At least in the UK, this type of activity would probably fall foul of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, especially if well buried in the small print. There is a decent amount of case law prior to this legislation supporting this as well.
Not that that particularly helps you as an individual, since you'd then need to reverse the card transaction, then risk being sued for it and, finally, asserting that the term was unfair and therefore void in your defence case.
There are powers for certain government bodies like the OFT to take more useful action (such as seeking an injunction against the company in question enforcing those terms) though, which may explain why these scams don't seem to have appeared on reputable UK-centric sites yet.
The police have to pay for the storage. Since the amount of online data is constantly increasing, I figure having to lay out funds for that many terrabytes of storage should bankrupt them, and then they can focus on doing the job they *should* be doing (picking up garbage), instead of the one they *want* to be doing (invading privacy without probable cause).
No, they will just further increase your taxes to pay for it. If they're clever, they'll get it paid for by a hypothecated tax on ISPs. This is bad because they then have no incentive to save money. I'd much rather it didn't happen at all, but if it does then the ISPs should pay for it directly as they would then have an incentive to at least control costs, and therefore retain the minimum amount of data neccessary.
If NSA or some other organization had a way to break into your SSH session and they cared to use it against you (with the risk of that info leaking), then you have much larger problems than worrying about if you should leave ssh sessions open or reconnect.
Further, if NSA/whoever really do have a way to break DH or AES then it is highly likely that it would be in the form of some relatively minor weaknesses reducing the effective keyspace combined with big-iron processing capability. It would still them take some time to do - maybe on the order of weeks to months.
Fact is, they'd have a much better chance just trying to hack your box in the first place (or at least they'd probably try this while waiting for the number-crunching). For example, OP is running PuTTY, so on Windows. I would bet good money that the agencies have been through the source for Windows, Internet Explorer etc and have a small pile of zero-day exploits which they can use to install some piece of software which could just silently transmit your key back to them.
Finally a politician who acts like they have a pair, working in government to actually bring the issues faced by the Great British public to light.
Lord Lucas is a Conservative hereditary peer, and a "backbencher" at that - so he is not working in government at all at present and neither is he likely to be even after the election. In many respects this is a shame, because he's one of the few people who have been pointing out some of the other heinous flaws in the Digital Economy Bill (i.e. the parts apart from the copyright regime - the powers it gives the government to take over the UK Domain Name Registry for one).
Actually on the whole the politicians who act most independently tend to be the remaining hereditary peers because they owe their position and therefore "allegiance" to rather fewer people than almost anyone else in government (they are technically elected to sit in the house from amongst all hereditary peers by the existing members of the House of Lords but the pool of candidates is small and once elected they are there until death or, more likely, further reform of the House of Lords occurs).
What about sewers? Much of London's sewer system is more than 150 years old and will last for at least that long again thanks to good engineering and great foresight by the Victorian planners. If we had to rebuild our sewer system every 90 years, we would be spending a great deal more on our water bills than we do at present.
I agree that it should be legalized (pursuit of happiness and all that) but I'm not so sure that I buy the "you can keep much better control over it" line. When I was a kid I had no problems getting my hands on booze or tobacco and both of those products are legal. We always knew which store we could go to that wouldn't card us, which 21+ sibling of a friend would make a straw purchase and whose parents were too lazy to lock up the liquor cabinet.
There's more than one definition of "better control over it". When was the last time you bought alcohol from the store which turned out to be antifreeze? How common is it for one liquor store owner to shoot the owner of the new liquor store which opened down the street because it encroached on his territory? These are both the sorts of things which used to happen during prohibition, and don't now for alcohol, but do for drugs.
It was initially thought that the vaccination would require 2 doses per individual to have a strong enough effect. Once more testing was done and the vaccine was fully developed, it became clear that 1 dose per individual was sufficient.
Hmm. The thing is, in almost all industries where the incentives are sufficient for industrial espionage to be a credible threat, forms of collusion or cartels are almost certainly a greater threat leading to the same outcome.
If you have medical records, state secrets or financial information, then OF COURSE you should be taking these sorts of precautions (and not storing this data on laptops is the first precaution you take). Common thieves stealing bank or credit card details is a credible threat. Journalists paying for the medical records of politically sensitive individuals is a credible threat.
But your competitors paying to steal information on what pricing discounts you offer to your biggest customers? Or where your biggest orders came from? If the customer doesn't tell your competitors directly, you can be 100% certain that the two companies' respective sales forces will chat about it amongst themselves. Same for release timing information.
To use an analogy: People are the "analogue hole" to these sorts of measures' "DRM".
90% users are plainly and loudly annoyed by common access password expire time and complexity requirements. They are simply not intellectually ready to manage encryption of fixed and removable media.
I have complained to my corporate IT-droids about this before. My issue isn't the expiry (90 days is perfectly reasonable), it's the ridiculous policy they enforce which means that about 70% of the RANDOMLY-GENERATED passwords I try to use won't even work. They enforce: (1) At least one of each of: number, upper case, lower case, symbol; (2) No two consecutive characters a repetition; (3) No two consecutive characters may be adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard; and (4) No three or more consecutive characters are allowed to form ANY dictionary word (if you've ever played Scrabble you'll know how many ridiculous 3-letter combinations get caught by this)?).
The net effect of this (aside from the fact that it dramatically reduces the valid search space for brute-forcing) is that once people have a pattern which actually complies with the rules they then WRITE IT DOWN AND PUT IT ON A POST-IT ON THEIR MONITOR and then just increment the digits they invariably put on the end every 90 days. Net result: LESS security, AND more complaints to IT. Utterly stupid.
Overall this is truly an evil piece of legislation and I sincerely hope it doesn't pass (though I don't hold out much hope). It is full of these so-called "Henry VIII clauses" (a favourite device of Labour's) which grant huge lawmaking powers to the Secretary of State. Even where it is explicit, there is nothing good in it at all.
If you look into the definition of "technical obligation", it includes the ability for the Secretary of State to not only block particular sites but to ban an individual from the internet altogether just because he feels like it (see the new section 124G(3)(c) the bill would insert into the Communications Act 2003).
Then there are the provisions for allowing the government to take over DNS, the extension of the ability of the government to censor games, the block grant of rights to orphan works to our local equivalent of ASCAP, and the grant of an explicit subsidy for local news noone wants.
Not to mention of course the digital radio switchover (which is pretty much a direct sop to the BBC - there really is noone who wants this, noone particularly wants DAB radios and the rest of the world is abandoning DAB for digital radio anyway).
Travel is the biggest example of this I know of. All the airlines (and major hotel chains) know EXACTLY who the people who set travel policies for the large corporates are. Those people get comped all sorts of things - free upgrades, free flights, the ability to book a ticket even when the plane is already full, better levels of service even within the same class of travel, the lot.
* I know that not all copyright infringement is music-sharing online. In fact, the most dangerous type (from my EE perspective) is false labelling on electronics, especially circuit breakers and other protective devices. This is an endemic problem and it's scary as fuck when a 200A breaker keeps going and melts into fucking slag at 400A.
Surely, if the problem was actually copyright infringement, then the device would still work exactly as the original "official" product? The fact that it doesn't suggests either (i) it's a totally different product passed off as something its not, or (ii) it's the same design, but grossly negligent workmanship was applied in its creation.
The situation you are describing is actually a problem with regulatory compliance (devices not properly tested and certified for sale); the copyright (or trademark, for that matter) infringement is completely incidental to the safety issue. Putting your life on the line on the basis of the brand name of your gear (which I presume you think will give you information like "this product actually does what the law requires it to") is utterly stupid.
At least for me, 4.2.2.3 is WAY faster than (about twice the speed of, in fact) either of google's addresses. The other two are about the same as google.
This article explains it pretty well. The thing is, when you set that up, what's actually happening is that the same driver is running both the Quadro FX570 and the GTS250, because it happens that the latest drivers will support both those cards.
If you wanted to use e.g. an old GeForce FX5200 (in a PCI slot) plus the GTS250, you just can't do it in Vista or Windows 7, because the last driver which supports the FX5200 (96-series nvidia drivers) won't support the GTS250.
There is also another issue in that the X server won't let you use both "real" Xinerama and the Composite extension at the same time. I've no idea why, and it's very annoying as it means compiz won't work even though 3D will cross the cards correctly e.g. with the nvidia binary driver - before Xgl was deprecated you could use that to run compiz (and you could still go and find a copy of the old Xgl server and use it I suppose), but otherwise it just won't work.
Firstly, you do know that neither Vista nor 7 will let you use multiple cards with different drivers (e.g. you can't even use substantially different generations of nvidia cards together)? So much as you complain about it being hard to use nvidia+Intel cards for 3 screens on Linux, it's actually impossible in the latest versions of Windows.
Secondly, in terms of your Linux setup, you need to use Xinerama and disable nvidia TwinView. The way to do this is to add two separate "Device" sections (within/etc/X11/xorg.conf) for the same nvidia card, with one marked as "Screen 0" and one marked as "Screen 1". Then you need a separate Screen for each of those Devices, plus another for the Intel card. Secondly, make sure that you have Xinerama enabled (add Options "Xinerama" "on" within the ServerFlags section). Finally, make sure that within the "ServerLayout" section you have all three of your screens mentioned and using the "LeftOf" or "RightOf" keywords to make sure they are glued together. There's an example xorg.conf here for example.
These types of setups aren't easy to setup with graphical tools in Linux (where perhaps they should be) but if you understand a bit about how xorg.conf works they are not too hard to configure.
IANAL either and while this is all very true, I think there is a good chance that these terms are so broad that they may well fall foul of local "unfair consumer contract terms" type legislation. Not sure what the situation is in the US, but I would be surprised if some of those were held enforceable against consumers in the UK, for example. Not that that would help you a great deal, since your redress would just be to turn around and sue them for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively small monetary amount of damages.
The only way I can see this might get more legally interesting is if they try to use these terms to act against some kind of "speciallhy protected" speech (e.g. arguing in favour of disabled, women's or minority rights). And even then it's probably more of a political problem for them than a legal one I suspect.
For example, how do you know if your local transportation authority is really doing the best job to keep traffic moving? They could have incentive not to, such as increased tax flow to the coffers by making motorists spend just that much more on gasoline. Or perhaps their even getting kickbacks from a couple oil boys for making sure consumers spend their quota.
Bad example (or maybe not?). This was official UK government policy until this year!
It really irks me when people assume that the oil majors will lose out from AGW-informed climate change policy and therefore are shadowily lobbying against it. I tend to think that those who stand to lose are (to some extent) the mining majors and (to a large extent) the independent E&P companies (if they don't sell out to the majors first). Miners will be hurt because:
Controlling coal in particular means the world will be much more dependent on nat gas, and to some extent oil; and
Increased energy prices impact on miners in a big way. They are one of the largest users of electricity in the world - in the short term they can push their prices up in line, but in the medium term, demand will fall and they are left with pressure on their already slim margins and a lot of capital invested in non-productive mining operations
Independent E&P will lose because:
Policies which make E&P harder or more expensive to undertake will drive up the price which existing oil reserves (largely owned by the majors) can command, and simultaneously make raising capital to undertake these projects more expensive for the independents
Technology to make E&P (as well as midstream and downstream) less energy-consuming in and of itself has large economy of scale effects, benefiting the majors disproportionately.
Majors are among the few entities who have the global reach and scale to take advantage of policy arbitrage opportunities in the new "efficiency markets" which are springing up (e.g. through cap and trade, carbon permits, etc)
The oil majors have the political contacts and access to capital to develop and market renewables rapidly and in scale to replace their existing markets over time with greater margins. They are already doing this, and own some of the largest renewables portfolios in the world.
There are a whole host of other reasons, but in the end it comes down to "oil and gas get a bigger slice of the energy pie; the majors get a bigger slice of the oil and gas pie; and the majors also improve their existing cost advantages". In the long term, the only things that can hurt them are (1) lower total energy consumption (which I suspect will never be politically acceptable) and (2) nuclear, where frankly there are just too many countries which the existing nuclear powers will never allow to develop civilian nuclear power, even if you do believe that the UK, US etc have a hope in hell of "doing a France" and getting 70% of electricity produced by nuclear.
At least in the post-WW2 era, I think this is true. Even in the pre-WW2 era, you could argue that too much emphasis was placed on the negotiators of peace treaties (many of which were more like terms of surrender) than the other part of the definition. I do think that, in retrospect, Gorbachev did deserve it (or at least led a group of people who did so) "for the abolition or reduction of standing armies" by pushing the Soviet Union towards a peaceful end to the cold war. But... awarding it to him in 1990, when the relatively peaceful transition of Russia out of the cold war was far from a certain outcome, meant it was really just luck that they actually got one right. Not to mention that the credit really belonged jointly to Gorbachev and Reagan, but it seems like the Nobel committee has a distinct dislike for those on the political right.
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At least in the UK, this type of activity would probably fall foul of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, especially if well buried in the small print. There is a decent amount of case law prior to this legislation supporting this as well.
Not that that particularly helps you as an individual, since you'd then need to reverse the card transaction, then risk being sued for it and, finally, asserting that the term was unfair and therefore void in your defence case.
There are powers for certain government bodies like the OFT to take more useful action (such as seeking an injunction against the company in question enforcing those terms) though, which may explain why these scams don't seem to have appeared on reputable UK-centric sites yet.
The police have to pay for the storage. Since the amount of online data is constantly increasing, I figure having to lay out funds for that many terrabytes of storage should bankrupt them, and then they can focus on doing the job they *should* be doing (picking up garbage), instead of the one they *want* to be doing (invading privacy without probable cause).
No, they will just further increase your taxes to pay for it. If they're clever, they'll get it paid for by a hypothecated tax on ISPs. This is bad because they then have no incentive to save money. I'd much rather it didn't happen at all, but if it does then the ISPs should pay for it directly as they would then have an incentive to at least control costs, and therefore retain the minimum amount of data neccessary.
If NSA or some other organization had a way to break into your SSH session and they cared to use it against you (with the risk of that info leaking), then you have much larger problems than worrying about if you should leave ssh sessions open or reconnect.
Further, if NSA/whoever really do have a way to break DH or AES then it is highly likely that it would be in the form of some relatively minor weaknesses reducing the effective keyspace combined with big-iron processing capability. It would still them take some time to do - maybe on the order of weeks to months.
Fact is, they'd have a much better chance just trying to hack your box in the first place (or at least they'd probably try this while waiting for the number-crunching). For example, OP is running PuTTY, so on Windows. I would bet good money that the agencies have been through the source for Windows, Internet Explorer etc and have a small pile of zero-day exploits which they can use to install some piece of software which could just silently transmit your key back to them.
Finally a politician who acts like they have a pair, working in government to actually bring the issues faced by the Great British public to light.
Lord Lucas is a Conservative hereditary peer, and a "backbencher" at that - so he is not working in government at all at present and neither is he likely to be even after the election. In many respects this is a shame, because he's one of the few people who have been pointing out some of the other heinous flaws in the Digital Economy Bill (i.e. the parts apart from the copyright regime - the powers it gives the government to take over the UK Domain Name Registry for one).
Actually on the whole the politicians who act most independently tend to be the remaining hereditary peers because they owe their position and therefore "allegiance" to rather fewer people than almost anyone else in government (they are technically elected to sit in the house from amongst all hereditary peers by the existing members of the House of Lords but the pool of candidates is small and once elected they are there until death or, more likely, further reform of the House of Lords occurs).
IANAL either but my interpretation of most forms of estoppel is that they're more detailed equivalents to the playground rule of "no takebacks".
What about sewers? Much of London's sewer system is more than 150 years old and will last for at least that long again thanks to good engineering and great foresight by the Victorian planners. If we had to rebuild our sewer system every 90 years, we would be spending a great deal more on our water bills than we do at present.
I agree that it should be legalized (pursuit of happiness and all that) but I'm not so sure that I buy the "you can keep much better control over it" line. When I was a kid I had no problems getting my hands on booze or tobacco and both of those products are legal. We always knew which store we could go to that wouldn't card us, which 21+ sibling of a friend would make a straw purchase and whose parents were too lazy to lock up the liquor cabinet.
There's more than one definition of "better control over it". When was the last time you bought alcohol from the store which turned out to be antifreeze? How common is it for one liquor store owner to shoot the owner of the new liquor store which opened down the street because it encroached on his territory? These are both the sorts of things which used to happen during prohibition, and don't now for alcohol, but do for drugs.
It was initially thought that the vaccination would require 2 doses per individual to have a strong enough effect. Once more testing was done and the vaccine was fully developed, it became clear that 1 dose per individual was sufficient.
You can use Ctrl+S to stop scrolling and Ctrl+Q to resume it. Much better to learn those because they work over ssh and on other Unices too.
Is there a good reason Fn+Alt+Ins can't still function as SysRq?
Hmm. The thing is, in almost all industries where the incentives are sufficient for industrial espionage to be a credible threat, forms of collusion or cartels are almost certainly a greater threat leading to the same outcome.
If you have medical records, state secrets or financial information, then OF COURSE you should be taking these sorts of precautions (and not storing this data on laptops is the first precaution you take). Common thieves stealing bank or credit card details is a credible threat. Journalists paying for the medical records of politically sensitive individuals is a credible threat.
But your competitors paying to steal information on what pricing discounts you offer to your biggest customers? Or where your biggest orders came from? If the customer doesn't tell your competitors directly, you can be 100% certain that the two companies' respective sales forces will chat about it amongst themselves. Same for release timing information.
To use an analogy: People are the "analogue hole" to these sorts of measures' "DRM".
90% users are plainly and loudly annoyed by common access password expire time and complexity requirements. They are simply not intellectually ready to manage encryption of fixed and removable media.
I have complained to my corporate IT-droids about this before. My issue isn't the expiry (90 days is perfectly reasonable), it's the ridiculous policy they enforce which means that about 70% of the RANDOMLY-GENERATED passwords I try to use won't even work. They enforce: (1) At least one of each of: number, upper case, lower case, symbol; (2) No two consecutive characters a repetition; (3) No two consecutive characters may be adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard; and (4) No three or more consecutive characters are allowed to form ANY dictionary word (if you've ever played Scrabble you'll know how many ridiculous 3-letter combinations get caught by this)?).
The net effect of this (aside from the fact that it dramatically reduces the valid search space for brute-forcing) is that once people have a pattern which actually complies with the rules they then WRITE IT DOWN AND PUT IT ON A POST-IT ON THEIR MONITOR and then just increment the digits they invariably put on the end every 90 days. Net result: LESS security, AND more complaints to IT. Utterly stupid.
The correct order to put the two in would be "Captain Sir", not "Sir Captain"
Overall this is truly an evil piece of legislation and I sincerely hope it doesn't pass (though I don't hold out much hope). It is full of these so-called "Henry VIII clauses" (a favourite device of Labour's) which grant huge lawmaking powers to the Secretary of State. Even where it is explicit, there is nothing good in it at all.
If you look into the definition of "technical obligation", it includes the ability for the Secretary of State to not only block particular sites but to ban an individual from the internet altogether just because he feels like it (see the new section 124G(3)(c) the bill would insert into the Communications Act 2003).
Then there are the provisions for allowing the government to take over DNS, the extension of the ability of the government to censor games, the block grant of rights to orphan works to our local equivalent of ASCAP, and the grant of an explicit subsidy for local news noone wants.
Not to mention of course the digital radio switchover (which is pretty much a direct sop to the BBC - there really is noone who wants this, noone particularly wants DAB radios and the rest of the world is abandoning DAB for digital radio anyway).
Travel is the biggest example of this I know of. All the airlines (and major hotel chains) know EXACTLY who the people who set travel policies for the large corporates are. Those people get comped all sorts of things - free upgrades, free flights, the ability to book a ticket even when the plane is already full, better levels of service even within the same class of travel, the lot.
* I know that not all copyright infringement is music-sharing online. In fact, the most dangerous type (from my EE perspective) is false labelling on electronics, especially circuit breakers and other protective devices. This is an endemic problem and it's scary as fuck when a 200A breaker keeps going and melts into fucking slag at 400A.
Surely, if the problem was actually copyright infringement, then the device would still work exactly as the original "official" product? The fact that it doesn't suggests either (i) it's a totally different product passed off as something its not, or (ii) it's the same design, but grossly negligent workmanship was applied in its creation.
The situation you are describing is actually a problem with regulatory compliance (devices not properly tested and certified for sale); the copyright (or trademark, for that matter) infringement is completely incidental to the safety issue. Putting your life on the line on the basis of the brand name of your gear (which I presume you think will give you information like "this product actually does what the law requires it to") is utterly stupid.
At least for me, 4.2.2.3 is WAY faster than (about twice the speed of, in fact) either of google's addresses. The other two are about the same as google.
Yes - apart from anything else, XPDM drivers mean you lose DX10 and DX11 support.
This article explains it pretty well. The thing is, when you set that up, what's actually happening is that the same driver is running both the Quadro FX570 and the GTS250, because it happens that the latest drivers will support both those cards.
If you wanted to use e.g. an old GeForce FX5200 (in a PCI slot) plus the GTS250, you just can't do it in Vista or Windows 7, because the last driver which supports the FX5200 (96-series nvidia drivers) won't support the GTS250.
There is also another issue in that the X server won't let you use both "real" Xinerama and the Composite extension at the same time. I've no idea why, and it's very annoying as it means compiz won't work even though 3D will cross the cards correctly e.g. with the nvidia binary driver - before Xgl was deprecated you could use that to run compiz (and you could still go and find a copy of the old Xgl server and use it I suppose), but otherwise it just won't work.
Firstly, you do know that neither Vista nor 7 will let you use multiple cards with different drivers (e.g. you can't even use substantially different generations of nvidia cards together)? So much as you complain about it being hard to use nvidia+Intel cards for 3 screens on Linux, it's actually impossible in the latest versions of Windows.
Secondly, in terms of your Linux setup, you need to use Xinerama and disable nvidia TwinView. The way to do this is to add two separate "Device" sections (within /etc/X11/xorg.conf) for the same nvidia card, with one marked as "Screen 0" and one marked as "Screen 1". Then you need a separate Screen for each of those Devices, plus another for the Intel card. Secondly, make sure that you have Xinerama enabled (add Options "Xinerama" "on" within the ServerFlags section). Finally, make sure that within the "ServerLayout" section you have all three of your screens mentioned and using the "LeftOf" or "RightOf" keywords to make sure they are glued together. There's an example xorg.conf here for example.
These types of setups aren't easy to setup with graphical tools in Linux (where perhaps they should be) but if you understand a bit about how xorg.conf works they are not too hard to configure.
IANAL either and while this is all very true, I think there is a good chance that these terms are so broad that they may well fall foul of local "unfair consumer contract terms" type legislation. Not sure what the situation is in the US, but I would be surprised if some of those were held enforceable against consumers in the UK, for example. Not that that would help you a great deal, since your redress would just be to turn around and sue them for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively small monetary amount of damages.
The only way I can see this might get more legally interesting is if they try to use these terms to act against some kind of "speciallhy protected" speech (e.g. arguing in favour of disabled, women's or minority rights). And even then it's probably more of a political problem for them than a legal one I suspect.
For example, how do you know if your local transportation authority is really doing the best job to keep traffic moving? They could have incentive not to, such as increased tax flow to the coffers by making motorists spend just that much more on gasoline. Or perhaps their even getting kickbacks from a couple oil boys for making sure consumers spend their quota.
Bad example (or maybe not?). This was official UK government policy until this year!
It really irks me when people assume that the oil majors will lose out from AGW-informed climate change policy and therefore are shadowily lobbying against it. I tend to think that those who stand to lose are (to some extent) the mining majors and (to a large extent) the independent E&P companies (if they don't sell out to the majors first). Miners will be hurt because:
Independent E&P will lose because:
There are a whole host of other reasons, but in the end it comes down to "oil and gas get a bigger slice of the energy pie; the majors get a bigger slice of the oil and gas pie; and the majors also improve their existing cost advantages". In the long term, the only things that can hurt them are (1) lower total energy consumption (which I suspect will never be politically acceptable) and (2) nuclear, where frankly there are just too many countries which the existing nuclear powers will never allow to develop civilian nuclear power, even if you do believe that the UK, US etc have a hope in hell of "doing a France" and getting 70% of electricity produced by nuclear.
At least in the post-WW2 era, I think this is true. Even in the pre-WW2 era, you could argue that too much emphasis was placed on the negotiators of peace treaties (many of which were more like terms of surrender) than the other part of the definition. I do think that, in retrospect, Gorbachev did deserve it (or at least led a group of people who did so) "for the abolition or reduction of standing armies" by pushing the Soviet Union towards a peaceful end to the cold war. But... awarding it to him in 1990, when the relatively peaceful transition of Russia out of the cold war was far from a certain outcome, meant it was really just luck that they actually got one right. Not to mention that the credit really belonged jointly to Gorbachev and Reagan, but it seems like the Nobel committee has a distinct dislike for those on the political right.