Again, what does any of that have to do with the Nobel Peace Prize? The girl has accomplished little other than to bring an additional reminder of the plight of women in Afghanistan and some other repressive Muslim countries. Has she brought substantial change in those countries? The man has done good deeds in India but not really anywhere else.

So in the first case you have the award going to a feel good, sympathetic figure and in the second, a country specific figure. Neither has brought peace to the world. Once again the committee has given an award to those not worthy of the award given. Unfortunately, those who mark this as famebait miss the point and instead misinterpret what is being said. To say their work is not worthy of this prize is not to say their work is not valuable, important or deserving of some other more appropriate award, today or sometime in the future.

As to your specific comment re India/Pakistan: If the Nobel committee wishes to make statements like that they should just issue a press release - the peace prize should not be used for that purpose. What would be worthy of the prize is someone(s) who actually negotiate a lasting peace between the two countries and their disputed territories.

I guess you missed the past 50 years of practical use of LEDs. The original red and green LED's have had a far larger impact on the world - they were game changers. I'm not denying the usefulness of blue LEDs but to call them a critical achievement is to overstate the case.

Certainly in the west nobody has heard anything about the young girl since she was released from hospital after her recovery. I'm interested to know the real world changing accomplishments she has personally brought to fruition? In addition, Satyarthi "accomplishments" appear to be limited to one country. Is this then the Peace prize for India? I've seen Mother Teresa's name bounced around in justification because of her work in Calcutta but she worked in tends (if not more) nations around the world.

This is another Nobel fail. Nice people but not worthy of the prize.

ha you beat me to it! As much as I loved Slakware for so many years, I will not go back to linux. FreeBSD and .. gasp... xmonad.

In fact, the past year or so I've been running my (desktop) FreeBSD installs through virtualbox on top of Win 8. If I really want, yes I can boot directly into FreeBSD. But the virtualization solution has really worked well for me. FreeBSD on one desktop and windows on another, both across dual monitors.

as I pointed out previously (and was marked as flamebait) this was a dreadful award. Partly because it totally ignored all earlier work, partly because it is awarding based on "technology" which, though difficult, was incremental. But all of that is being polite. You only have to read the cmte. press release to see why the award was given: politics. What was stated over and over? Saving energy! This was all about the politics of "green" and (indirectly) global warming.

DId you read the fucking press release? Did it mention any of that other shit? NO.

It was all about political happy "green" talk.

As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

Can we sing Kumbaya now?

If blue LED's were the first LED made, I would not object. But which was a bigger first? Blue LEDs or

The first visible-spectrum (red) LED was developed in 1962 by Nick Holonyak, Jr., while working at General Electric Company.[9] Holonyak first reported this breakthrough in the journal Applied Physics Letters on the December 1, 1962.[20][21] M. George Craford,[22] a former graduate student of Holonyak, invented the first yellow LED and improved the brightness of red and red-orange LEDs by a factor of ten in 1972.[23] In 1976, T. P. Pearsall created the first high-brightness, high-efficiency LEDs for optical fiber telecommunications by inventing new semiconductor materials specifically adapted to optical fiber transmission wavelengths.[24]

wikimedia

So my point again - this was a dreadful choice of Nobel prize. And just because something was hard to do and took a technological breakthrough to do is not reason for a Nobel prize. If it were, we could give them out like candy.

er no. I want to know how many miles I can go PER GALLON because the gas in my fuel tank is measured in... GALLONS. When that E light comes on I know how much further I can go.

we purchase fuel, not mles.

that I can remember. The jury is far from in on the true worth of LED lighting. Longevity claims are just that, claims and unproven. The cost remains very high and a burden to anyone forced to use LED lighting. Efficiency matters not if the bulb designed for 10 or more years dies in one or two.

While Nobel wished to award for discovery or technology, there had to be better choices on the technology side than this obviously political choice.

When "Dancing with Stars" pulls 12.8M in the number 10 spot and a 8.3 rating, there are still a lot of people watching broadcast TV. The highest ranked prime time cable show that was non-football pulled 4.1M with a 2.5 rating. Netflix has about 45M subscribers. Their most popular showing, House of Cards was estimated to garner about 15% viewership (by one ISP on day), so thats in the 6M ish range.

So while internet based viewing may have put a dent into broadcast (and cable), they are still the heavy weights by a good margin.

That has to be perhaps the best AC post I've read on /. in a very long time, perhaps ever. Well done.

Fail, fail and more fail. The press, three letter agencies and especially the congress critters love to a) inflate the threat and b) give attribution when none is possible. This book is extensively researched and has footnotes out the ying-yang. Bottom line is attribution at a level where one can say "these guys did it" is rare and even saying "probably did it" is difficult. And beware that many of the players involved have multiple objectives and even relationships with each other (when convenient).

Has the resolution and reliability of initial data points improved as well? Or are we just doing a finer interpolation of model output with same data input?

Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to run (though having one is quite nice :). It will run on systems as far back as the 486. Below is a list of minimum system requirements needed to install and run Slackware.

        486 processor
        64MB RAM (1GB+ suggested)
        About 5GB+ of hard disk space for a full install
        CD or DVD drive (if not bootable, then a bootable USB flash stick or PXE server/network card)

Debian:

  A Pentium 4, 1GHz system is the minimum recommended for a desktop system.

Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install Type RAM (minimal) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive
No desktop 64 megabytes 256 megabytes 1 gigabyte
With Desktop 128 megabytes 512 megabytes 5 gigabytes

Ubuntu Desktop Edition

        700 MHz processor (about Intel Celeron or better)
        512 MiB RAM (system memory)
        5 GB of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach)
        VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution
        Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media

        Internet access is helpful

Linux Mint 16

System requirements:

        x86 processor (Linux Mint 64-bit requires a 64-bit processor. Linux Mint 32-bit works on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors).
        512 MB RAM (1GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
        5 GB of disk space
        Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
        CD/DVD drive or USB port

did nobody think to release it on the proper date or just skip that version number? No wonder so many people hate on Gnome

so of course nobody could possibly be interested in this format either, right? I mean look at it! its like holding a piece of toast up to your ear. And who wants to be able to read a whole email without having to swipe left right up and down and lets not forget pinch and zoom. Thats just plain boring. And with this great economy we're in I can totally slack off at work and watch videos half the day so all those pixels best be showing my videos (and pron!)