supercat

Rather than get bogged down in details of all the abortion scenarios, let me make a few principles clear: -1- One can reasonably debate what protections should be given to a two-week embryo. A 39-week fetus is another matter. -2- It is lawful to commit homicide when it is reasonably necessary to protect oneself or another innocent from death or severe bodily harm. I see no reason abortion should be an exception. -3- With regard to redemption, a girl who gets pregnant with a baby for which she cannot reasonably provide can give the baby up for adoption and then get on with her life. What more redemption should she need> -4- Why should abortion, a 'right' which is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, be more protected than, e.g., the right to keep and bear arms which is explicitly mentioned?

The original VIC-II chip on my first C64 had defects on sprites 0 and IIRC 5 that would cause isolated pixels to fail to appear. Probably a node with either too much stray capacitance or a deficient pull-up resistor. One of my CIA chips wouldn't carry time from 'seconds' to 'minutes'. Did make Raid Over Moscow much easier, since the clock would never count down all the way.

To send a bit of data as master, a device should assert clock, drive the bit, release clock, and wait for the clock wire to go high. A receiving slave device that sees the clock wire go low should hold the clock wire low until it has a chance to process the bit. If the master waits for the clock wire to go high after each bit, and if the slave has some hardware to latch the clock line low and do a few other things, it won't matter if the slave CPU is sometimes 'distracted' with interrupts, badlines, etc. Note that many slave devices never hold clock low, and so some software I2C master implementations don't check for it.

I would have thought the Pesco and Ebivision Pac-Man kernels were essentially the same. Are they not?

Batari gave permission for his kernel to be distributed with bB games. Ebivision gave no such permission for the Pesco kernel.

Would it be practical to adapt the Adventure game engine to use a different kernel? I have a kernel I wrote which uses a bit more RAM that would be ideal, and would really only be suitable for an 8K or bigger cartridge, but it allows two 2lk objects, colored per line pair along with the Ball; the background is 25 rows (8 lines each) by 40 pixels wide, with even and odd scan lines separately drawn and colored. Each screen has 25 bytes that serve as indexes into a master row list; all screens in a bank must together use 256 or fewer rows total. The kernel uses about 32-40 bytes.

Same thing happened, IMHO, with the Amiga. Commodore did finally release a 32-bit chipset, but only after the Amiga had long since been surpassed from every side.

I'd describe the goodies more simply, for later levels: skateboard=life. Bubble (or anything else)=death.

When does what data get fetched on the A8? The A8 performs two memory cycles in the time required to display each character, but from my understanding it does not interleave memory cycles with the CPU the way the C64 and Apple II do. Are the bytes required for each line fetched in a burst, or what? It would seem the A8 should have enough memory bandwidth to at least handle 320-wide 4-color graphics or 160-wide 16-color graphics.

I would say that a viable fetus is pretty clearly and unambiguously a person, and there is no legitimate basis for denying a born baby (wanted or not) full Constitutional rights. When in the Illinois state legislature, Barack Obama made clear a belief that if someone wants to kill through neglect an unwanted baby that was born during an attempted abortion, he should be allowed to do so. I've seen nothing to indicate that belief has changed. Further, a belief that Roe v. Wade is bad law does not imply that all abortion should be outlawed. The Tenth Amendment makes clear that matters not articulated in the Constitution are to be determined by state governments. The Supreme Court made an outrageous stretch when it concluded that: (1) women have a broad fundamental right to have an abortion, even though such right had never been widely acknowledged previously, and (2) the enforcement of that right was a legitimate function of the federal government. The notion that judges should have the power to arbitrarily decide what rights are to be enforced by the federal government against states poses dangers far beyond the abortion issue. I accept that there is some ambiguity with early-term pregnancies. I see no basis, however, for claiming that e.g. a 24-week fetus is anything other than a baby, or for claiming that late-term abortion is anything other than homicide (justifiable in only in narrow circumstances, as with any other form of homicide). Given that 4d ultrasound technology is widely available, I find it hard to regard those who would seek to rationalize most late-term abortions as anything other than accessories to murder. If they are ignorant of the personhood of late-term fetuses, it is because they deliberately choose to remain so. The solution is a return to the practice of encouraging irrevocable anonymous adoption. It used to be that when a girl got pregnant with no prospects for marriage nor substantial independent income, she would give up the baby. Period. Once the baby had been born and given to a waiting couple, the girl could then return to living her life without being saddled by responsibilities for which she was not yet ready. The girl had no right to change her mind later, and the adopting couple had no need to worry that the biological parents might reappear to disrupt their lives or even take their baby. Is there any way in which irrevocable anonymous adoption is not the best course of action for everyone concerned in 99.9% of cases? Unwanted pregnancies would be enough of a burden that girls and women would make real effort to avoid them, but they would pose only a limited disruption to the mothers' lives. If you acknowledge that a 36-week fetus is a person, and yet still think a woman should be allowed to have one killed, how are you not justifying murder? If you want to suggest that it's not clear that a two-week embryo is fully a baby, I could go along with that. But in cases where it is clear, what reason is there to allow abortion? Has governor Palin called for a federal ban on abortion? I am unaware of her having done so. Could you point me to some evidence of that? Obama has for decades attended a church led by Reverent Wright, who preaches openly anti-American beliefs. Are you suggesting that Palin's connections with Dominionists are stronger than Obama's connections to anti-American "Black Liberation Theology"? Can you be somewhat more specific? If you are suggesting that a few miscellaneous people shouted out hateful things and she declined to acknowledge them, what of it? In many cases, acknowledging hecklers (whether positively or negatively) gives them more attention than they deserve, so a decision to ignore some hecklers should not be taken as any sort of endorsement thereof. Would attending for decades the church of Reverend Wright not constitute far more of an endorsement of the hatred he spouted forth? I acknowledge that many people will continue to attend a church out of habit even if they come to have some disagreements with the preacher's sermons, but if Reverent Wright were to start preaching in my church it certainly wouldn't take me twenty years to find another. What gays are seeking with 'gay marriage' is the ability to compel other people to acknowledge their relationships. I haven't seen any particular opposition to letting people designate anyone they choose of either sex to exercise privileges such as medical visitation, inheritance, power of attorney, etc. What the opponents of 'gay marriage' oppose is gays having the ability to demand that other people acknowledge their relationship in ways those other people would otherwise decline to do. How many societies can you name, from any period of history, which have (1) lasted at least 100 years, (2) contained at least 1,000 people, and (3) have not required that any marriage involve exactly one male principal? I am aware of one (it provides that two brothers may marry the same woman). The concept that a marriage must involve exactly one male principal predates any known religion, so it can hardly be regarded as an invention by religious zealots. I'll address the rest of your post later. Thanks for writing.

That isn't quite as versatile as it sounds, though, given that two of the three colors must be shared among all multi-color sprites. On the other hand, if I were to do Toyshop Trouble for the 64, I'd probably overlap two hires sprites for each toy and two hires sprites for the player, and then update all the color registers every scan line (use tricks to eliminate the badline in each toy row). That could probably work out pretty well, though I don't know that there'd be enough market for a C64 version to make it worthwhile.

The Commodore 64 has a total set of 16 colors, as compared with the Atari's total set of 256. On the other hand, the Commodore has no difficulty displaying all 16 colors on a line in high-res mode whereas the Atari can't do anything like that. The total number of different colors on the Atari works to a huge advantage in games that use vertical color gradients. The ability to display more colors on a line works to a huge advantage on games whose color layouts aren't amenable to such treatment. Too bad there's no way to retroactively add a 16x8 RAM to the C64 to give it the best of both worlds.

Out of curiosity, is there a similar exemption for audiovisual materials displayed on digital equipment? A DVD player or equivalent device must of necessity create a copy of the image in a frame buffer, and the vast majority of modern television sets do likewise.

A copy of a game in RAM that exists purely to run the game would likely be regarded as ephemeral, and not really a "copy" as such.

Most computer monitors don't behave like old-fashioned televisions. Flicker really must be judged on real hardware. There is no alternative.

David's Midnight Magic. The Atari version uses artifacting to get four colors in 320-wide mode. The Commodore version tries, but artifacting doesn't work on the C64.

While you're trying to find a solution, count how many times you click each square. Any square you clicked an odd number of times should be clicked exactly once. Any square you clicked an even number of times should not be clicked. If you work out how to solve a board which is blank except for each of the nine squares in the top 3 rows and columns, you can then via reflection solve a board which is blank except for any single square. If you XOR together the solutions for all the squares that are lit up, you can solve any combination.

Clarify exactly what you mean by 'fanned the fires of hate and bigotry'. She asked fellow members of her congregation to pray that the troops were on a mission from God. She didn't say that they were--she asked members of her congregation to pray that they were. Of course, if you only heard the portion of her quote that Charlie Gibson and company aired, you may not be aware of that. What choices has she said she wants to legislate for others? Palin has five children who give her a lot of joy and whom, as far as I can tell, she loves very much. Some people who see that may feel some envy and self-hatred as a result of their own personal decisions, but I don't sense any hatred from Gov. Palin directed at those people. What signs of hatred are you seeing?

Combat is a good game when played by two motivated players of reasonable skill. It is essentially useless otherwise.

One of the things I've thought Gov. Palin should do would be to make a campaign ad showing her supposed "mission from God" quote in its proper context. I wonder how many people have any idea what she was actually saying, or the way that Charlie Gibson and the liars at ABC have misrepresented it?

You could try using something like a median-of-three algorithm to curtail paddle jitter, but if a paddle is bad there really isn't anything software can do. If the player moves the paddle so it stops on a bad spot, the paddle will keep yielding the same wrong readings until the next time the player moves it.

Not quite sure what sprites you're planning to have where. I doubt you can do everything you show there using the 2600's resources. Still sometimes it's surprising what is possible. logo.bin

Did the italics give it away? BTW, I'm curious: Given that Barack Obama received $200,000,000 worth of contributions of $200 or less that he hasn't individually reported, having an average value of $86, do people believe that those contributions came from a 2.3 million different people each contributing less than $200? Or did some people make multiple contributions totaling over $200 without being reported?

Harvard architecture is quite logical for devices that will be executing programs from a read-only code store. Particularly on machines with a fixed instruction size, it makes sense to think of each code address as holding an instruction, rather than a number. From a programming standpoint, it doesn't generally doesn't matter whether instructions are twelve bits, or fourteen, or sixteen, unless one is reading code memory as data (which some controllers allow and some don't). Incidentally, I'm disappointed by Microchip's design for the code memory readout on the PIC18F series. To read a byte (half a word) of code memory, one has to load the address, then do a table-read instruction, then read one byte from a register. I wonder why they didn't provide a means of reading two bytes at once?

I know the promotion of ridicule is often used as a means of diminishing one's opponents politically, but many of the complaints about Palin seem to apply just as well, if not moreso, to Obama. I consider her character to be far superior to that of any of the other top-three candidates. She may not match Obama's pure intelligence, but common sense and character trump intelligence any day in my book. As governor of Alaska, she has managed the highest approval rating of any governor anywhere. Are the people of Alaska stupid? The ethics stuff was a partisan witchhunt: A police officer threatened to kill her father-in-law before she was governor. While she was governor, she sought to bring police attention to some further misconduct by that person (including snowmobiling while 'disabled' from a workman's comp injury). After the head of the state police went on a trip to lobby for a program that she had vetoed, she had him reassigned. As that particular person was an at-will political appointment, she was entitled to dismiss him for any reason whatsoever or no reason at all. The complaint is that she might have been motivated to fire him because of a personal vendetta related to his earlier threats against her father-in-law (who, incidentally, is still employed as a police officer). What sort of ethics charge is that!? IMHO, the real reason for the visceral hatred of Sarah Palin is simple: in circumstances where many women would have had one abortion and encouraged another, she did neither. Worse, she seems happy with those choices. That does not compute. Therefore, she must be destroyed.