Slashdot Mirror
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton
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.'"
What has he done for us LATELY?
That was classic intercourse!
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
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
"greatest Briton"?
Hmmm. I'm British. I wonder what my ranking is?
14,223,921st greatest Briton?
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 : )
don't spoil it with ignorance now
Shouldn't that be "ignourance".
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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 434963,00.html
... further downI'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!
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!
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.
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!
/and/ gave them away. Sounds pretty close to the socialist ideal to me.
Both Berners Lee and Torvalds did both though. They created the WWW and Linux
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.