On the TI-86, at least, the OS offered the ability to add a keystroke handler hook in assembly. That would make fake memory clearing easy. It could even trap & fake other things like checking the memory screen until a password is entered. I would be surprised if no one has written one yet.
& even on the TI-83+ (or even the TI-81:)) you can always replace the interrupt routine & trap keys before they reach the OS.
I learned to program in QBASIC a long time ago. I learned many other dialects of BASIC along the way (due to acquiring various old computers), including Visual Basic.
But now I use Haskell for nearly everything & avoid imperative programming whenever possible. I suppose I occasionally use gotos & often use global variables when programming in C, but I only use C if I need to optimize something to death, anyway.
So I guess if I had to recommend languages, I would suggest C for speed-critical code & Haskell for everything else. Mostly, I would suggest having a good development environment set up, including having language & library help readily available.
Aside from the inability even in principle (i.e. even allowing for magic) to perform perfect quantum-level copying (assuming the theory of everything upholds that aspect of quantum theory) & the possible irrelevancy thereof if consciousness is classical, if someone were to copy me while I was unconscious & then destroy the original, I would argue that I would experience waking up in the copied body. Maybe a bit disorienting if it was located somewhere else, but nothing more. Identity of indiscernibles & such.
But if you try it when I am awake, I hope the copy returns the favor.
The need for a separate antivirus makes sense because the virtual machine is running a different operating environment with susceptibility to different viruses. A separate firewall does indeed seem superfluous.
I suppose the GBA Movie Player is not just a flash cart (well, not at all, but it uses CompactFlash for storage), but I got it so I could play media I own (DVDs & NES cartridges) in a more portable manner. (Ever try carrying around a toaster NES with 6 D-cells & a portable TV? It works, but it is too heavy & awkward to be considered portable.) I also got a GB flash cart a while back purely for homebrew stuff.
But yeah, it unfortunately seems most people want them for piracy. Perhaps if Nintendo made an official homebrew development cart & made the PC-side software reject commercial games they would make people like me happy & have a stronger case against flash carts, but that would be very un-Nintendo-like.
Flash 7 & Gnash are great when they work, but my current physics class requires using Flash 8 or greater for homework. That rules out both Flash 7 & Gnash, which necessitates walking to the computing commons (probably a few hundred yards away, not counting intervening buildings & streets) & standing in line to wait for a Windows machine, which is annoying (not to mention the grime that accumulates on public computers).
You assume that audio recordings must be made by people performing a song & therefore likely wanting compensation. It is entirely possible to convert the musical score into a MIDI, render it with a free SoundFont, & then post it on a web site, though I have not seen that done very often (perhaps I have not been looking in the right places).
Either - it is irrelevant (unless one or the other would make the equations more consistent or beautiful or whatever). Unless, of course, X thinks "Oh, no. Not again."
& the German discoverer of time travel decided to use it to free his people, but his successor wanted more, so he went back again, & ultimately, someone killed the inventor of the time machine & the whole mess vanished from history, leaving only the Hitler of whom we know.:)
(Where would that put me, being part German & part Jewish?)
We do not know for certain of that is true (we do not even know for certain if relativity itself is true), so that is the point of the convention - to see if anyone manages to come back, & if so, to find out how (if they will tell us & we can understand, of course).
What if free will is like this: "before" the beginning of time, we made our choices, then the universe unfolded as it did as a result. It looks predestined, but the laws & initial conditions (& any external influences) are actually a result of free will.
Well, certainly, if we saw a huge sign drop from the sky which said "Evolution is false" & was made of some indestructible material, that might be good counterevidence. Seriously, though, evolutionists can always claim that it occurs so rarely that we cannot observe it in our lifetimes, & furthermore, they could claim it only occured in the past (just like creationists claim), if they cannot find any instances of it, so it cannot be falsified.
Evolution makes a claim about how species change over time (that is, they improve according to a fitness function). To disprove this, one must either disprove significant change of species (which would require a *long* time) or that a suitable fitness function exists (which would require testing nearly all possible cases).
Creationism claims everything was created in more or less its present form x years ago (about 6,000 in the Bible). To disprove this, one would need to travel into the past & show that 1. no significant species changes happened & 2. it all was created at some point, not eternally existent.
Simply proving that evolution can occur now would not prove it for the past (although it would support it by Occam's razor), & would certainly not prove that things were not created in almost their present form & evolved slightly from there.
If both sides were honest, we would be having a philosophical debate, not a "scientific" one.
The human mind searches in the form of simultaneous thought paths, with interconnection strength taking the place of natural selection, so claiming that evolution (in general - not any particular implementation) is a mere search does not preclude the intelligence thereof. Neurons just calculate, but they combine to form a brain, which can have an intelligent mind.
I personally am a fundamentalist Christian, & I believe that the principles of evolution applie to thoughts, not to species.
In the mind, thoughts compete with one another, mutate, combine, replicate, are crowded out, etc. This sounds a lot like evolution. Memory would correspond to surviving species if evolution applied to them. Furthermore, these actions give rise to intelligence in our minds. Unless someone can show that the mind does something that evolution supposedly does not do (& is not reducible to a sequenece of such actions), evolution is a form of intelligence.
By contrast, God need not design the world as we think of design. If He is omniscient, He already knows how to make everything & have it work together. All He would have to do is make it.
That said, we cannot show that God exists or not. We cannot even show that the universe did not pop into existence from nothing (with no cause) 1 attosecond ago. Maybe we live in the Matrix...maybe the Matrix is in God's imagination. I know I sometimes imagine universes.
Nothing can be absolutely proven, of course, but 2+2!=5 even if the party says it is.
Slashdot Mirror
On the TI-86, at least, the OS offered the ability to add a keystroke handler hook in assembly. That would make fake memory clearing easy. It could even trap & fake other things like checking the memory screen until a password is entered. I would be surprised if no one has written one yet.
& even on the TI-83+ (or even the TI-81 :)) you can always replace the interrupt routine & trap keys before they reach the OS.
I learned to program in QBASIC a long time ago. I learned many other dialects of BASIC along the way (due to acquiring various old computers), including Visual Basic.
But now I use Haskell for nearly everything & avoid imperative programming whenever possible. I suppose I occasionally use gotos & often use global variables when programming in C, but I only use C if I need to optimize something to death, anyway.
So I guess if I had to recommend languages, I would suggest C for speed-critical code & Haskell for everything else. Mostly, I would suggest having a good development environment set up, including having language & library help readily available.
Aside from the inability even in principle (i.e. even allowing for magic) to perform perfect quantum-level copying (assuming the theory of everything upholds that aspect of quantum theory) & the possible irrelevancy thereof if consciousness is classical, if someone were to copy me while I was unconscious & then destroy the original, I would argue that I would experience waking up in the copied body. Maybe a bit disorienting if it was located somewhere else, but nothing more. Identity of indiscernibles & such.
But if you try it when I am awake, I hope the copy returns the favor.
Since "forever" is often exponential time, the logarithm of forever would indeed make cryptanalysis easy. :)
There is DEBUG 0.95 (not sure if it is related to FreeDOS's debugger), which supports 32-bit opcodes through the Pentium Pro, but only in real mode.
Or N people, if people actually bother trying to decode it.
The need for a separate antivirus makes sense because the virtual machine is running a different operating environment with susceptibility to different viruses. A separate firewall does indeed seem superfluous.
I suppose the GBA Movie Player is not just a flash cart (well, not at all, but it uses CompactFlash for storage), but I got it so I could play media I own (DVDs & NES cartridges) in a more portable manner. (Ever try carrying around a toaster NES with 6 D-cells & a portable TV? It works, but it is too heavy & awkward to be considered portable.) I also got a GB flash cart a while back purely for homebrew stuff.
But yeah, it unfortunately seems most people want them for piracy. Perhaps if Nintendo made an official homebrew development cart & made the PC-side software reject commercial games they would make people like me happy & have a stronger case against flash carts, but that would be very un-Nintendo-like.
Flash 7 & Gnash are great when they work, but my current physics class requires using Flash 8 or greater for homework. That rules out both Flash 7 & Gnash, which necessitates walking to the computing commons (probably a few hundred yards away, not counting intervening buildings & streets) & standing in line to wait for a Windows machine, which is annoying (not to mention the grime that accumulates on public computers).
You assume that audio recordings must be made by people performing a song & therefore likely wanting compensation. It is entirely possible to convert the musical score into a MIDI, render it with a free SoundFont, & then post it on a web site, though I have not seen that done very often (perhaps I have not been looking in the right places).
Either - it is irrelevant (unless one or the other would make the equations more consistent or beautiful or whatever). Unless, of course, X thinks "Oh, no. Not again."
Were that true, it would explain why some people fail at suicide.
& the German discoverer of time travel decided to use it to free his people, but his successor wanted more, so he went back again, & ultimately, someone killed the inventor of the time machine & the whole mess vanished from history, leaving only the Hitler of whom we know. :)
(Where would that put me, being part German & part Jewish?)
We do not know for certain of that is true (we do not even know for certain if relativity itself is true), so that is the point of the convention - to see if anyone manages to come back, & if so, to find out how (if they will tell us & we can understand, of course).
What if free will is like this: "before" the beginning of time, we made our choices, then the universe unfolded as it did as a result. It looks predestined, but the laws & initial conditions (& any external influences) are actually a result of free will.
Well, certainly, if we saw a huge sign drop from the sky which said "Evolution is false" & was made of some indestructible material, that might be good counterevidence. Seriously, though, evolutionists can always claim that it occurs so rarely that we cannot observe it in our lifetimes, & furthermore, they could claim it only occured in the past (just like creationists claim), if they cannot find any instances of it, so it cannot be falsified. Evolution makes a claim about how species change over time (that is, they improve according to a fitness function). To disprove this, one must either disprove significant change of species (which would require a *long* time) or that a suitable fitness function exists (which would require testing nearly all possible cases). Creationism claims everything was created in more or less its present form x years ago (about 6,000 in the Bible). To disprove this, one would need to travel into the past & show that 1. no significant species changes happened & 2. it all was created at some point, not eternally existent. Simply proving that evolution can occur now would not prove it for the past (although it would support it by Occam's razor), & would certainly not prove that things were not created in almost their present form & evolved slightly from there. If both sides were honest, we would be having a philosophical debate, not a "scientific" one.
The human mind searches in the form of simultaneous thought paths, with interconnection strength taking the place of natural selection, so claiming that evolution (in general - not any particular implementation) is a mere search does not preclude the intelligence thereof. Neurons just calculate, but they combine to form a brain, which can have an intelligent mind.
I personally am a fundamentalist Christian, & I believe that the principles of evolution applie to thoughts, not to species. In the mind, thoughts compete with one another, mutate, combine, replicate, are crowded out, etc. This sounds a lot like evolution. Memory would correspond to surviving species if evolution applied to them. Furthermore, these actions give rise to intelligence in our minds. Unless someone can show that the mind does something that evolution supposedly does not do (& is not reducible to a sequenece of such actions), evolution is a form of intelligence. By contrast, God need not design the world as we think of design. If He is omniscient, He already knows how to make everything & have it work together. All He would have to do is make it. That said, we cannot show that God exists or not. We cannot even show that the universe did not pop into existence from nothing (with no cause) 1 attosecond ago. Maybe we live in the Matrix...maybe the Matrix is in God's imagination. I know I sometimes imagine universes. Nothing can be absolutely proven, of course, but 2+2!=5 even if the party says it is.