Who cares when or why he was nominated?? Much less worthy people might have been nominated for all you know. Do you think he would still have gotten it if since february he had just dicked around and been a lousy leader? Nominations != decision.
It's the nominations, not the time they actually decide the winner. Hundreds of people were nominated, you'd think someone would have nominated him for some random reason or even by expectation of something happening from him. He didn't win it in February, he won it just now. Anything he may have done between then and now may have been the decisive factor.
So how do you determine how something is biased? By comparing it to the average of all the biases you could put together? By the way, reporting facts isn't being biased. That would be like saying the Washington Post was biased for choosing to report on the Watergate burglaries. There's bias if you cover something up, not if you shine a light on something.
Yeah, facts and truth have a bias. And so does your definition of bias. Mine says "influence in an unfair way", but you'll probably think it's biased too.
It's funny to see how hard Americans fail to understand what's just happened. It takes an outsider point of view to understand. Here's how it all looks to me, a European : the USA, the arrogant super power, were fucking around, invading countries for no fucking reason and pretending like global warming didn't exist/was nothing to worry about. On top of that, geopolitically it's like they were trying to split the world in two sides (the Axis of Evil and all the bad guys vs the good guys) like they were missing the Cold War already. And as if acting like complete dicks and fucking the world up the best they could wasn't good enough they had to top it off by shooting their economy in the foot and taking the rest of the whole world down with them because they just had to hold to their sacrosanct belief that "the Holy Market will drive itself" to the point the debate between economists came down to "so do we keep a hand on the Fed's interest rate or do we keep our hands off everything?".
Then came Obama, and bam, all of a sudden the USA change their attitude. We hear of closing Gitmo, of pulling out of Iraq, of withdrawing the European missile shield thing, of negotiations, talks, diplomacy, we see a leader who actually seems to understand the world he's messing with, and who seems smart enough and considerate enough to do the right things for the world.
So yeah, at home, maybe he's just a new president who hasn't done much yet, who can't get his own damn party to accomplish a damn thing and who may or may not be an evil socialist Nazi from Kenya, but to us puny outsiders he's more radical a change than the last time we decapitated one of our leaders, and without him having even done much yet we can feel the difference. That's why he got a Nobel prize, because from our point of view he already changed a lot in the world.
You've only got half of the picture. This win was for taking a bold L-turn. People who say Obama hasn't achieved anything are missing this. His one accomplishment is a change of direction on a plethora of fronts. So yes, this is related to the previous administration, because this is all about the turn. The most important aspects to the Nobel committee are I think a strong return to diplomacy (instead of going with the polarising "we won't talk with these guys, they're meanies"), a general depolarisation of everything (whereas Bush was strongly polarising on anything. Not that it prevents conservatives in the USA from polarising themselves like they've been taught to), denuclearisation and facing the issues of global warming head-on instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
So yeah, it may look like nothing, like something natural when a new president from a different party gets in power, but from the outside it looks like the nation took a bold turn in a good direction. That's what he's getting awarded for.
I hope he bombs Iran and North Korea before invading Pakistan together with India. Perhaps then the retards at the Nobel Peace Prize committee will stop handing out that thing like it's the Politically Correct Popularity Contest.
Me too! I hope tens of thousands of people die just to prove a point to a bunch of Norwegians.
Pragmatically speaking the cold war in America wasn't about any countries but the US and Russia.
Man, what are you talking about. It was about two sides, and on which side certain countries in the world would fall to. That's the domino theory and how it lead to pretty much all the interventions we've had during the Cold War that had nothing to do with us. Who gives a crap about what happens in Korea, Indochina or Afghanistan? We did, and not because we feared a rain of ICBMs, but because we didn't want the enemy to take over the world country after country.
Yep, pretty much my point actually. We thought everyone would want to have that, but turns out we don't. That's those funny things about technological progress and the way we foresee it, we get it wrong, because either the technological advances we predicted never happened and something revolutionising appears instead (without anyone seeing it coming), or the technology does happen but turns out the people of the future don't care about the same stuff as we thought they would.
I type e-mails from my cell phone, through VNC, onto my Mac, on Facebook. I think that among us (on/.) you'll find everything. I'm sure you can find someone who types e-mail on a C64, through SSH to a remote FreeBSD machine by telneting onto an SMTP server.
The best usage is playing piano on a laptop keyboard? You mean, those things that have like 1 millimetre of travel and that have a really awful layout for playing music? lol:D
When's the last time you gave your mom a videocall? Also that's something I find very interesting about webcams, you would have thought that it would be used for like a video phone, when in reality most people use it to do a "look at me while I'm doing random stuff at my computer" type of thing. You can't deny that that whole videophone thing really didn't go as expected 20 years ago.
Not to piss on their parade, but none of those ideas seem like anything that will ever in one way or another be used by anyone. Even the password thing. Why? Because although it seems like a good idea, people like to think of computers as simple dumb machines. And they need to stay this way, so we can predict how they will respond to our actions. No one's going to want to be locked out of their account because their computer doesn't like the way they're typing today (maybe they hurt their left wrist, or maybe they'd rather copy-paste their password in).
That's pretty typical of the "behold the technology of tomorrow!"-type of concept that never happens cause no one actually wants it, like voice recognition-everything, videophones, video mail or typing e-mails from your living room on your TV set. The problem is that all that's come out of this contest destined to proving the potential of this new keyboard thingie isn't the solution to any problem, or any sort of desirable improvement on anything, which seems to invalidate the merits of the keyboard technology in question. In other words, so what's this thing good for?
Huh??? I thought that was collected by phishing? Yeah, sorry for getting in the way of your ritual MS bashing, but it's something that can affect any service since it's essentially social engineering. Kind of.
You can create steam using a radiothermal nuclear generator
That's original, I've never heard such a suggestion before. However I believe I never have because it would work. How much thrust could you possibly get out of steaming out water?
And ok, sure, if you've got as much energy as you want then why not. Although if you have as much energy as you want then instead of doing something completely retarded like carrying an impossibly huge ice cube through space you could use an engine that's powered by a RTG, like a ion thruster.
Having imagination is good but that would be a plus if you knew what you're talking about so you'd know why what you proposed is dumb as fuck.
gravity tractors
lol, oh I see, so your solution is to the problem of moving an impossibly huge block of ice is to move another impossibly huge block of whatever towards the huge block of ice. Yeah, that should work. Alternatively you could try reading less science fiction and more scientific articles, and get a grip on that thing called feasibility.
You can sit there with a hectare of solar panels
Yeah, again, that's oh so very feasible. Here, get a clue. If you still don't get why I'm pointing you to this, it's to show you why saying "fuck it, let's just send a square mile of solar panels up there" is a dumb idea.
A chunk of ice the size of Mt Everest could keep a spacecraft supplied with propellant
lol... did you miss the part where water is not a fuel? The second law of thermodynamics is very clear on the water -> hydrogen + oxygen -> water cycle. Also, how are you, with a rocket with a few meganewtons of thrust, going to move a block of ice of about 200 billion tons from a solar orbit to a transfer orbit to Mars?
Slashdot Mirror
Then it has just risen! God damn, Slashdot is so full of anal dicks.
Who cares when or why he was nominated?? Much less worthy people might have been nominated for all you know. Do you think he would still have gotten it if since february he had just dicked around and been a lousy leader? Nominations != decision.
It's the nominations, not the time they actually decide the winner. Hundreds of people were nominated, you'd think someone would have nominated him for some random reason or even by expectation of something happening from him. He didn't win it in February, he won it just now. Anything he may have done between then and now may have been the decisive factor.
And the other other half going to Shimon Peres.
So how do you determine how something is biased? By comparing it to the average of all the biases you could put together? By the way, reporting facts isn't being biased. That would be like saying the Washington Post was biased for choosing to report on the Watergate burglaries. There's bias if you cover something up, not if you shine a light on something.
Yeah, facts and truth have a bias. And so does your definition of bias. Mine says "influence in an unfair way", but you'll probably think it's biased too.
It's funny to see how hard Americans fail to understand what's just happened. It takes an outsider point of view to understand. Here's how it all looks to me, a European : the USA, the arrogant super power, were fucking around, invading countries for no fucking reason and pretending like global warming didn't exist/was nothing to worry about. On top of that, geopolitically it's like they were trying to split the world in two sides (the Axis of Evil and all the bad guys vs the good guys) like they were missing the Cold War already. And as if acting like complete dicks and fucking the world up the best they could wasn't good enough they had to top it off by shooting their economy in the foot and taking the rest of the whole world down with them because they just had to hold to their sacrosanct belief that "the Holy Market will drive itself" to the point the debate between economists came down to "so do we keep a hand on the Fed's interest rate or do we keep our hands off everything?".
Then came Obama, and bam, all of a sudden the USA change their attitude. We hear of closing Gitmo, of pulling out of Iraq, of withdrawing the European missile shield thing, of negotiations, talks, diplomacy, we see a leader who actually seems to understand the world he's messing with, and who seems smart enough and considerate enough to do the right things for the world.
So yeah, at home, maybe he's just a new president who hasn't done much yet, who can't get his own damn party to accomplish a damn thing and who may or may not be an evil socialist Nazi from Kenya, but to us puny outsiders he's more radical a change than the last time we decapitated one of our leaders, and without him having even done much yet we can feel the difference. That's why he got a Nobel prize, because from our point of view he already changed a lot in the world.
You've only got half of the picture. This win was for taking a bold L-turn. People who say Obama hasn't achieved anything are missing this. His one accomplishment is a change of direction on a plethora of fronts. So yes, this is related to the previous administration, because this is all about the turn. The most important aspects to the Nobel committee are I think a strong return to diplomacy (instead of going with the polarising "we won't talk with these guys, they're meanies"), a general depolarisation of everything (whereas Bush was strongly polarising on anything. Not that it prevents conservatives in the USA from polarising themselves like they've been taught to), denuclearisation and facing the issues of global warming head-on instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
So yeah, it may look like nothing, like something natural when a new president from a different party gets in power, but from the outside it looks like the nation took a bold turn in a good direction. That's what he's getting awarded for.
I hope he bombs Iran and North Korea before invading Pakistan together with India. Perhaps then the retards at the Nobel Peace Prize committee will stop handing out that thing like it's the Politically Correct Popularity Contest.
Me too! I hope tens of thousands of people die just to prove a point to a bunch of Norwegians.
Pragmatically speaking the cold war in America wasn't about any countries but the US and Russia.
Man, what are you talking about. It was about two sides, and on which side certain countries in the world would fall to. That's the domino theory and how it lead to pretty much all the interventions we've had during the Cold War that had nothing to do with us. Who gives a crap about what happens in Korea, Indochina or Afghanistan? We did, and not because we feared a rain of ICBMs, but because we didn't want the enemy to take over the world country after country.
Cogs and rubber ducks?!! lol, that sounds awesome!! Where can I get the German edition? (In Germany?)
Yep, pretty much my point actually. We thought everyone would want to have that, but turns out we don't. That's those funny things about technological progress and the way we foresee it, we get it wrong, because either the technological advances we predicted never happened and something revolutionising appears instead (without anyone seeing it coming), or the technology does happen but turns out the people of the future don't care about the same stuff as we thought they would.
I type e-mails from my cell phone, through VNC, onto my Mac, on Facebook. I think that among us (on /.) you'll find everything. I'm sure you can find someone who types e-mail on a C64, through SSH to a remote FreeBSD machine by telneting onto an SMTP server.
The best usage is playing piano on a laptop keyboard? You mean, those things that have like 1 millimetre of travel and that have a really awful layout for playing music? lol :D
lol, dick.
When's the last time you gave your mom a videocall? Also that's something I find very interesting about webcams, you would have thought that it would be used for like a video phone, when in reality most people use it to do a "look at me while I'm doing random stuff at my computer" type of thing. You can't deny that that whole videophone thing really didn't go as expected 20 years ago.
Oh wow! You're right, wikipedia says you can still download and use some for that though.
Not to piss on their parade, but none of those ideas seem like anything that will ever in one way or another be used by anyone. Even the password thing. Why? Because although it seems like a good idea, people like to think of computers as simple dumb machines. And they need to stay this way, so we can predict how they will respond to our actions. No one's going to want to be locked out of their account because their computer doesn't like the way they're typing today (maybe they hurt their left wrist, or maybe they'd rather copy-paste their password in).
That's pretty typical of the "behold the technology of tomorrow!"-type of concept that never happens cause no one actually wants it, like voice recognition-everything, videophones, video mail or typing e-mails from your living room on your TV set. The problem is that all that's come out of this contest destined to proving the potential of this new keyboard thingie isn't the solution to any problem, or any sort of desirable improvement on anything, which seems to invalidate the merits of the keyboard technology in question. In other words, so what's this thing good for?
Could the synapses of that brain you've used recognize humour?
Yeah, I thought not. At least read the guy's /signature/, for crying out loud, even if this is /.
int128_t?
It blows my mind how few people use stdint.h when it makes a lot more sense to use that these days.
Well to be fair if he was aiming for a low word count he probably wouldn't have went with the fluffy and decorative "Fourscore and seven years ago".
Huh??? I thought that was collected by phishing? Yeah, sorry for getting in the way of your ritual MS bashing, but it's something that can affect any service since it's essentially social engineering. Kind of.
Wow, I didn't know we could post such long posts on Slashdot. Time to code a remote filesystem that works by storing data in Slashdot posts!
You can create steam using a radiothermal nuclear generator
That's original, I've never heard such a suggestion before. However I believe I never have because it would work. How much thrust could you possibly get out of steaming out water?
And ok, sure, if you've got as much energy as you want then why not. Although if you have as much energy as you want then instead of doing something completely retarded like carrying an impossibly huge ice cube through space you could use an engine that's powered by a RTG, like a ion thruster.
Having imagination is good but that would be a plus if you knew what you're talking about so you'd know why what you proposed is dumb as fuck.
gravity tractors
lol, oh I see, so your solution is to the problem of moving an impossibly huge block of ice is to move another impossibly huge block of whatever towards the huge block of ice. Yeah, that should work. Alternatively you could try reading less science fiction and more scientific articles, and get a grip on that thing called feasibility.
You can sit there with a hectare of solar panels
Yeah, again, that's oh so very feasible. Here, get a clue. If you still don't get why I'm pointing you to this, it's to show you why saying "fuck it, let's just send a square mile of solar panels up there" is a dumb idea.
A chunk of ice the size of Mt Everest could keep a spacecraft supplied with propellant
lol... did you miss the part where water is not a fuel? The second law of thermodynamics is very clear on the water -> hydrogen + oxygen -> water cycle. Also, how are you, with a rocket with a few meganewtons of thrust, going to move a block of ice of about 200 billion tons from a solar orbit to a transfer orbit to Mars?