Downtown that question can usually be answered with "look 360 degrees around you", and the full circle is only required if you want to make sure you go to the closest...
I'm very much looking forward to the <video> element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux. There's a huge market for flash to do flash games and whatever but I really look forward to watching embedded video without it. I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works". Opera is late to the party here, won't even be in 10.0 initial release:/. Too bad, because for various reasons I like it even better than Firefox...
Or maybe it's the fact that movie playback sucks even if you get it decrypted? Linux got trouble with the menus, the file types, the audio codecs... pretty much the only thing that works easily and well is video decoding - h264 always seems to work great, because it's practicly the same as any other h264 video. Audio on the other hand is full of exotic codecs like DTS-HD Master and TrueHD that just aren't used anywhere else because noone has 10gb to waste on an audio track. It does mostly handle the basic m2ts (bluray) / evo (hddvd) files but that's pieces of the movie, I still haven't seen any one-click "here's the disc image, play film" setup. Not even the quick version without the menus, even at the best of times I have to queue up the parts or join them first.
I should of course note that none of this applies to the typical reencode in MKV format using AC3/DTS, it's only a problem playing the native disc. There are ways of getting it done without booting into windows but I've had to use manual steps using windows-software under WINE to get it over to a format Linux (that is to say, any of mplayer/xine/vlc) handles. Sp yeah BD+ neato, but there's more fundamental problems that need solving first.
In my experience, Linux is usually either very simple or very complicated. Like, you boot a computer and if it autodetects everything then wow is that much easier than Windows. When it doesn't work though, on Windows it's usually a CD/download and next/next/finish away. On Linux there's usually some f-ugly reason it's not in the kernel, almost so my first thought is "can this be solved with an addon card?"
What ends up being the endless timesinks for me though is when I try to use stuff primarily designed for Windows. Like for example all the various forms of embedded video, I hope to god that the HTML5 <video> element takes off bigtime. There's so many other variations apart from flash, and flash itself has been hell to tweak too. And I don't know how often I've messed with kopete/pidgin but they never ever work well with MSN - I get messages yes but offline messages, custom icons, picture sharing and tons of other stuff plain old does not work. I still have to deal with websites that are IE only - fortunately I can do that through a VirtualBox (probably WINE too). In short, Linux is great as long as you can live in the Linux-bubble but the moment you have to interact with the Windows world it's a huge timesink.
I've grown more and more pragmatic with time - instead of fiddling with trying to make stuff work I try to: a) Buy Linux-friendly hardware b) Deal with all stuff Windows through VirtualBox c) Eliminate b) instead of trying to tweak WINE
It's not really the complex apps like Photoshop I miss... it's the really "simple" stuff like browsing the web and chatting with people like a normal person. As an absolute #1 on my hit list would be MSN - please find a way to make an open standard popular (yes, I know of IRC and Jabber - welcome to geekland), it's really not working very well today.
Are we using the reviewer's scale where anything better than notepad is a 4? If so that could actually be a real difference... Anyway, I wasn't aware this company was trying to take on Office so interesting news. A bit of a slashvertisement but it gets very one sided when we get all the OSS releases/raves and nothing else.
So pressplay + 2.5 million dollars of branding = 122 million, but didn't really say how much pressplay was worth to begin with. From what I understand pressplay had among other things very valuable agreements with the music industry, existing customers+++ which probably made them much more valuable than the Napster name.
But your eyes and ears aren't growing exponentially more sensitive. Nothing with more bandwidth than the CD has really caught on, in fact 128kbps MP3S seem to be ok for many and 256kbps AAC enough for almost everyone. Pictures seem to have stabilized in the 5-10MP range for the consumer market - we'd rather have a practical size than huge dSLRs. The only thing really pushing the envelope is HD video, and that too is debatable. Compare a DVD upscale to a well made DVD-size h264 rip from BluRay source - it's incredibly much better without exceeding the size from 15 years ago. BluRay might be to movies what the CD is to audio, but the bluray rips are equal to mp3s.
That, and there's bandwidth. If you have a 10Mbit+ line and can max it, why bother storing it unless you're a pack rat? You're already downloading at faster-than-real time, if only the torrent client had a little sense you could start near-instant play. Just yesterday I was looking at a new fiber provider that was offering up to 250/50 Mbit/s for residential customers. If you know you can get it again, why even bother saving it?
People have always been reinventing the wheel, that is when we haven't had dark ages and lost the wheel in the first place. It just shows the importance of putting knowledge in a context. By all means I'm not saying wikipedia is perfect in content, but the basic idea of hyperlinking up documents to related concepts makes it 1000% user-friendlier than the dead tree encyclopedias I grew up with.
We do have a few books like that too, trying to give a bird's eye view of a topic. I remember using one of those in my master's degree, it was 8-900 pages thick, basicly shortly put a topic in context and listed central works. They referenced literally hundreds of works and basicly told us enough to say whether it was relevant or not for the thesis.
Yes, it's impossible to know the whole width of human knowledge or even within a single field. I think you'd have a helluva time trying to get through the Library of Alexandria, so it's hardly a new thing. But knowing every wheel is different from not finding the one wheel you seek and end up reinventing it. The former is impossible, the latter takes structure.
And there's a cost to overstructuring. You mention IT as an example - yes, but how long does it also take to find a library that does what you want, is it documented properly, is it of good quality, is it still developed so people will fix issues, can you adapt it to your needs, will upstream want your changes, in short reusing the wheel is not free either.
Phobos, by virtue of it's very close orbital distance, would have a shot at actually being recognized by a lay-Martian to be something special in the sky, but it would still appear quite small when compared to the grandeur of Luna.
Since you appear to have inside information, what do the scientific Martians think?
In the US I would probably be earning about $4000 per month.
Just make sure you compare apples to apples, those in the US make more than I do but I really work only 37.5 hours/week (+ half an hour's lunch break) a week, unlike most US jobs where they expect free overtime. And I get five weeks of vacation per year, I don't think any US job has that. Not that it's my impression they get that much more work done, but you do end up stuck in the office much longer.
Why not? All it takes is really some box in an attic noone remembers what is or why it could be important. People have found extremely rare stamps and coins and whatnot before, why not old video tapes? I just wouldn't put money on it...
His argument sounds reasonable on the economic side, because he's hardly the only one wondering what'll happen to investigative journalism. You can see it with planted stories, one online site reports something and it grows exponentially so hundreds of sites and blogs and whatnot paraphrase it and then you got google news pointing you to hundred rehashes of that article. If that's a deep story you've spent plenty money to unfold, it's really hard to recover your costs.
However, from a logical point I don't see it possible - should they then get an exclusive right to that news, like a patent? You really want Fox News to report something, but noone else can present the story with a different twist? What about other media following up on a case reporting 90% the same but with 10% additional content? This would be nothing but legal hell to figure out what news are "your" news and not. All this could do is create media cartels of people not suing each other over their respective news, which would be even worse than all the other alternatives.
Lots of funny ones there, but I think Hannibal Lector did the captions:
The "I've eaten what I study" badge. Recipients have prepared their object of study as a cuisine item for eating. Hopefully, the minority of MDs are ineligible for this one. (J)
Every time the "stable ABI" is brought up, the problem is that proprietary Linux drivers tend to be crap. They simply will not be anywhere near as good as proprietary windows drivers are. The solution is to instead create good classes of devices like for USB you have Human Interface Device (HID), Mass Storage and Video which in Linux is covered by a single driver. Make it to spec and it doesn't matter who makes it, even some Chinese knockoff that's never heard of Linux will work just fine. I would also say that if you're putting together a laptop today an OEM should have no big problem finding only Linux-friendly components.
The standardized version of the C# language is not controlled by Microsoft. It's, you know, standardized. If you're paranoid about MS pulling the rug out from under you in the future, then stick to the ECMA standard, and don't use the latest whiz-bang C# 4.0 features until and unless those become standardized too.
Spoken like a developer. And if I'm a user of some software? Everything is nice and crossplatform, but the primary platform is Windows. They go C# 4.0 and either Linux does too or it gets left in the cold. I get left in the cold. The whole concept is just as stupid as if Linux were to give up on OpenGL and try chasing DirectX instead, or abandon ODF and try chasing OOXML. It's the good old fashioned embrace, extend, extinguish again except Microsoft got us adopting their standards instead of the other way around. That they've managed to fool part of the community only means the community is being naive.
It takes me DAYS to download a 4 GB ISO. (...) On "average" it takes between 4 1/2 and 6 days to download a movie.
Some quick math says that works out to 100kbit/s. I guess noone's disputing that, only that what you have can under no possible definition be considered "broadband". It's less than double ISDN, even - which is what I could get in a city of 150k people back in 1997. I guess the most positive thing I manage to say about your line is that it beats dial-up....
I think he was referring to your use of past tense. A DVD weighs about 16 grams and a USB stick less than 30 grams according to some quick google searches, so that's not an issue. Using one of those padded envelopes (also cheap in bulk) I don't see why you couldn't easily stuff five or ten USB sticks in one either. The thing is still cost, even a cheap 1GB usb stick for a CD+ size release will cost you almost 5$ retail ex. VAT, even if you say 3$ in bulk + cost of adding image it's too much. Plus people might just order to get an USB stick. It's better to have people create a stick from the DVD, for which there's already tools I think.
Long story short, EU does not make law. The EU passes directives, that each member country has to implement their variation of. This is very typically used by lobbyists and others to push unpopular directives to be made on the EU level, for then the national government to throw up their hands and say "we must pass this, it's a directive". For the most part, the general population doesn't learn about it until it's being implemented nationally, and there's a delay in that system. So basicly now in 2009 they're implementing directives passed maybe like 2007, and if you try to protest it's like "the decision's already been made, you should have complained to the EU two years ago". For most people that sounds like a scene from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy where the files have been on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
A good example is the mandatory data storage directive that says everyone must keep logs for 6-24 months of who, what, when and from where you've been communicating on the Internet or on your cell phone. It was passed in the EU around 2006 I think, passed into law in some countries last year and some still haven't. But you can't undo the directive, the national governments can't really say no without getting ESA (no, not the space agency) on their backs. It's a ugly backdoor to the democratic process and the Lisbon treaty isn't really fixing it. There's a vast democratic deficiency in the EU system.
But Norway isn't that extremely free in my opinion. It's a very comfortable nanny state, but that I can't buy a damn beer at 7PM on a saturday is just the tip of that iceberg. Sweden and the Pirate Party is the first ones I've seen to really kick back on the massive surveillance efforts being passed by the EU, thus coming to Norway too because we're the EU's bitch. Denmark has a wonderfully more relaxed attitude to everything, but they're not exactly heading on the barricades. The netherlands has legalized soft drugs and hookers, if that's your idea of freedom.
The vast majority of Norway's population live south of the polar circle, same in Sweden so you won't have all dark days or midnight sun, that's up north where we send the tourists. Of course there's some cities up there like Tromsø with 65k people if you want to be there, but the typical job in Norway is not. Depending on where you're coming from, expect colder winters wtih snow though. Driving in the winter is a skill I see many immigrants struggle with, no you can not just pretend it's summer and expect to accelerate or break in no time. For the most part a good country though, and one of the better things is that if you become citizen of an EU country, you can always change your mind. I can move anywhere in the EU without issue if I think the going is crap. Then again, a lot of the anti-freedom crap is coming from EU....
And be sure to give your co-conspirators legal immunity. Funny how aiding and abetting the government in violating the constitution can be make legal with a rider.
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration. * People wanting to kill each other more efficiently. * Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness.
Yes, because getting the funding to run a huge missile program right after the cuban missile crisis during the height of the cold war was soooooooo about taking money away from "People wanting to kill each other more efficiently." and gicing it to an altruistic aspiration to greatness. Sure, it came in a very nice sales package with a civilian agency and a great morale booster but the reason it passed was that it created lots and lots of high tech research and equipment of military value. If it was about "aspiring to greatness" why would the russians break their back trying to keep up with it? The other two points are timeless classics though. Add "Getting the girl" and you've summed up the reasons for most of humanity's innovation...
Slashdot Mirror
Downtown that question can usually be answered with "look 360 degrees around you", and the full circle is only required if you want to make sure you go to the closest...
(...) but if you read the article you'll see they have a pretty graph, so I think the data is good.
Yes, because a picture lies more than a thousand words or something like that...
I'm very much looking forward to the <video> element - because every other solution tends to suck bigtime under Linux. There's a huge market for flash to do flash games and whatever but I really look forward to watching embedded video without it. I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works". Opera is late to the party here, won't even be in 10.0 initial release :/. Too bad, because for various reasons I like it even better than Firefox...
If rips and reencodes were apples and oranges, guess what you're comparing?
Or maybe it's the fact that movie playback sucks even if you get it decrypted? Linux got trouble with the menus, the file types, the audio codecs... pretty much the only thing that works easily and well is video decoding - h264 always seems to work great, because it's practicly the same as any other h264 video. Audio on the other hand is full of exotic codecs like DTS-HD Master and TrueHD that just aren't used anywhere else because noone has 10gb to waste on an audio track. It does mostly handle the basic m2ts (bluray) / evo (hddvd) files but that's pieces of the movie, I still haven't seen any one-click "here's the disc image, play film" setup. Not even the quick version without the menus, even at the best of times I have to queue up the parts or join them first.
I should of course note that none of this applies to the typical reencode in MKV format using AC3/DTS, it's only a problem playing the native disc. There are ways of getting it done without booting into windows but I've had to use manual steps using windows-software under WINE to get it over to a format Linux (that is to say, any of mplayer/xine/vlc) handles. Sp yeah BD+ neato, but there's more fundamental problems that need solving first.
Once you reach OT level III, it's revealed to be "-1, pro-M$" but it's still shown as troll to the unbelievers.
In my experience, Linux is usually either very simple or very complicated. Like, you boot a computer and if it autodetects everything then wow is that much easier than Windows. When it doesn't work though, on Windows it's usually a CD/download and next/next/finish away. On Linux there's usually some f-ugly reason it's not in the kernel, almost so my first thought is "can this be solved with an addon card?"
What ends up being the endless timesinks for me though is when I try to use stuff primarily designed for Windows. Like for example all the various forms of embedded video, I hope to god that the HTML5 <video> element takes off bigtime. There's so many other variations apart from flash, and flash itself has been hell to tweak too. And I don't know how often I've messed with kopete/pidgin but they never ever work well with MSN - I get messages yes but offline messages, custom icons, picture sharing and tons of other stuff plain old does not work. I still have to deal with websites that are IE only - fortunately I can do that through a VirtualBox (probably WINE too). In short, Linux is great as long as you can live in the Linux-bubble but the moment you have to interact with the Windows world it's a huge timesink.
I've grown more and more pragmatic with time - instead of fiddling with trying to make stuff work I try to:
a) Buy Linux-friendly hardware
b) Deal with all stuff Windows through VirtualBox
c) Eliminate b) instead of trying to tweak WINE
It's not really the complex apps like Photoshop I miss... it's the really "simple" stuff like browsing the web and chatting with people like a normal person. As an absolute #1 on my hit list would be MSN - please find a way to make an open standard popular (yes, I know of IRC and Jabber - welcome to geekland), it's really not working very well today.
Are we using the reviewer's scale where anything better than notepad is a 4? If so that could actually be a real difference... Anyway, I wasn't aware this company was trying to take on Office so interesting news. A bit of a slashvertisement but it gets very one sided when we get all the OSS releases/raves and nothing else.
So pressplay + 2.5 million dollars of branding = 122 million, but didn't really say how much pressplay was worth to begin with. From what I understand pressplay had among other things very valuable agreements with the music industry, existing customers+++ which probably made them much more valuable than the Napster name.
But your eyes and ears aren't growing exponentially more sensitive. Nothing with more bandwidth than the CD has really caught on, in fact 128kbps MP3S seem to be ok for many and 256kbps AAC enough for almost everyone. Pictures seem to have stabilized in the 5-10MP range for the consumer market - we'd rather have a practical size than huge dSLRs. The only thing really pushing the envelope is HD video, and that too is debatable. Compare a DVD upscale to a well made DVD-size h264 rip from BluRay source - it's incredibly much better without exceeding the size from 15 years ago. BluRay might be to movies what the CD is to audio, but the bluray rips are equal to mp3s.
That, and there's bandwidth. If you have a 10Mbit+ line and can max it, why bother storing it unless you're a pack rat? You're already downloading at faster-than-real time, if only the torrent client had a little sense you could start near-instant play. Just yesterday I was looking at a new fiber provider that was offering up to 250/50 Mbit/s for residential customers. If you know you can get it again, why even bother saving it?
People have always been reinventing the wheel, that is when we haven't had dark ages and lost the wheel in the first place. It just shows the importance of putting knowledge in a context. By all means I'm not saying wikipedia is perfect in content, but the basic idea of hyperlinking up documents to related concepts makes it 1000% user-friendlier than the dead tree encyclopedias I grew up with.
We do have a few books like that too, trying to give a bird's eye view of a topic. I remember using one of those in my master's degree, it was 8-900 pages thick, basicly shortly put a topic in context and listed central works. They referenced literally hundreds of works and basicly told us enough to say whether it was relevant or not for the thesis.
Yes, it's impossible to know the whole width of human knowledge or even within a single field. I think you'd have a helluva time trying to get through the Library of Alexandria, so it's hardly a new thing. But knowing every wheel is different from not finding the one wheel you seek and end up reinventing it. The former is impossible, the latter takes structure.
And there's a cost to overstructuring. You mention IT as an example - yes, but how long does it also take to find a library that does what you want, is it documented properly, is it of good quality, is it still developed so people will fix issues, can you adapt it to your needs, will upstream want your changes, in short reusing the wheel is not free either.
Phobos, by virtue of it's very close orbital distance, would have a shot at actually being recognized by a lay-Martian to be something special in the sky, but it would still appear quite small when compared to the grandeur of Luna.
Since you appear to have inside information, what do the scientific Martians think?
In the US I would probably be earning about $4000 per month.
Just make sure you compare apples to apples, those in the US make more than I do but I really work only 37.5 hours/week (+ half an hour's lunch break) a week, unlike most US jobs where they expect free overtime. And I get five weeks of vacation per year, I don't think any US job has that. Not that it's my impression they get that much more work done, but you do end up stuck in the office much longer.
Why not? All it takes is really some box in an attic noone remembers what is or why it could be important. People have found extremely rare stamps and coins and whatnot before, why not old video tapes? I just wouldn't put money on it...
His argument sounds reasonable on the economic side, because he's hardly the only one wondering what'll happen to investigative journalism. You can see it with planted stories, one online site reports something and it grows exponentially so hundreds of sites and blogs and whatnot paraphrase it and then you got google news pointing you to hundred rehashes of that article. If that's a deep story you've spent plenty money to unfold, it's really hard to recover your costs.
However, from a logical point I don't see it possible - should they then get an exclusive right to that news, like a patent? You really want Fox News to report something, but noone else can present the story with a different twist? What about other media following up on a case reporting 90% the same but with 10% additional content? This would be nothing but legal hell to figure out what news are "your" news and not. All this could do is create media cartels of people not suing each other over their respective news, which would be even worse than all the other alternatives.
Lots of funny ones there, but I think Hannibal Lector did the captions:
The "I've eaten what I study" badge.
Recipients have prepared their object of study as a cuisine item for eating. Hopefully, the minority of MDs are ineligible for this one. (J)
Every time the "stable ABI" is brought up, the problem is that proprietary Linux drivers tend to be crap. They simply will not be anywhere near as good as proprietary windows drivers are. The solution is to instead create good classes of devices like for USB you have Human Interface Device (HID), Mass Storage and Video which in Linux is covered by a single driver. Make it to spec and it doesn't matter who makes it, even some Chinese knockoff that's never heard of Linux will work just fine. I would also say that if you're putting together a laptop today an OEM should have no big problem finding only Linux-friendly components.
The standardized version of the C# language is not controlled by Microsoft. It's, you know, standardized. If you're paranoid about MS pulling the rug out from under you in the future, then stick to the ECMA standard, and don't use the latest whiz-bang C# 4.0 features until and unless those become standardized too.
Spoken like a developer. And if I'm a user of some software? Everything is nice and crossplatform, but the primary platform is Windows. They go C# 4.0 and either Linux does too or it gets left in the cold. I get left in the cold. The whole concept is just as stupid as if Linux were to give up on OpenGL and try chasing DirectX instead, or abandon ODF and try chasing OOXML. It's the good old fashioned embrace, extend, extinguish again except Microsoft got us adopting their standards instead of the other way around. That they've managed to fool part of the community only means the community is being naive.
It takes me DAYS to download a 4 GB ISO. (...) On "average" it takes between 4 1/2 and 6 days to download a movie.
Some quick math says that works out to 100kbit/s. I guess noone's disputing that, only that what you have can under no possible definition be considered "broadband". It's less than double ISDN, even - which is what I could get in a city of 150k people back in 1997. I guess the most positive thing I manage to say about your line is that it beats dial-up....
I think he was referring to your use of past tense. A DVD weighs about 16 grams and a USB stick less than 30 grams according to some quick google searches, so that's not an issue. Using one of those padded envelopes (also cheap in bulk) I don't see why you couldn't easily stuff five or ten USB sticks in one either. The thing is still cost, even a cheap 1GB usb stick for a CD+ size release will cost you almost 5$ retail ex. VAT, even if you say 3$ in bulk + cost of adding image it's too much. Plus people might just order to get an USB stick. It's better to have people create a stick from the DVD, for which there's already tools I think.
And since the human brain has a computational power of 100 petaflops at 20 watts, it'd well exceed DARPA's requirements.
Only before you subtract the power used to think about pr0n. Or you can use a female brain, it'll no nuclear on you only once a month.
Long story short, EU does not make law. The EU passes directives, that each member country has to implement their variation of. This is very typically used by lobbyists and others to push unpopular directives to be made on the EU level, for then the national government to throw up their hands and say "we must pass this, it's a directive". For the most part, the general population doesn't learn about it until it's being implemented nationally, and there's a delay in that system. So basicly now in 2009 they're implementing directives passed maybe like 2007, and if you try to protest it's like "the decision's already been made, you should have complained to the EU two years ago". For most people that sounds like a scene from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy where the files have been on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
A good example is the mandatory data storage directive that says everyone must keep logs for 6-24 months of who, what, when and from where you've been communicating on the Internet or on your cell phone. It was passed in the EU around 2006 I think, passed into law in some countries last year and some still haven't. But you can't undo the directive, the national governments can't really say no without getting ESA (no, not the space agency) on their backs. It's a ugly backdoor to the democratic process and the Lisbon treaty isn't really fixing it. There's a vast democratic deficiency in the EU system.
But Norway isn't that extremely free in my opinion. It's a very comfortable nanny state, but that I can't buy a damn beer at 7PM on a saturday is just the tip of that iceberg. Sweden and the Pirate Party is the first ones I've seen to really kick back on the massive surveillance efforts being passed by the EU, thus coming to Norway too because we're the EU's bitch. Denmark has a wonderfully more relaxed attitude to everything, but they're not exactly heading on the barricades. The netherlands has legalized soft drugs and hookers, if that's your idea of freedom.
The vast majority of Norway's population live south of the polar circle, same in Sweden so you won't have all dark days or midnight sun, that's up north where we send the tourists. Of course there's some cities up there like Tromsø with 65k people if you want to be there, but the typical job in Norway is not. Depending on where you're coming from, expect colder winters wtih snow though. Driving in the winter is a skill I see many immigrants struggle with, no you can not just pretend it's summer and expect to accelerate or break in no time. For the most part a good country though, and one of the better things is that if you become citizen of an EU country, you can always change your mind. I can move anywhere in the EU without issue if I think the going is crap. Then again, a lot of the anti-freedom crap is coming from EU....
And be sure to give your co-conspirators legal immunity. Funny how aiding and abetting the government in violating the constitution can be make legal with a rider.
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration.
* People wanting to kill each other more efficiently.
* Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness.
Yes, because getting the funding to run a huge missile program right after the cuban missile crisis during the height of the cold war was soooooooo about taking money away from "People wanting to kill each other more efficiently." and gicing it to an altruistic aspiration to greatness. Sure, it came in a very nice sales package with a civilian agency and a great morale booster but the reason it passed was that it created lots and lots of high tech research and equipment of military value. If it was about "aspiring to greatness" why would the russians break their back trying to keep up with it? The other two points are timeless classics though. Add "Getting the girl" and you've summed up the reasons for most of humanity's innovation...