I just checked his history and you're right. I could have sworn he'd been modded "Score 4: Insightful" when I wrote my post. Ah well, appreciate the support nonetheless.
What do you mean no presence? And why would you focus on the virtual goods or currency itself? Why ignore the context?
Would you tell thousands of players of MMOs that their sense of fair play is misguided because players that use gold farming services and items bought with "real" currency don't have a "presence" in the real world?
What about how these gold farming services are provided? Does anyone actually know how its done? How do we know there isn't some sort of sweatshop set-up in some neighbourhood in Guangdong where the "farmers" toil at a desk with no worker's rights and no health plans of any sort and being paid a pitiful percentage of what's charged?
real money can buy real things
What does "real money" represent? It's a unit representation of our time and labour which we then exchange for goods and services. So just what do you think people going to gold farming services are buying? They are paying for time and labour of course! Just so they don't have to invest their own. How is the time and labour invested to get that certain mount or special weapon in an MMO "not real" in meatspace? Isn't it obvious why honest players are in uproar and how some brat teen doesn't want to work that hard?
As VoidCrow says, if you have a huge surplus of virtual currency, you can sell it for real currency. I'd say that qualifies for presence beyond the game itself. If it didn't, gold farming services wouldn't be profitable. I don't understand why you were modded up at all.
You based a gameplay decision on what you read and not actually finding out for yourself? You went back to WoW over hearsay?
When you bought WAR you got the first 30 days free. What exactly did you do with those 30 days? It is not impossible to grind to level 20 in less than a week. 6 hours of gameplay gets me to level 6 or 7. You can get XP either with PvE, RvR or PvP. The fastest of course is just RvR hence the complaints about scenario camping or warcamping. But that inherently has more to say about players than the game itself. Some players just aren't interested in the lore (which is very good) or sightseeing (The Inevitable City is amazing). 6 hours straight of RvR gets you further than 6 hours of PvE. But it's obvious why: There is no travel time in RvR, you are instantly placed in profitable target central.
WAR is based heavily on DAoC: You should expect the endgame to be the similar but with a GW flavour. It will eventually be a sort of a World Series or Olympics Association of the best guilds pretty much equal in gear and counterpart classes thus winning primarily through superior skill and tactics. You are allowed and encouraged to re-spec your masteries (translation: skill trees) to suit the scenario or RvR or siege. AFAIK it is free to re-spec. In this sense WAR begins to lead more towards an interactive Chess or even table-top wargaming feel. This is why the gear seems bland and very limited in cross-class utility. Mythic was aiming at not letting anyone have ubergear that cheapened skill at a class. I predict they will change this though. Cross-class gear will appear as it is a very successful mechanic (albeit accidental) in WoW having seen WoW Druids using staffs meant for Priests and Mages because Druid staffs were pretty useless.
They are pretty late in the fixing but they have now added tier-wide chat channels in the latest patch. It hasn't done much, I do agree that EA/Mythic messed up this part.
I noticed it didn't know who Veronika Zemanova was so I told CruxLux about her website. Don't worry, no need to thank me. I've probably funneled about 200,000 horny fatbeards in your sites general direction.:)
Unfortunately being AC, you're unlikely to ever come back and read the responses to your post and therefore unlikely to learn anything. But here goes anyway.
You are making two assumptions that show you do not understand evolution enough to competently discuss it.
Firstly I think you're confusing evolution with genesis. Evolution is not a substitute for genesis. Darwin was proposing how species A gets to become species E in response to pressure from the environment i.e. natural selection using fossils that show transitional species B,C and D as evidence. Darwin never came anywhere near proposing where the very first species A came from. That would a different theory, the theory of biogenesis if it was through biological processes or exogenesis which covers the stoic "space seeding" of plant seeds on comets theory or the kooky "we-were-genetically-designed-ape-slaves-for-Assyrian-god-beings" theory and yes just plain vanilla Genesis with capital "G" for your preferred faith story.
In short, as someone else posted, evolution and genesis (or Genesis with a capital "G" if you prefer) are not mutually exclusive. Never has been from the start. Please get that straight.
The other problem is your example. You seem locked into the erroneous idea that evolution is "random". Well the short answer is it isn't. Sure the mutations are random but the selection processes are not. If you are slow, you get eaten. If you are stupid, you get eaten. If you don't have wings, a shell or spines, you get eaten. When you get eaten before you can breed, your traits don't persist. Nothing random about that. You cannot deny that the smartest, fastest or strongest creatures live to breed and have children to pass on those qualities. That at the very least you must be able to grasp.
"OK," you say "I might agree with you so far but that doesn't account for the scrap metal in my basement before it became a single transistor." Actually I can and again, there is nothing random about it and it started from the Big Bang. You know that the Universe has 'handedness' don't you? It has a left and right orientation that seems to go down to the level of molecules. I lack immediate references but I think this goes down to the level of atoms and electrons. Below this at the level of quarks there are 6 flavours. Directions or flavours, this isn't the important thing to grasp. What is important to grasp is that at the level of quarks, regardless of random events, take a snapshot of the Universe, every quark in that snapshot will always have 1 of 6 possible flavours. Just 6. The distribution will be random but there is nothing chaotic about - well - a Venn diagram definitively divided into 6 exclusive sets. Upon these six sets, regardless of possible random distribution (because who knows, certain flavours may favour certain handedness) electrons and atoms will either be left-handed or right-handed. Upon this, organic molecules tend to favour being left-handed. Why? Nobody really knows, its just the way things are under the microscope. Rising up through the scales, I can't help but feel that there isn't anything random about the Universe and its building blocks, but something rather inevitable. The rules are there, such as the four fundamental interactions with at least two results fixed at being left- or right-handedness. It is inevitable for something more complex to result from the interactions of something simple. For all the pieces to be in place at the right time - that may be random as its a matter of distribution over space-time - but the outcome is inevitable because it can only be one of two. It was going to happen somewhere and it happened here.
I use a WRT54GS, the so-called SpeedBoost version. For fear of bricking it, I read lots of forum posts regarding the 54GS knowing it was not the recommended model for installing DD-WRT onto it. Turns out for the production run of the 54GS, certain chips on the 54GS have been made by three different manufacturers, one of them known to get bricked by a DD-WRT flashing. There is no way to check other than to crack the case open and look and I didn't want to do that. I took the risk.
I was lucky. DD-WRT worked on my 54GS and has done so since November 2007. It is worth reading around. There are often little bits of technical information like this that may be the reason your firmware is unstable.
Perhaps the Lily tank was a poor example and I think you've misunderstood me or I've not expressed myself clearly. You've essentially restated my own post in a completely different way. It's quite funny actually.
When I say 'stress' I mean psychological stress not physical stress. A clamouring for stimuli that a brain takes for granted and perhaps even needs in order to function optimally. Probably the best analogue is our immune system that ironically functions sub-optimally and even malfunctions when placed in a hyper-sanitary environment i.e. if you don't let your children play in the dirt, get chicken pox and scrape their knees, they become more likely to develop allergies or auto-immune symptoms. It's been pre-tuned genetically for an expected level of constant assault from the environment and our brains are no different being pre-tuned for an expected level of input.
I'm sure it would be a very odd experience. You wouldn't feel heat, pain, hunger, or even the need to breathe.
I think people suffering from full neck-down paralysis would be perfect for this as, well, since they are essentially cut off from their body, do they still feel hunger? Does low blood sugar in the brain still signal hunger without the vagus nerve included in the feedback circuit? Did Christopher Reeve and others like him still have an instinctive urge to breathe or did it disappear? Is it still possible to experience breathlessness? With all of this, is it possible to go insane if we don't figure out how to fake that kind of stimulus? They are as close to a "brain in a box" as we are going to get to help answer these questions. Should the technology be available one day they would certainly be some of the first adopters. After all, having been isolated from their body and getting used to the 'radio silence', do you give them back all that stimuli with their new cyborg one?
One of the Ghost In The Shell SAC episodes features a scene discussing the psychology of people going partial or full cyborg and the significance of their 'ghost' as part of that mental stability, the need to simulate specific datastreams of biofeedback from a body that doesn't exist. I think it's fascinating for this to show up in an anime when most media I've seen regarding "brain box/cyberbrain transplant" sci-fi never satisfactorily deals with interoception (pain response and sensory information from internal organs) and proprioception (sense of the body in space) as part of our psychology.
Simply putting an unprepared human being in a Lily isolation tank which only affects our classic 5 senses puts people in stress. Sure you can get your TV eyes and microphone ears but how will a brain/mind really function without feedback from a "body".
Probably the best people to study before full cyberbrain transplant are those with paralysis from the neck down. I'm assuming that they lose interoception since its the same nervous system that moves their muscles and they must have extremely limited proprioception i.e. if they can still move their eyes, then visual stimuli is the only thing left to inform the brain about the position of the body. Certainly indivuduals with extreme paralysis will be prone to depression but I've never heard of anyone going insane from it. I could be wrong as it may just be a taboo subject and never published, researched or discussed anywhere.
I have Adblock Plus.
Don't have chatzilla.
Flash plugin is Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124 and that's the only one. Don't have two so try uninstalling..well...uninstall both, browse without it. See how it goes then.
My Java plugin is Java(TM) Platform SE6 U5: Java Plug-in 1.6.0_05 for Netscape Navigator (DLL Helper)
If all else fails, unsintall FF3, download a fresh setup.exe just in case, try again. Still a problem try an alternate non-IE browser. Not much you can do until further patches. You just might be one of the unlucky ones with some obscure difference in your OS or hardware. Hope that helps.
I run FF3 with NoScript, so it blocks everything Flash and everything Javascript by default until whitelisted.
Looking around at all the other replies to your post that might explain why I have yet to crash with FF3.
I did have to Alt-F4/Force Quit FF3 a few times when some heavy Flash-based website was running. One of them happened to be YouTube when I wanted to read a 3,000+ range of comments to a video. YouTube is a very weird website in terms of performance when it comes to displaying a stream of posts greater than 500. Performance turns to cold porridge and my title bar frequently displays the "(program not responding)" string. Its even worse when actually typing to post a comment at the end of such a long stream. Anybody else get this on YouTube? What gives?
This reminds me of something my Dad - who is a veteran in the oil industry, 30+ years - always tells people who ask him how long it'll be before we really run out of oil. They are hoping for an 'insider' answer because of my Dad's position. He tells them: "Well that depends on how much you're willing to pay for it."
His position is that we aren't running out of oil. Not at all. There's at least another 100-200 years of it left at current consumption levels. The real problem is that all the "easy" oil reserves have been tapped. Before we use up all the oil, it's going to get too expensive to get at it.
My main concern with the scarcity of oil is not its use for transpotation or energy generation, but for plastics and related advanced materials. I'm no materials scientist, but I'm personally more concerned about not having the raw materials for advanced plastics than a fuel source. Who knows how badly we may have shot ourselves in the foot when a vital technology can't progress because we lack a naturally-ocurring hydrocarbon for a specific part? Worse, research can't be affordable because no one can afford to pay for the material in the first place!
I think the very first entity to really comprehend what I'm talking about will be the military. It's not just that their jets and tanks can't move, its all their technology from the armour a soldier wears to the plastic bracket in a million dollar weapon system. The military is definitely going to feel the pinch and they'll begin demanding confirmed reserves separate from civilian use and that will spur a lot of good debate.
I never thought I'd read a post from someone who had experienced the same thing as my lecturer so I just had to add his story after reading this. Its one of my favourite anecdotes from uni.
Our lecturer at uni told us a similar story when he was messing around with FPGAs and genetic algorithms. The difference between your resulting chip and his was that there was a direct data path from input to output but there were also apparently superfluous logic loops sitting like happy little islands around the data path.
So like any pragmatic effieciency-oriented engineering type he re-flashed the chip to keep the data path but remove the islands of loop logic. Why waste the energy right? So he plugs back the chip into the test equipment and zip. Nothing happens.
Eventually he figured out that just like in your example some of the logic loops were influencing the data path through induction. But some of the islands of logic loop didn't make sense even with the induction theory. His best guess from crude testing i.e. sticking it in the fridge, thermometers and benchmarking both with and without logic islands, was that the other loops were simply there to generate heat. They were maintaing a minimum optimal working temperature for the entire chip. Fascinating stuff.
Wish you all the best then good sir. It's posts like yours that make/. a daily joy for me.
On topic: I think some earlier posters are right on the money regarding skipping the whole process of expecting someone else to make you a star.
Buy a domain name. Get a good hosting deal with generous download allowances. Build that website, call your friends, write a script, get a digital video camera, play with Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.
My own IRL example: A girl from my high school got featured in the Alumni newlestter 6 months ago that featured her break into TV through the DIY route. She'd done lots of jobs here and there including being a teacher at our high school. After a while she started putting together a documentary on an old man she met in China on her own time. She had only the support of friends, her own energy, time and money but she got it together, entered it in some industry competition of some sort. It got noticed and Discovery Channel Asia picked her up and now she does documentaries for their Asia office for a living.
I'd have to agree with you there. Of the books I have read, Ubik was the least satisfying to finish. Other PKD works are easier to find a personal conclusion to. VALIS reads like a straightforward 70's documentary, a mix of John Updike's S. and RAWilson's Cosmic Trigger. You can't miss what his intent was for the reader.
Still, Ubik got plenty of ideas across to me hence my essay up there.
The company that managed to get the rights to Ubik is the French company Celluloid Dreams. Ignoring all the inevitable inspired frog jokes, this immediately made me more hopeful. French cinema brought us Delicatessen (highly recommended if you haven't seen it), The 5th Element (any fellow Moebius fans here?) and City of Lost Children et al.
You can have a look at their portfolio of which I recognise only two (Son of Rambow and The Magic Flute) and both were determined art-house flicks. Perhaps there is a cinephile on/. who can give us a quick overview of the quality of their portfolio?
Anyway, go ahead and put a tick in the box for "Art House/European production company".
Probably the most important group will be the team comprising the scriptwriters, director, reps from the PKD estate and the prinicipal storyboard artists. They will literally have to make the most amazing comic ever created before a single frame has been filmed.
[SPOILER]
To those who couldn't understand Ubik, it helps if you've read VALIS first and alot about PKD himself, particularly the period of time right after he recovered from being certified insane.
VALIS mixes fictional elements with real life experiences of his own becoming a bizarre self-referential story with one theme being how we take reality, particularly the model we hold of 'reality' in our heads, for granted. PKD noted that while he was apparently insane, he recalled that he never once stopped in mid-thought and assessed that what he was perceiving or thinking was crazy or mad. His perception and thoughts while "mad" were indistinguishable from when he was "sane". He could not point out a boundary separating the period of insanity from sanity. It just didn't exist. There is no built-in internal yardstick despite what a lot of us may believe. Its something you model during the process of living and it gains 'rigidity' upon adulthood. When you've apparently fallen off the edge and broken that yardstick, someone else has to tell you its broken. Someone else has to give you a new yardstick. Someone else has to 'reset it/re-model' for you. In his case it was his doctors. But then, who is checking the doctors' yardsticks aren't broken either? What if they are mad too and no one knows better? The mad healing the mad? This revelation profoundly affected him.
To the gentleman earlier who seemed to have the definitive opinion that Ubik was just a dying man's hallucinations, I can assure you I never felt sure about the ending as it seemed perfectly within PKD's twisted sense of humour for the ending to be just another misleading lie, further compounding that you just can't take what's presented to you for granted. I see Ubik as partly an attempt to share what it was like being insane. Imagine that you are directly involved in the events of the book and that when the book ends - right when you close the back cover - that you are suddenly looking into the kind blue eyes of a distinguished looking man in a white coat congratulating you on your recovery.
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked his history and you're right. I could have sworn he'd been modded "Score 4: Insightful" when I wrote my post. Ah well, appreciate the support nonetheless.
What do you mean no presence? And why would you focus on the virtual goods or currency itself? Why ignore the context?
Would you tell thousands of players of MMOs that their sense of fair play is misguided because players that use gold farming services and items bought with "real" currency don't have a "presence" in the real world?
What about how these gold farming services are provided? Does anyone actually know how its done? How do we know there isn't some sort of sweatshop set-up in some neighbourhood in Guangdong where the "farmers" toil at a desk with no worker's rights and no health plans of any sort and being paid a pitiful percentage of what's charged?
real money can buy real things
What does "real money" represent? It's a unit representation of our time and labour which we then exchange for goods and services. So just what do you think people going to gold farming services are buying? They are paying for time and labour of course! Just so they don't have to invest their own. How is the time and labour invested to get that certain mount or special weapon in an MMO "not real" in meatspace? Isn't it obvious why honest players are in uproar and how some brat teen doesn't want to work that hard?
As VoidCrow says, if you have a huge surplus of virtual currency, you can sell it for real currency. I'd say that qualifies for presence beyond the game itself. If it didn't, gold farming services wouldn't be profitable. I don't understand why you were modded up at all.
No link, just a theory that LucasArts has had a steak driven through the good part of their brain.
Would that be rib-eye or T-bone? Has serious implications on cerebral matter explosive spread patterns you see.
You based a gameplay decision on what you read and not actually finding out for yourself? You went back to WoW over hearsay?
When you bought WAR you got the first 30 days free. What exactly did you do with those 30 days? It is not impossible to grind to level 20 in less than a week. 6 hours of gameplay gets me to level 6 or 7. You can get XP either with PvE, RvR or PvP. The fastest of course is just RvR hence the complaints about scenario camping or warcamping. But that inherently has more to say about players than the game itself. Some players just aren't interested in the lore (which is very good) or sightseeing (The Inevitable City is amazing). 6 hours straight of RvR gets you further than 6 hours of PvE. But it's obvious why: There is no travel time in RvR, you are instantly placed in profitable target central.
WAR is based heavily on DAoC: You should expect the endgame to be the similar but with a GW flavour. It will eventually be a sort of a World Series or Olympics Association of the best guilds pretty much equal in gear and counterpart classes thus winning primarily through superior skill and tactics. You are allowed and encouraged to re-spec your masteries (translation: skill trees) to suit the scenario or RvR or siege. AFAIK it is free to re-spec. In this sense WAR begins to lead more towards an interactive Chess or even table-top wargaming feel. This is why the gear seems bland and very limited in cross-class utility. Mythic was aiming at not letting anyone have ubergear that cheapened skill at a class. I predict they will change this though. Cross-class gear will appear as it is a very successful mechanic (albeit accidental) in WoW having seen WoW Druids using staffs meant for Priests and Mages because Druid staffs were pretty useless.
They are pretty late in the fixing but they have now added tier-wide chat channels in the latest patch. It hasn't done much, I do agree that EA/Mythic messed up this part.
I noticed it didn't know who Veronika Zemanova was so I told CruxLux about her website. Don't worry, no need to thank me. I've probably funneled about 200,000 horny fatbeards in your sites general direction. :)
"When life gives you Lehmans, go make Lehmanade."
/me frantically ducks explosive tomatoes
Unfortunately being AC, you're unlikely to ever come back and read the responses to your post and therefore unlikely to learn anything. But here goes anyway.
You are making two assumptions that show you do not understand evolution enough to competently discuss it.
Firstly I think you're confusing evolution with genesis. Evolution is not a substitute for genesis. Darwin was proposing how species A gets to become species E in response to pressure from the environment i.e. natural selection using fossils that show transitional species B,C and D as evidence. Darwin never came anywhere near proposing where the very first species A came from. That would a different theory, the theory of biogenesis if it was through biological processes or exogenesis which covers the stoic "space seeding" of plant seeds on comets theory or the kooky "we-were-genetically-designed-ape-slaves-for-Assyrian-god-beings" theory and yes just plain vanilla Genesis with capital "G" for your preferred faith story.
In short, as someone else posted, evolution and genesis (or Genesis with a capital "G" if you prefer) are not mutually exclusive. Never has been from the start. Please get that straight.
The other problem is your example. You seem locked into the erroneous idea that evolution is "random". Well the short answer is it isn't. Sure the mutations are random but the selection processes are not. If you are slow, you get eaten. If you are stupid, you get eaten. If you don't have wings, a shell or spines, you get eaten. When you get eaten before you can breed, your traits don't persist. Nothing random about that. You cannot deny that the smartest, fastest or strongest creatures live to breed and have children to pass on those qualities. That at the very least you must be able to grasp.
"OK," you say "I might agree with you so far but that doesn't account for the scrap metal in my basement before it became a single transistor."
Actually I can and again, there is nothing random about it and it started from the Big Bang. You know that the Universe has 'handedness' don't you? It has a left and right orientation that seems to go down to the level of molecules. I lack immediate references but I think this goes down to the level of atoms and electrons. Below this at the level of quarks there are 6 flavours. Directions or flavours, this isn't the important thing to grasp. What is important to grasp is that at the level of quarks, regardless of random events, take a snapshot of the Universe, every quark in that snapshot will always have 1 of 6 possible flavours. Just 6. The distribution will be random but there is nothing chaotic about - well - a Venn diagram definitively divided into 6 exclusive sets. Upon these six sets, regardless of possible random distribution (because who knows, certain flavours may favour certain handedness) electrons and atoms will either be left-handed or right-handed. Upon this, organic molecules tend to favour being left-handed. Why? Nobody really knows, its just the way things are under the microscope. Rising up through the scales, I can't help but feel that there isn't anything random about the Universe and its building blocks, but something rather inevitable. The rules are there, such as the four fundamental interactions with at least two results fixed at being left- or right-handedness. It is inevitable for something more complex to result from the interactions of something simple. For all the pieces to be in place at the right time - that may be random as its a matter of distribution over space-time - but the outcome is inevitable because it can only be one of two. It was going to happen somewhere and it happened here.
I use a WRT54GS, the so-called SpeedBoost version. For fear of bricking it, I read lots of forum posts regarding the 54GS knowing it was not the recommended model for installing DD-WRT onto it. Turns out for the production run of the 54GS, certain chips on the 54GS have been made by three different manufacturers, one of them known to get bricked by a DD-WRT flashing. There is no way to check other than to crack the case open and look and I didn't want to do that. I took the risk.
I was lucky. DD-WRT worked on my 54GS and has done so since November 2007. It is worth reading around. There are often little bits of technical information like this that may be the reason your firmware is unstable.
Perhaps the Lily tank was a poor example and I think you've misunderstood me or I've not expressed myself clearly. You've essentially restated my own post in a completely different way. It's quite funny actually.
When I say 'stress' I mean psychological stress not physical stress. A clamouring for stimuli that a brain takes for granted and perhaps even needs in order to function optimally. Probably the best analogue is our immune system that ironically functions sub-optimally and even malfunctions when placed in a hyper-sanitary environment i.e. if you don't let your children play in the dirt, get chicken pox and scrape their knees, they become more likely to develop allergies or auto-immune symptoms. It's been pre-tuned genetically for an expected level of constant assault from the environment and our brains are no different being pre-tuned for an expected level of input.
I'm sure it would be a very odd experience. You wouldn't feel heat, pain, hunger, or even the need to breathe.
I think people suffering from full neck-down paralysis would be perfect for this as, well, since they are essentially cut off from their body, do they still feel hunger? Does low blood sugar in the brain still signal hunger without the vagus nerve included in the feedback circuit? Did Christopher Reeve and others like him still have an instinctive urge to breathe or did it disappear? Is it still possible to experience breathlessness? With all of this, is it possible to go insane if we don't figure out how to fake that kind of stimulus? They are as close to a "brain in a box" as we are going to get to help answer these questions. Should the technology be available one day they would certainly be some of the first adopters. After all, having been isolated from their body and getting used to the 'radio silence', do you give them back all that stimuli with their new cyborg one?
One of the Ghost In The Shell SAC episodes features a scene discussing the psychology of people going partial or full cyborg and the significance of their 'ghost' as part of that mental stability, the need to simulate specific datastreams of biofeedback from a body that doesn't exist. I think it's fascinating for this to show up in an anime when most media I've seen regarding "brain box/cyberbrain transplant" sci-fi never satisfactorily deals with interoception (pain response and sensory information from internal organs) and proprioception (sense of the body in space) as part of our psychology.
Simply putting an unprepared human being in a Lily isolation tank which only affects our classic 5 senses puts people in stress. Sure you can get your TV eyes and microphone ears but how will a brain/mind really function without feedback from a "body".
Probably the best people to study before full cyberbrain transplant are those with paralysis from the neck down. I'm assuming that they lose interoception since its the same nervous system that moves their muscles and they must have extremely limited proprioception i.e. if they can still move their eyes, then visual stimuli is the only thing left to inform the brain about the position of the body. Certainly indivuduals with extreme paralysis will be prone to depression but I've never heard of anyone going insane from it. I could be wrong as it may just be a taboo subject and never published, researched or discussed anywhere.
I have Adblock Plus.
Don't have chatzilla.
Flash plugin is Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124 and that's the only one. Don't have two so try uninstalling..well...uninstall both, browse without it. See how it goes then.
My Java plugin is Java(TM) Platform SE6 U5: Java Plug-in 1.6.0_05 for Netscape Navigator (DLL Helper)
If all else fails, unsintall FF3, download a fresh setup.exe just in case, try again. Still a problem try an alternate non-IE browser. Not much you can do until further patches. You just might be one of the unlucky ones with some obscure difference in your OS or hardware. Hope that helps.
I run FF3 with NoScript, so it blocks everything Flash and everything Javascript by default until whitelisted.
Looking around at all the other replies to your post that might explain why I have yet to crash with FF3.
I did have to Alt-F4/Force Quit FF3 a few times when some heavy Flash-based website was running. One of them happened to be YouTube when I wanted to read a 3,000+ range of comments to a video. YouTube is a very weird website in terms of performance when it comes to displaying a stream of posts greater than 500. Performance turns to cold porridge and my title bar frequently displays the "(program not responding)" string. Its even worse when actually typing to post a comment at the end of such a long stream. Anybody else get this on YouTube? What gives?
This reminds me of something my Dad - who is a veteran in the oil industry, 30+ years - always tells people who ask him how long it'll be before we really run out of oil. They are hoping for an 'insider' answer because of my Dad's position. He tells them: "Well that depends on how much you're willing to pay for it."
His position is that we aren't running out of oil. Not at all. There's at least another 100-200 years of it left at current consumption levels. The real problem is that all the "easy" oil reserves have been tapped. Before we use up all the oil, it's going to get too expensive to get at it.
My main concern with the scarcity of oil is not its use for transpotation or energy generation, but for plastics and related advanced materials. I'm no materials scientist, but I'm personally more concerned about not having the raw materials for advanced plastics than a fuel source. Who knows how badly we may have shot ourselves in the foot when a vital technology can't progress because we lack a naturally-ocurring hydrocarbon for a specific part? Worse, research can't be affordable because no one can afford to pay for the material in the first place!
I think the very first entity to really comprehend what I'm talking about will be the military. It's not just that their jets and tanks can't move, its all their technology from the armour a soldier wears to the plastic bracket in a million dollar weapon system. The military is definitely going to feel the pinch and they'll begin demanding confirmed reserves separate from civilian use and that will spur a lot of good debate.
I never thought I'd read a post from someone who had experienced the same thing as my lecturer so I just had to add his story after reading this. Its one of my favourite anecdotes from uni.
Our lecturer at uni told us a similar story when he was messing around with FPGAs and genetic algorithms. The difference between your resulting chip and his was that there was a direct data path from input to output but there were also apparently superfluous logic loops sitting like happy little islands around the data path.
So like any pragmatic effieciency-oriented engineering type he re-flashed the chip to keep the data path but remove the islands of loop logic. Why waste the energy right? So he plugs back the chip into the test equipment and zip. Nothing happens.
Eventually he figured out that just like in your example some of the logic loops were influencing the data path through induction. But some of the islands of logic loop didn't make sense even with the induction theory. His best guess from crude testing i.e. sticking it in the fridge, thermometers and benchmarking both with and without logic islands, was that the other loops were simply there to generate heat. They were maintaing a minimum optimal working temperature for the entire chip. Fascinating stuff.
Wish you all the best then good sir. It's posts like yours that make /. a daily joy for me.
On topic: I think some earlier posters are right on the money regarding skipping the whole process of expecting someone else to make you a star.
Buy a domain name. Get a good hosting deal with generous download allowances. Build that website, call your friends, write a script, get a digital video camera, play with Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.
My own IRL example: A girl from my high school got featured in the Alumni newlestter 6 months ago that featured her break into TV through the DIY route. She'd done lots of jobs here and there including being a teacher at our high school. After a while she started putting together a documentary on an old man she met in China on her own time. She had only the support of friends, her own energy, time and money but she got it together, entered it in some industry competition of some sort. It got noticed and Discovery Channel Asia picked her up and now she does documentaries for their Asia office for a living.
I'd have to agree with you there. Of the books I have read, Ubik was the least satisfying to finish. Other PKD works are easier to find a personal conclusion to. VALIS reads like a straightforward 70's documentary, a mix of John Updike's S. and RAWilson's Cosmic Trigger. You can't miss what his intent was for the reader. Still, Ubik got plenty of ideas across to me hence my essay up there.
You can have a look at their portfolio of which I recognise only two (Son of Rambow and The Magic Flute) and both were determined art-house flicks. Perhaps there is a cinephile on /. who can give us a quick overview of the quality of their portfolio?
Anyway, go ahead and put a tick in the box for "Art House/European production company".
Probably the most important group will be the team comprising the scriptwriters, director, reps from the PKD estate and the prinicipal storyboard artists. They will literally have to make the most amazing comic ever created before a single frame has been filmed.
[SPOILER]
To those who couldn't understand Ubik, it helps if you've read VALIS first and alot about PKD himself, particularly the period of time right after he recovered from being certified insane.
VALIS mixes fictional elements with real life experiences of his own becoming a bizarre self-referential story with one theme being how we take reality, particularly the model we hold of 'reality' in our heads, for granted. PKD noted that while he was apparently insane, he recalled that he never once stopped in mid-thought and assessed that what he was perceiving or thinking was crazy or mad. His perception and thoughts while "mad" were indistinguishable from when he was "sane". He could not point out a boundary separating the period of insanity from sanity. It just didn't exist. There is no built-in internal yardstick despite what a lot of us may believe. Its something you model during the process of living and it gains 'rigidity' upon adulthood. When you've apparently fallen off the edge and broken that yardstick, someone else has to tell you its broken. Someone else has to give you a new yardstick. Someone else has to 'reset it/re-model' for you. In his case it was his doctors. But then, who is checking the doctors' yardsticks aren't broken either? What if they are mad too and no one knows better? The mad healing the mad? This revelation profoundly affected him.
To the gentleman earlier who seemed to have the definitive opinion that Ubik was just a dying man's hallucinations, I can assure you I never felt sure about the ending as it seemed perfectly within PKD's twisted sense of humour for the ending to be just another misleading lie, further compounding that you just can't take what's presented to you for granted. I see Ubik as partly an attempt to share what it was like being insane. Imagine that you are directly involved in the events of the book and that when the book ends - right when you close the back cover - that you are suddenly looking into the kind blue eyes of a distinguished looking man in a white coat congratulating you on your recovery.
But that's just my 2 cents.
[END SPOILER]