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World Technology Awards 2001

Posted by michael on from the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you dept.

struanr writes: "Nature has published the winners and finalists of the World Technology Awards, which are run by the World Technology Network. "These are about those individuals whose work today will, in our opinion, create the greatest "ripple effects" in the future... in both expected and unexpected ways." There are some big names chosen here, and some glaring omissions."

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Take These Awards with A Grain of Salt by nathanm · · Score: 5, Informative
    Most of the awardees and finalists are probably well deserving, but one of the finalists in Ethics was Peter Singer.

    If you're not familiar with Singer, here's a good page about him. The short version is that he advocates infanticide until 28 days for disabled newborns and euthanasia for people with cognitive
    disabilities. He first made it big in the animal rights community, but many are abandoning him after he tried to justify some forms of bestiality (see this). Here's one of his quotes:
    Sex with animals does not always involve cruelty.
    Sounds like a real champion of animal rights, huh?

    Also, as other posters have mentioned, although he's well deserving of the award, Linus didn't establish the Open Source software model. Some of the posters have said RMS did, but there are a couple issues with that:

    RMS would say he's not for Open Source, he's for Free Software

    The model was around long before RMS, he just successfully described & codified it in the GPL

  2. Re:List of winners - Take with a grain of salt by Cannucklehead · · Score: 2, Informative

    Strange, I thought Ballard Power systems was in Vancouver B.C. Canada (not USA as indicated).

    Did the border move while I was celebrating the new year?

    :-)