Really? Can you name anyone who has ever been denied a U.S. Senate, much less Illinois state senate, position as a result of a failed background check? If Barack Obama were to send a notarized statement to the state of Hawaii authorizing it to officially state that he was born there, that would be great. Since he refuses to do so, nobody can confirm his eligibility.

I've never seen anything to indicate that a child born of two U.S. citizen parents who were out of the country on military business would ever have been regarded anything other than a natural-born citizen. If Obama was born in the U.S., the fact that his father was a foreign national would probably not disqualify him (the law is vague on the subject) but if he was born in Kenya, and the other facts of his birth are as he claims, there would be no legitimate basis of which I am aware for a claim of natural-born citizenship.

Even on the 2600, the video graphics circuitry takes a lot of load off the CPU (e.g. sprites automatically retrigger every line without CPU intervention). The differences in graphics circuitry matter far more than the similarities in CPU horsepower. I don't think it's particularly meaningful to regard either the 7800 or the NES as "more powerful" than the other with regard to graphics; each can do things that the other simply cannot. The NES has circuitry to manage multi-color tile-mapped backgrounds. As a result, it can do a better job of displaying such backgrounds than can the 7800, so Super Mario Brothers can come out looking better than Scrapyard Dog. On the other hand, its abilities to display things other than the tiled background aren't as sophisticated, so Robotron can show more freely-moving objects than anything on the NES.

True, but with modern emulation it's really not that hard. Often, rather than trying to count cycles I'll simply throw together a little kernel test and find out what things happen to early or too late, and then see if I can fix them. If there's too much stuff going on, it may be difficult or impossible to tweak the timing of a particular instruction without knocking some other timing out of tolerance. But if there isn't much going on, it's usually pretty easy.

Seems reasonable. Obama thinks abortion should be legal at any stage, for any reason, even after an unwanted child is fully born. How is that not extremist?

Under the laws in effect when he was born, Obama's mother would have had to have lived in the U.S. for at least five years after turning 14 for her son to receive citizenship at birth (if born outside the U.S. and fathered by a foreign national). If the claimed birthdates of Obama and his mother are accurate, she had not yet reached the age of 19, and thus Obama would not have been a natural-born citizen if born outside the U.S. As for McCain, both of his parents are U.S. citizens, and both had been resident in the U.S. prior to his birth. Under the laws enacted shortly after the Constitution was written, any person born of two natural-born or naturalized citizens of the United States is a natural-born citizen at birth, provided only that at least one of the parents has been a resident of the U.S. for at least some time prior to birth. I am unaware of any law that ever stated that such a person was not a natural-born citizen. Incidentally, the natural-born citizenship requirement was as much about allegiance as geography. I wonder if there have ever been any Presidents who were not alive when the Constitution was ratified, whose parents weren't both U.S. citizens?

It is possible for the two halves of a 160-mode pixel to be programmed with different chroma? My guess would be that the chroma circuitry only samples its data once per chroma clock; making the hires modes are 'transparent' to chroma data would avoid strangeness.

Is there any reason why aspiring Presidents should not be willing to prove their eligibility for office as a matter of course? If Obama was born in Hawaii, why would it not be in everyone's interest for him to authorize the state of Hawaii to officially say so? Note that they have said they have a birth record on file, but they haven't said what it indicates about where he was born (a newspaper article's headline claimed they said the latter, but in the article itself they only said the former). I would think that if Obama cared at all about the Constitution he should be delighted to demonstrate that he meets the requirements for office. The most charitable explanation I can think of is that, even though he's eligible, he'd rather demonstrate that it's possible for a person to bluster his way into office without proving citizenship, than do anything that would be perceived as acceding to his detractor's demands (no matter how reasonable those demands might be). A frightening prospect since, were he to do so it would pave the way for others who really weren't eligible. That Obama would do such a thing suggests that he's really not a suitable person to be president, but I can't figure any more charitable explanation. Can anyone else offer one?

Before designing for any particular EEPROM or flash chip, check to ensure that there is no address setup time requirement for read cycles. On a typical EPROM, if the address changes while the chip is selected for reading, the behavior of the device outputs will be unspecified for next 50-200ns or so (the access time, or TACC) but by the end of that time the device will start outputting the data from the new address. To put it another way, the device doesn't care when the address is or becomes valid, provided the address is valid at least TACC before the data is needed (the device doesn't really care when the data is needed either, but if another device tries to use the data less than TACC after an address change, the data from the memory chip may be incorrect). On some flash and EEPROM devices, however, the address lines are only sampled once at the start of a memory cycle. In a system that strobes the memory once per cycle, this is fine. On the 2600, however, it would cause severe problems in the absence of a controller that could infer the timing of the 2600's clock (the 4A50 cart does that). Some chips are fine, but some aren't--check data sheets to be sure.

One problem with using EPROMs as PLD replacements is that there is no guarantee about what an EPROM's outputs will do in the first 50ns or so after an address change. Even if D0 is zero at address 1234 and also on address 1235, there is no guarantee that switching from address 1234 to 1235 will not cause the outputs to glitch.

You can, however, make the klystron pod fly through the reactor without registering a collision.