No, Windows 8 is not new. It's a touch oriented GUI on top of a boring old OS. It's not even better than the OS it is intended to replace.
New would be something completely different, like an implant or holographic projector, or a redefining of the cell phone, like cigar-sized device that uncurls into a full screen phone, and unscrolls even further into a mini iPad sized device.
we'll have to chalk this all up to intellectual curiosity. Apparently that's a category that's now considered frivolous on Slashdot.
Sorry, but the whole gist of TFA is saying "What J.K.Rowling should have done" when clearly he has no business telling a billionaire what she should actually be doing, especially when it's in regard to her chosen profession that actually made her a billion dollars in the first place. At some point the hubris sticks in the craw, and it no longer matters if the ideas originated from scientific curiosity or an undernourished ego.
Had he been criticizing her for publishing an e-book on privacy that had a built-in tracking javascript, then he at least would have been in his element. But this was just ridiculous.
That would have been true if we hadn't discovered that 'The Cloud' has an open back door for the NSA.
I was just watching my FutureVision screen, and saw the world busily yawning at last week's news about the NSA, and wishing Congressman Mr. Paranoid Nutjob would shut up about it already. Oh, look, the Royal Baby and Jennifer Aniston are on America's Dancing with the Next Talented Idol!
The average consumer simply won't care if the NSA is reading their kid's Word documents for school, just as long as they don't have to back up their damn computer anymore.
Microsoft's last big consumer-facing moneymaker is Office. But Office n is suffering from a huge competitor, and that is Office n-1. Nobody who owns Office 2010 would spend extra to get Office 2014, because there isn't a single feature they need to make it better than it is. They truly have released a very good product. And now they can't sell upgraded versions anymore, because they've run out of improvements that could possibly make a difference.
Except one. Computer management. Consumers are truly tired of the hassles of backing up disks, losing files, can't share because I left it at home, viruses, or buying a new computer because the old one's full. In the minds of homeowners and small business owners, computers suck.
Microsoft's answer is they've gone all-in on Office365. Office365 lets you rent the software and storage in the cloud, and get at it everywhere. The hassles of actually owning the software are theoretically gone.
And Microsoft? They are now the proud owners of a giant, giant cloud, and all the business they hope it will bring. And this is about the smartest bet they could make, because they really are out of options. Not only does this give them a continual stream of money, but if they lose the desktop to Apple and tablets, they can still be everyone's Office provider, even if they're on an iPad or Android phone.
The cost doesn't matter because they were trying to enter a new but very established market. Anyone with a spare $700 already has an iPad.
The only logical way to enter the market would be to buy their way in: giving away the hardware and hoping to make it up on MS App Store sales. They could have given RTs to schools full of children, sold them in phone kiosks at the mall for $50, stuffed them free in cereal boxes. Giving away a billion dollars worth of hardware is the only approach that would have made an impact.
The real crime against Microsoft's shareholders is there was already sufficient evidence that there was no room in the market for a fourth player. Look at the Nook: it's pretty much the same as a Kindle Fire HD, and it's even priced competitively. It's priced well below the iPad mini. Yet Barney Snowball is completely tanking as a result of its failure. Who at Microsoft could have believed that adding "me three" to B&N's "me too" was ever going to work?
If Microsoft wants to be a leader again, they've got to get in front of a trend, not follow it for four years then release a clone. They also have to stop swallowing their own bullshit and stop believing "ours will have the coolest software." Even if they did have the coolest software, it doesn't matter. Nobody with a wallet gives a damn. Consumers have proven they want "new", not "better".
Exactly. What good does it do J. Random Writer to know he writes books with an average review rating of 73.8 while J.K.Rowling's average is rated 62.5? Does he think anyone is going to buy his book because it's reviewed 11.3 better? Is Amazon going to push his book to the top of the advertising pile because it's 73.8? No, Amazon is going to push J.K.Rowling's book to the top of the pile because people are buying it.
I mean people are buying 50 Shades of Taupe, and from what I understand the book is full of typos and hackneyed writing, and might score about a 16 when compared to anything by JKR. But the only review that counts is the one the customer opens his wallet for, and money is the scoring token. It might be too bad that we're not a more enlightened society, but that's pretty much the whole game as it's played today, right there.
And how do we know what effort it takes to deal with each of these false positives? I didn't say that's where a human had to get involved.
But if a human does have to investigate, you quickly winnow down the results by selecting a maximum set size. If could only afford 20 hours of investigation, you'd rank them in order and put an hour of manpower on each of the top 20. If you were working a more public case, you'd set the slider to the top 100, or maybe even all 10,000, if the president is asking you to find the Boston bomber. Dealing with cost and finite budgets is easy to accomplish, even if it's unsatisfying to be so constrained.
The thing about an investigation is that you really can have a difficult time starting it. But if you knew the bomb components included a plastic radio case from a Toshiba radio, Samsonite luggage, and a fragment of clothing that came from a gift shop in Malta*, you've got a lot of people you can eliminate from the beginning. Who's traveled to Malta recently? Can you cross check that with people who live in Boston? What about phone calls between Malta and Boston ? Can you tie those to people who Skype to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Chechnya, or some other Al Qiada hot spot?
If you only look at a short list of the usual suspects, you'll likely miss these connections. If you look at the records of 300 million people, though, these kinds of patterns can emerge. You could afford to let a computer sift through a detailed accounting of the phone records of 10,000 of them, no sweat.
* Actual clues that came from the Lockerbie bombing investigation.
A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling probably won't have much effect on the NSA.
No, but it might have a more direct and beneficial effect on New Jersey citizens. So far, the NSA isn't in the habit of pounding down doors at dark o'clock themselves, and they have been leaving the police work of tracking down criminals to the local police forces. This just ensures the police are following the rules.
The other good thing about this is that any police work done that follows procedures and obtains these warrants will not be challenged in court.
A buddy of mine has had a couple of occasions to see his criminal record. At the time, he was concerned because he had some "youthful indiscretions" that the judge ordered were to be expunged when he became an adult, and if they had come to light they probably would not have improved the situation he was in at the time.
Apparently, expunging meant taking his manila folder and sealing it shut with actual red tape that had the word "EXPUNGED" printed on it.
"Young man, this will go down on your permanent record!" - truer words were never spoken.
TFA mentions two books, The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Dulles, and Spycraft, by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, which talk about the gadgetry in use by the CIA. They're both very good reads, but Spycraft is definitely the fun book of the two. For a more adventurous history that's written by a professional screenwriter, Leo Marks wrote Between Silk and Cyanide, which is a very Bond-like description of work in the SOE during WWII. The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception, also by Melton and Wallace, talks about learning tradecraft from a professional stage magician, where they learned how to perfect the unseen brush pass, dead drops, poison in the champagne glasses, and all of that kind of spy sleight of hand. A fascinating book.
If you want to see what the Soviets were up to during this time, I recommend reading it from their own historical documents in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin was the Senior Archivist for the KGB in the 1980s, and copied many of their records against intentional destruction. In it, he documents all kinds of operations, including the secret caches scattered around the United States (booby trapped, of course), radio caches in Berne and Rome, and bugging operations everywhere.
And to cross reference the Soviet files, the book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, has the stories from much of the decoded information the Americans gleaned by cracking the Soviet "one-time-pad" encryption system in use in the late 1940s. This information provided the basis for much of the attention of the FBI as they were hunting for communists through the '50s and beyond; including the Soviet's own documents detailing the Rosenbergs' and Greenglass' involvement in giving the atomic bomb secrets to Russia.
If I take the "single strand" mentioned in TFS very literally, then it is indeed a single strand without amplification.
(Unless you can amplify light on a single strand, without ever breaking it into two or more strands.)
Aha. I went to the Alcatel Lucent site and read The Fine Press Release where the actual truth* was published.
Paris, July 16, 2013 — Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) has broken a new record for the amount of data that can be transmitted over transoceanic distances on a single optical fiber.
In a test carried out at Alcatel-Lucent’s Innovation City campus in Villarceaux near Paris, researchers from Bell Labs successfully sent data at speeds of 31 Terabits-per-second (Tbps) over 7200km – a capacity exceeding that of the most advanced commercial undersea cables today by a factor of three. This was achieved with a span - the distance between amplifiers maintaining the entire length - of 100km.
The researchers were able to achieve the highest-ever capacity for undersea data transmission on a single fiber.
So there we have at least a few facts from the source. Yes, they used repeaters in a typical undersea configuration. No, they didn't say if these repeaters were the existing erbium doped optical amplifiers or if they used some other novel technology that would require either laying new cables or dredging up the old ones and splicing in new repeaters.
* If you can accept the concept of 'Truth' in a press release.
It's an average, and may not be accurate for you. Do you really know all the associates of all of your associates? Any of them military? Any of them move to New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville? Any of them know your local mayor?
Some surprising people know other surprising people. I was amazed to learn I was 3 degrees from President Reagan, but then determined most people were either 3 or 4, since he stood at a nexus of Hollywood, the military, and politics.
And if it produces 10,000 false positives to yield one valuable lead, how does that impact you? It's not like that turns into 10,000 knocks on 10,000 doors by 10,000 special agents. It gives them more trails to follow.
Not trying to defend the program in any way, just pointing out that at a certain point in the process mistakes cost very little. It may be no more consequential than typing a million lines of code and needing to use the backspace key 10,000 times.
Do you think all the big-boys are going to tear up their existing long haul fiber and undersea trunks and replace it with something new? It'll never happen. These stories pop up on/. with disturbing periodicity and I've become immune to them.
What part of the story said they needed to tear up the existing fiber, or even lay new fiber? Sure, they would need to add new gear at the terminals, but that's cheap in comparison to laying cable.
And even if they did have to lay new cable, for this kind of bandwidth I imagine they'd have already begun planning it. The more you carry, the more money arrives.
As far as I know, the police are legally prohibited from using many of those kinds of tools.
I'm setting the wayback machine for more years than I should, but I recall being told they used to do exactly this at the toll booths. You'd get a toll slip stating the time when you entered the turnpike, you'd drive the road, then when you paid your toll, the cashier would look at the timestamp. If you arrived before it could have been possible had you been following the posted speed limit, a nearby cop walked up to the booth and you were handed a speeding ticket. As you approached a tollbooth at the end of a long stretch of a turnpike, it was apparently common to see cars parked on the side of the road, waiting for the clock to run down so they wouldn't get a ticket.
Eventually it was contested in court, and it was determined that because the police officer didn't actually witness you at the time you took the toll slip as well as the time you turned it in, he had no proof you were the driver during the time when the speeding event occurred so the ticket was invalid. For a similar reason, the old "ribbon radar" speed traps that local police used to set in small towns were contested and ultimately thrown out. I think these practices were ended sometime in the 1960s.
And what was wrong with the committee awarding Peace Prizes to Kissinger and Arafat? Kissinger negotiated the ceasefire in Vietnam, and pulled our troops out. Vietnam is a far more peaceful place now than it was before Kissinger signed the agreement. It maybe didn't work out so well for the "American interests" in the region, but when you look at those interests, we were only there because of the fear of the commies and the "domino effect". Those were really crappy reasons to enter someone else's civil war. Arafat had to do some serious wheeling and dealing within his own organizations and gave up a lot just to get permission to go to Oslo with Rabin, and the resultant accords were a huge step toward peace.
Maybe none of these efforts has ever created a permanent lasting land of happy peace-loving unicorns full of good will hugs, but the world isn't that kind of place. But we do know it was made better for many people due to their efforts.
However I completely agree with you that Obama was awarded it merely for being elected, kind of like a kid getting a trophy for attending baseball practice. I agree that giving it to him did nothing to hold up the reputation of the award. But it still shouldn't diminish Carter's accomplishments any.
If you set your wayback machine to when he took office, keep in mind that the country was still reeling from the Watergate scandal, and we were all pretty damn sick and disgusted with all of the politicians in D.C. It would have been almost impossible for anyone to get anything major accomplished in that environment.
Yes, he is certainly more of a "doer" than a "leader", and I'm not sure he would ever make a great president. But he sure as hell would be better than Obama or Bush, both of whom seem cut from the same tarp used to cover up Washington's dirt.
Are you a troll, or just completely unaware of what takes place on this planet?
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Price for his efforts at various hot spots around the world, including Palestine, Cuba, Korea, Egypt, Ireland, Haiti, Venezuela, and the Sudan (and I'm sure I'm missing some others.) He's poured himself into Habitat for Humanity. He created the Carter Center, which works for human rights around the world, peace, and is even fighting preventable diseases.
While he may have not accomplished much of note while in office, Carter has far and away been the most active, most influential, and best ex-president this country's ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Windows 8 is not new. It's a touch oriented GUI on top of a boring old OS. It's not even better than the OS it is intended to replace.
New would be something completely different, like an implant or holographic projector, or a redefining of the cell phone, like cigar-sized device that uncurls into a full screen phone, and unscrolls even further into a mini iPad sized device.
we'll have to chalk this all up to intellectual curiosity. Apparently that's a category that's now considered frivolous on Slashdot.
Sorry, but the whole gist of TFA is saying "What J.K.Rowling should have done" when clearly he has no business telling a billionaire what she should actually be doing, especially when it's in regard to her chosen profession that actually made her a billion dollars in the first place. At some point the hubris sticks in the craw, and it no longer matters if the ideas originated from scientific curiosity or an undernourished ego.
Had he been criticizing her for publishing an e-book on privacy that had a built-in tracking javascript, then he at least would have been in his element. But this was just ridiculous.
That would have been true if we hadn't discovered that 'The Cloud' has an open back door for the NSA.
I was just watching my FutureVision screen, and saw the world busily yawning at last week's news about the NSA, and wishing Congressman Mr. Paranoid Nutjob would shut up about it already. Oh, look, the Royal Baby and Jennifer Aniston are on America's Dancing with the Next Talented Idol!
The average consumer simply won't care if the NSA is reading their kid's Word documents for school, just as long as they don't have to back up their damn computer anymore.
Microsoft's last big consumer-facing moneymaker is Office. But Office n is suffering from a huge competitor, and that is Office n-1. Nobody who owns Office 2010 would spend extra to get Office 2014, because there isn't a single feature they need to make it better than it is. They truly have released a very good product. And now they can't sell upgraded versions anymore, because they've run out of improvements that could possibly make a difference.
Except one. Computer management. Consumers are truly tired of the hassles of backing up disks, losing files, can't share because I left it at home, viruses, or buying a new computer because the old one's full. In the minds of homeowners and small business owners, computers suck.
Microsoft's answer is they've gone all-in on Office365. Office365 lets you rent the software and storage in the cloud, and get at it everywhere. The hassles of actually owning the software are theoretically gone.
And Microsoft? They are now the proud owners of a giant, giant cloud, and all the business they hope it will bring. And this is about the smartest bet they could make, because they really are out of options. Not only does this give them a continual stream of money, but if they lose the desktop to Apple and tablets, they can still be everyone's Office provider, even if they're on an iPad or Android phone.
The cost doesn't matter because they were trying to enter a new but very established market. Anyone with a spare $700 already has an iPad.
The only logical way to enter the market would be to buy their way in: giving away the hardware and hoping to make it up on MS App Store sales. They could have given RTs to schools full of children, sold them in phone kiosks at the mall for $50, stuffed them free in cereal boxes. Giving away a billion dollars worth of hardware is the only approach that would have made an impact.
The real crime against Microsoft's shareholders is there was already sufficient evidence that there was no room in the market for a fourth player. Look at the Nook: it's pretty much the same as a Kindle Fire HD, and it's even priced competitively. It's priced well below the iPad mini. Yet Barney Snowball is completely tanking as a result of its failure. Who at Microsoft could have believed that adding "me three" to B&N's "me too" was ever going to work?
If Microsoft wants to be a leader again, they've got to get in front of a trend, not follow it for four years then release a clone. They also have to stop swallowing their own bullshit and stop believing "ours will have the coolest software." Even if they did have the coolest software, it doesn't matter. Nobody with a wallet gives a damn. Consumers have proven they want "new", not "better".
Exactly. What good does it do J. Random Writer to know he writes books with an average review rating of 73.8 while J.K.Rowling's average is rated 62.5? Does he think anyone is going to buy his book because it's reviewed 11.3 better? Is Amazon going to push his book to the top of the advertising pile because it's 73.8? No, Amazon is going to push J.K.Rowling's book to the top of the pile because people are buying it.
I mean people are buying 50 Shades of Taupe, and from what I understand the book is full of typos and hackneyed writing, and might score about a 16 when compared to anything by JKR. But the only review that counts is the one the customer opens his wallet for, and money is the scoring token. It might be too bad that we're not a more enlightened society, but that's pretty much the whole game as it's played today, right there.
And how do we know what effort it takes to deal with each of these false positives? I didn't say that's where a human had to get involved.
But if a human does have to investigate, you quickly winnow down the results by selecting a maximum set size. If could only afford 20 hours of investigation, you'd rank them in order and put an hour of manpower on each of the top 20. If you were working a more public case, you'd set the slider to the top 100, or maybe even all 10,000, if the president is asking you to find the Boston bomber. Dealing with cost and finite budgets is easy to accomplish, even if it's unsatisfying to be so constrained.
The thing about an investigation is that you really can have a difficult time starting it. But if you knew the bomb components included a plastic radio case from a Toshiba radio, Samsonite luggage, and a fragment of clothing that came from a gift shop in Malta*, you've got a lot of people you can eliminate from the beginning. Who's traveled to Malta recently? Can you cross check that with people who live in Boston? What about phone calls between Malta and Boston ? Can you tie those to people who Skype to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Chechnya, or some other Al Qiada hot spot?
If you only look at a short list of the usual suspects, you'll likely miss these connections. If you look at the records of 300 million people, though, these kinds of patterns can emerge. You could afford to let a computer sift through a detailed accounting of the phone records of 10,000 of them, no sweat.
* Actual clues that came from the Lockerbie bombing investigation.
If the Queen goes to visit the Royal Baby and abdicates the throne to become a full time grandmother, Charles will reign in her stead.
A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling probably won't have much effect on the NSA.
No, but it might have a more direct and beneficial effect on New Jersey citizens. So far, the NSA isn't in the habit of pounding down doors at dark o'clock themselves, and they have been leaving the police work of tracking down criminals to the local police forces. This just ensures the police are following the rules.
The other good thing about this is that any police work done that follows procedures and obtains these warrants will not be challenged in court.
A buddy of mine has had a couple of occasions to see his criminal record. At the time, he was concerned because he had some "youthful indiscretions" that the judge ordered were to be expunged when he became an adult, and if they had come to light they probably would not have improved the situation he was in at the time.
Apparently, expunging meant taking his manila folder and sealing it shut with actual red tape that had the word "EXPUNGED" printed on it.
"Young man, this will go down on your permanent record!" - truer words were never spoken.
Stop trying to rein us in.
Thank you! That is the first time this month anyone on slashdot has correctly spelled the phrase "rein in".
TFA mentions two books, The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Dulles, and Spycraft, by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, which talk about the gadgetry in use by the CIA. They're both very good reads, but Spycraft is definitely the fun book of the two. For a more adventurous history that's written by a professional screenwriter, Leo Marks wrote Between Silk and Cyanide, which is a very Bond-like description of work in the SOE during WWII. The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception, also by Melton and Wallace, talks about learning tradecraft from a professional stage magician, where they learned how to perfect the unseen brush pass, dead drops, poison in the champagne glasses, and all of that kind of spy sleight of hand. A fascinating book.
If you want to see what the Soviets were up to during this time, I recommend reading it from their own historical documents in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin was the Senior Archivist for the KGB in the 1980s, and copied many of their records against intentional destruction. In it, he documents all kinds of operations, including the secret caches scattered around the United States (booby trapped, of course), radio caches in Berne and Rome, and bugging operations everywhere.
And to cross reference the Soviet files, the book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, has the stories from much of the decoded information the Americans gleaned by cracking the Soviet "one-time-pad" encryption system in use in the late 1940s. This information provided the basis for much of the attention of the FBI as they were hunting for communists through the '50s and beyond; including the Soviet's own documents detailing the Rosenbergs' and Greenglass' involvement in giving the atomic bomb secrets to Russia.
If I take the "single strand" mentioned in TFS very literally, then it is indeed a single strand without amplification.
(Unless you can amplify light on a single strand, without ever breaking it into two or more strands.)
Aha. I went to the Alcatel Lucent site and read The Fine Press Release where the actual truth* was published.
So there we have at least a few facts from the source. Yes, they used repeaters in a typical undersea configuration. No, they didn't say if these repeaters were the existing erbium doped optical amplifiers or if they used some other novel technology that would require either laying new cables or dredging up the old ones and splicing in new repeaters.
* If you can accept the concept of 'Truth' in a press release.
Ok, lets take your way.....
Someone updated the paypal software. And it affected EXACTLY one person.
Right. Dismissed.
Maybe the guy's name is Little Bobby Tables. That'll teach you to sanitize your PayPal names.
It's an average, and may not be accurate for you. Do you really know all the associates of all of your associates? Any of them military? Any of them move to New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville? Any of them know your local mayor?
Some surprising people know other surprising people. I was amazed to learn I was 3 degrees from President Reagan, but then determined most people were either 3 or 4, since he stood at a nexus of Hollywood, the military, and politics.
We must overthrow Kevin Bacon to ensure access to his oil
But first we got to get rid of these giant snake things in the desert.
And if it produces 10,000 false positives to yield one valuable lead, how does that impact you? It's not like that turns into 10,000 knocks on 10,000 doors by 10,000 special agents. It gives them more trails to follow.
Not trying to defend the program in any way, just pointing out that at a certain point in the process mistakes cost very little. It may be no more consequential than typing a million lines of code and needing to use the backspace key 10,000 times.
Do you think all the big-boys are going to tear up their existing long haul fiber and undersea trunks and replace it with something new? It'll never happen. These stories pop up on /. with disturbing periodicity and I've become immune to them.
What part of the story said they needed to tear up the existing fiber, or even lay new fiber? Sure, they would need to add new gear at the terminals, but that's cheap in comparison to laying cable.
And even if they did have to lay new cable, for this kind of bandwidth I imagine they'd have already begun planning it. The more you carry, the more money arrives.
That being said, do I HAVE to provide 12VDC? what about 6V from my old BUG? 24V from my truck? 110AC from my inverter? 220 from my other inverter?
I think you should provide 15 kV from a neon transformer, and see how well their circuitry likes being overclocked.
As far as I know, the police are legally prohibited from using many of those kinds of tools.
I'm setting the wayback machine for more years than I should, but I recall being told they used to do exactly this at the toll booths. You'd get a toll slip stating the time when you entered the turnpike, you'd drive the road, then when you paid your toll, the cashier would look at the timestamp. If you arrived before it could have been possible had you been following the posted speed limit, a nearby cop walked up to the booth and you were handed a speeding ticket. As you approached a tollbooth at the end of a long stretch of a turnpike, it was apparently common to see cars parked on the side of the road, waiting for the clock to run down so they wouldn't get a ticket.
Eventually it was contested in court, and it was determined that because the police officer didn't actually witness you at the time you took the toll slip as well as the time you turned it in, he had no proof you were the driver during the time when the speeding event occurred so the ticket was invalid. For a similar reason, the old "ribbon radar" speed traps that local police used to set in small towns were contested and ultimately thrown out. I think these practices were ended sometime in the 1960s.
> most influential
I don't know about that. After all, if it wasn't for Nixon the press wouldn't be able to append "gate" to every perceived transgression.
Nixon engineered "Watergate" while he was in office. I said Carter was the most influential ex- president.
And what was wrong with the committee awarding Peace Prizes to Kissinger and Arafat? Kissinger negotiated the ceasefire in Vietnam, and pulled our troops out. Vietnam is a far more peaceful place now than it was before Kissinger signed the agreement. It maybe didn't work out so well for the "American interests" in the region, but when you look at those interests, we were only there because of the fear of the commies and the "domino effect". Those were really crappy reasons to enter someone else's civil war. Arafat had to do some serious wheeling and dealing within his own organizations and gave up a lot just to get permission to go to Oslo with Rabin, and the resultant accords were a huge step toward peace.
Maybe none of these efforts has ever created a permanent lasting land of happy peace-loving unicorns full of good will hugs, but the world isn't that kind of place. But we do know it was made better for many people due to their efforts.
However I completely agree with you that Obama was awarded it merely for being elected, kind of like a kid getting a trophy for attending baseball practice. I agree that giving it to him did nothing to hold up the reputation of the award. But it still shouldn't diminish Carter's accomplishments any.
Or you could hang one of those license plate covers like they do at the Japanese "love hotels".
If you set your wayback machine to when he took office, keep in mind that the country was still reeling from the Watergate scandal, and we were all pretty damn sick and disgusted with all of the politicians in D.C. It would have been almost impossible for anyone to get anything major accomplished in that environment.
Yes, he is certainly more of a "doer" than a "leader", and I'm not sure he would ever make a great president. But he sure as hell would be better than Obama or Bush, both of whom seem cut from the same tarp used to cover up Washington's dirt.
Are you a troll, or just completely unaware of what takes place on this planet?
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Price for his efforts at various hot spots around the world, including Palestine, Cuba, Korea, Egypt, Ireland, Haiti, Venezuela, and the Sudan (and I'm sure I'm missing some others.) He's poured himself into Habitat for Humanity. He created the Carter Center, which works for human rights around the world, peace, and is even fighting preventable diseases.
While he may have not accomplished much of note while in office, Carter has far and away been the most active, most influential, and best ex-president this country's ever seen.