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Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the particularly-exemplary dept.

mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004. Berners-Lee had this to say about the honor: 'I am very proud to be British, it is great fun to be British and this award is just an amazing honour.'"

23 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Why 2004? by Alan+Partridge · · Score: 5, Funny

    What has he done for us LATELY?

    --
    That was classic intercourse!
    1. Re:Why 2004? by ReadParse · · Score: 3, Informative

      What has he done for us LATELY?

      Running the W3C, and we owe his as much thanks for that as for creating HTTP and HTML.

      RP

  2. It was less of a surprise by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Funny

    Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004

    Prince Harry was taken out of the running for Greatest Briton recently for some reason...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:It was less of a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Prince Harry was taken out of the running for Greatest Briton recently for some reason

      However he was named as the Greatest German of 2004

  3. Re:And typically there are some doubters by ninthwave · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea, was it was not his idea, it was just using things already invented together, and tweaking it for sharing. He himself seems to acknowledge the simple principle that science and technology is a building process off the works of our forefathers in our fields.

    He is very humble about it as he does not see it as a pure invention, the press on the other hand just can't be bothered to learn. The web needs an inventor. Did Edison invent the light bulb?

    Something in the human condition needs this widget here was made by inventor Goosebury. Why I don't know, maybe we understand ideas better when we have a psychology to project the idea onto.

    --
    I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
  4. More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... by Dark$ide · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Jane Tomlinson

    At the same awards ceremony, Jane Tomlinson (who suffers with a terminal cancer) was awarded "Greatest British Campaigner". I think that is just a little bit more significant. She has raised £1,150,000 (~USD$2,170,970) for Cancer Research.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/ 4215561.stm

    --

    Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.

    1. Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... by hanssprudel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm so very sick of posts like this. There is always some holier-than-thou slashdotter who'll tell us how we should be ashamed of ourselves for developing technology instead of giving our money to cancer victims/sick kids/homeless puppies etc.

      Let me put this out there for you: Who do you think has made a greater contribution to cancer treatment, Jane Tomlinson, or Tim Berners Lee?

      Well, Tomlinson may have collected money that can be used to fund a few more researchers in a field where hundreds of millions are already spent, and finding the solution is not a matter of man-hours. TBL on the other hand, created a brilliant new communication medium that has completely revolutionized the sharing of information between people.

      As somebody who works with research (though not directly related to curing cancer - shame on me!) I can attest that the World Wide Web is an invalvuable tool that has completely changed for the better the way scientists are able to cooperate, publish, and access each others information. Tim Berners Lee wasn't just good at begging together money: he actually created something great, something that brought society forward, something that has improved the efficiency and wealth of all walks of life.

      When efficient treatments for cancer are found, Tim Berners Lee will have deserved some of the credit for it, like he deserves some of the credit for every scientific achievement from now on. All due respect to Miss Tomlinson, but her achievement does not close to compare.

      The same thing goes, btw, to the recent post about the Linux community matching Gates' donation to childrens vaccines. Gates may vaccinate ten million children, but the result will most likely be that those children will have another twenty million children, also living in poverty, and also needing vaccines. The Linux community, on the other hand, has given to developing world a fantastic tool with which wealth can be created, and development spurred.

      Let us not fall for the socialist fallacy that the only good thing one can do in life is to give away ones money. People like Tim Berners Lee CREATE wealth, which is a greater virtue then passing it around!

    2. Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... by Pentagram · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Let us not fall for the socialist fallacy that the only good thing one can do in life is to give away ones money. People like Tim Berners Lee CREATE wealth, which is a greater virtue then passing it around!

      Both Berners Lee and Torvalds did both though. They created the WWW and Linux /and/ gave them away. Sounds pretty close to the socialist ideal to me.

    3. Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... by DJCF · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This week, Bill Gates donates 100,000 dollars to help fight AIDs over the next 10 years. In other news, Bill Gates also donates 10 million dollars to help fight linux over the next ten years.

      Bla bla. Above figures made up, etc. But you see my point?

    4. Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... by hanssprudel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Both Berners Lee and Torvalds did both though. They created the WWW and Linux /and/ gave them away. Sounds pretty close to the socialist ideal to me.

      Neither has hesitated to profit from his invention, as well they shouldn't. Both will tell you that the reason they released it for free wasn't altruism, but that it was the only way it could have evolved into what it became.

  5. Re:Errant U's by BarryNorton · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not errant, it's a quote! Sir Tim was knighted by the Queen for a European invention and this has been reported on by the British Broadcasting Corporation. It's nice that you chaps across the Pond care enough to relay this, and even nicer when we're properly quoted - don't spoil it with ignorance now!

  6. What's the metric for this? by wombatmobile · · Score: 4, Funny

    "greatest Briton"?

    Hmmm. I'm British. I wonder what my ranking is?

    14,223,921st greatest Briton?

  7. "It's Great Fun to be British" by popo · · Score: 4, Funny


    Ho HO! Indeed! And what a rollicking good time being human as well! Its a smashing good time up here at the top of the food-chain!

    --
    ------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
  8. Re:Errant U's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny


    don't spoil it with ignorance now

    Shouldn't that be "ignourance".

  9. Re:I for one... by pfdietz · · Score: 4, Funny

    Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but during his previous song-writing career, he invented something even more important to information processing: the Al Gore Rhythm.

  10. Re:And typically there are some doubters by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Informative
    Wrong on both counts. Bell did not invent the telephone (though he did patent a design that couldn't work first) - he was a thief.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 434963,00.html

    Monday June 17, 2002

    Italy hailed the redress of a historic injustice yesterday after the US Congress recognised an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.

    Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognise a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.

    The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci's homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found fortune and fame by stealing another man's work.

    Calling the Italian's career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said his "teletrofono", demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials and who took out a patent 16 years later.
    ... further down ...
    He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone, became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.

    Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.
    , and Edison did not invent the light bulb http://www.naturalhandyman.com/iip/infelectrical/l ightbulbhistory.shtm He just improved it. Others had already demonstrated working light bulbs.
  11. Re:Great Fun to be British? by Linker3000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's not like it's pre-Christian Polynesia and you get to boink nubile exotic Island girls all day long and eat sweet tree-melons while basking on the beach.

    You've obviously not been to Butlin's Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis then - mind you, there it's Essex girls and tinned pineapple.

    Pip! pip!

    --
    AT&ROFLMAO
  12. Looked up some historical links... by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OK, I did some searching for the Neowin article on this, and can just as well post it here too.
    It's a bunch of fun historical documents. ;-)

    - Screenshot of Tim-Berner Lee's web browser/editor gizmo (apparently two apps in one suite, kinda like Mozilla?)
    - Web page (from 1992) describing a very early version of HTML
    - Description of the web (from 1992)*
    - The original WWW proposal from 1989**
    - History of the web

    * = It tells you why the WWW was made... "Tim decided that high energy physics needed a networked hypertext system and CERN was an ideal site for the development of wide-area hypertext ideas"

    ** = excerpt: "Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990."

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  13. Re:Strange, fortune just printed this out for me.. by crimson30 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why the hell was that modded "interesting", if not that for someone on /. knows who Schopenhauer is - well, no proof even for that since it's a fortune citing - ?

    I, for one, found it interesting that another slashdotter might allude to the silliness of national pride, since, after all, it is taking pride in other people's accomplishments. Personally, I keep my national pride to a miniumum, since I'm no more responsible for the great things America has done than the awful things. Same goes for racial pride. I am not responsible for the great things others have done, nor am I responsible for slavery just because I'm white. I think people should be as proud as their skin color as they are of their hair color. Likewise, there should be no shame.

  14. Re:Errant U's by skaffen42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Can't understand how anybody who still refuses to use the metric system can be so upset about an extra U...

    (This is slashdot. Nobody can spell anyway. So if you want to start a flamewar you should rely on trusted methods like the metric system.)

    --
    People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
  15. Teeth! by zenmojodaddy · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm surprised no-one from the States has said anything about the guy's teeth. From Austin Powers to the Simpsons' 'Big Book Of British Smiles', that's all we ever get to hear. British=Bad F*ckin' Teeth.

    Listen, you shiny-gobbed sons of bitches, these are Darwinian survival aids. If we got into a fight and I bit you with these babies, you'd bleed to death in thirty seconds or get a dose of gangrene and end up taking your fingers home in a bag.

    Right. I'm off to throw bricks at a dentist. What ho, my lily-white arse.

  16. Re:Great Fun to be British? by pjt33 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    What the heck? Do they have tea-parties and watch Monty Python all day?
    Not at all, old chap: we don't start the tea-parties until 5pm.
    It's not like it's pre-Christian Polynesia and you get to boink nubile exotic Island girls all day long and eat sweet tree-melons while basking on the beach.
    If you were from pre-Christian Polynesia you wouldn't find the island girls exotic. (See, mods: this post is insightful as well as funny ;)
  17. That's not so impressive by craXORjack · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was at a friend's house over the holidays and I noticed that he had received the distinction of being the World's Greatest Dad! Top that, Sir Tim!

    --
    Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.