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He created a multinational project of cooperation between tons of people all over the globe and made a project that has helped change the computer industry and lower costs, making computing more affordable for everyone. Sounds good to me.

That's a lot better than saying you'll do things but not having done them yet.

He'll never win. The prize is very political, and I doubt they would give it to someone who isn't in their group of admired people. As a PR tool, it could be much more valuable to give it to someone else.

Are there better candidates? I'd certainly expect so. But look at the list of winners. While some are obviously good (Doctors Without Borders, The Dalai Llama) others are much more questionable.

This must be a proactive move to force Obama to back up his talk with actual action - there's no other sensible explanation.

Here's a list of all Nobel Peace Prize recipients. http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/peace.html

How many other times has the prize given for wishful thinking or for merely saying the right things? I wonder when Obama will start the Iraq war crimes trials? And, uhm, how many more troops is Obama sending to Afganistan to secure the pipeline route and protect the poppy fields?

Gee, can I nominate the Rothschild family for their efforts to establish an earthly utopia for us all?

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

No intelligent person wants to hear the hate mongering and ignorance festering that is the christian religions.

Someone needs to mod the parent down. That's just flaming, plain and simple. And I'd like to think Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Donald Knuth (suck on that one, computer geeks), Gödel, Cantor, nearly every U.S. president (there has to be at least one that you agree is/was intelligent), W. D. Phillips, and the list goes on and on. I chose those whom most people on Slashdot would undoubtedly consider intelligent men. Additionally, each lived during the 20th century, so they could have easily rejected Christianity without persecution.

I have had the page online for quite some time now, yet am quite surprised to have yet to receive a DMCA notice about. My hosting service hasn't received one either. It's especially surprising considering that the page places in the first page of results at Google for a search for content scrambling system. I get a few referrals from queries for "decss" as well, although the page doesn't rank so highly for it.

Perhaps an explanation for this phenomenon can be found in the following quote from another notorious criminal, which appears prominently on my page:

one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

-- Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail

I have written more recent piece called Practice Civil Disobedience that you may enjoy reading.

Absolutely everybody though, should read Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. I understand that it inspired not only King and Gandhi, but also the Dutch resistance under the Nazis.

It's not long, being just twenty pages or so in dead tree form. Here's a Spanish translation.

It's not hard at all to find in paperback. My local used bookstore had editions from two different publishers that also included Walden for just three bucks apiece.

I read somewhere that Senator Joseph McCarthy, who instigated the infamous "witch trial" hearings by the Senate Committee on Unamerican Activities, was appalled to discover that Civil Disobedience, being considered a classic work of American literature, was standard issue for the libraries that the U.S. government operates around the world, I guess for overseas servicemen. He got all the copies removed.

one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

• Practice Civil Disobedience

Okay. No I wasn't. ;)
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icq:2057699
seumas.com

The fact that the author's book is published by Cambridge Univ. Press tells me that he is no hack.

There are a lot of interesting people like Paul Erdos at the bleeding edge.

My first year physics prof at Tufts U. shared a Nobel Prize for something he worked on in his basement during free time completed unrelated to his main research topics.

Since a lot of great physics is done in the early life of a physicist, it is not surprising that there is a lot of amatuer flavor to it. Many of Einstein's ideas leading to relativity were framed when he was 15 or 16 years old.