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Tim Berners-Lee awarded the British Order of Merit
MarsBar writes "The BBC is reporting that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded The Order of Merit, a royal award granted directly by the Queen. Previous recipients have included Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Sir Edward Elgar, Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher."
I discussed this with my kids just now, and they agree 100% with the award. After all, this is the man who made barbie.com possible, as well as trollz.com, clubpenguin, and neopets.
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Arthur: What manner of man are you that you can summon up fire without flint or tinder? ...greetings, Tim the Enchanter.
Tim: I... am an enchanter.
Arthur: By what name are you known?
Tim: There are some who call me... 'Tim'
Arthur:
It's a travesty that a destructive bitch like Thatcher was placed in the company of Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Sir Edward Elgar, and Mother Teresa.
The mind really boggles. The Queen should have known better.
Our Bernie is worth it though. The web has been a very important marker on Mankind's road into the future.
Internet != WWW.
Wish I could have seen this. Was Freddy Mercury there? He seems to have been keeping out of the news lately...
Simply put, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the Johannes Gutenberg of the Internet.
His simple invention, and his polite, modest manner should make him the IT icon of our time. I wonder, though, how many people could even tell you what he's done or recognise him by his picture?
Good for him. He deserves all the recognition that he can get.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So this is the same guy that made the first website on the NeXt Cube right? if so illl give him cred for helping to start the WWW (World Wide Web) he started HTML over TCP/IP before that all you had really was BBS it was a major leap to have content with images, I forget did he help make Mosaic?
I can see him going down is history as a great role is starting the WWW
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
God Backup the Queen!
Man, the last time I came to visit Slashdot, almost the same story led. It's like I never left. Reddit be damned. news.ycombinator.com ? pfft. If I want the same old shit, I'll just come to ancient.slashdot.org and hear about this (admittedly studly) guy being knighted or getting the Order of Merit. Maybe you gots to be a Brit to get it. Seriously. What are the odds of the last two visits having a TBL love session?
Mind the gap
This was meant at Thatcher, not Berners-Lee. Otherwise, not great company to have - one who destroyed prosperity in her own country.
Nice try on the troll. The inclusion of Al Gore was a little too much tho.
"Old man yells at systemd"
You forget that Thatcher invented "soft frozen ice-cream"
I kid you not.
Twit.
What was once true, is no longer so
Yes wasn't her plan to win back the Falklands to land a couple of C-130s full of SAS Troopers on Stanley Airfield?
Great plan that was......
She also probably stopped WWIII by convincing Reagan to actually talk to Russians instead of threaten them from afar. Stopping the incredibly expensive British nuclear energy program without stopping nuclear research was also a good move.
No he's really not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_ice_cream
Whining of conservatives notwithstanding, Slashdot *is* right. Besides the delusional anarcho-capitalist libertarians who use their ideology as an excuse to deny global warming and promote other idiocy, there's a fairly large portion of the usual Bush-worshiping Islamophobes.
You have to dig pretty deep on the internets to find a real enclave of lefties. Even DailyKos is moderate-left, at best. There's always been a large, highly influential bloc of reflexive Democrat-defenders, for whom all criticism of their team is absolutely unacceptable. Markos himself is the anti-feminist. It's more recently been infiltrated by libertarians, Clintonites, and Ron Paulbots.
The one place I've found sane, intelligent people (and the occasional amusing troll)? Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory. It's an unlikely blend of just about everyone opposed to dictatorship, but it rarely if ever descends into the same kind of swamp that every other forum seems doomed to.
Steve Ballmer was awarded the Iron Cross which he immediately threw across the room when he learned that Himmler was considering migrating the Reich's infrastructure to GNU/Linux.
It also doesnt help that her leadership made a tempest out of a teapot for an island.
Well, if the UK were just giving away islands without a fight, I know which one I'd take...
Thanks in part to her help, over 100 million Eastern Europeans are now living free and better lives.
Well, mind that Ronald "PATCO" Reagan did some heavy lifting to help on that one.
Yes, she only broke the destructive unions that were impoverishing Britain
No, she simply gave businesses the green light to sell out on their country, with hollow results. Same poverty, just swept under the rug, and with foreign knockoffs of tons of UK vehicles.
The only thing that she did was to make the UK serve as a reminder of what happens when you institute such anti-domestic policies.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hang on, you have that as the complete opposite of history - Thatcher was pushing for co-existance and talking Reagan out of war. What we got was Thatcher, Reagan and Gorby sitting down at the same table on multiple occasions and a peaceful solution that looks prety good to me from here a few decades on. The hard line imagined here would not have solved anything apart from a "mission accomplished" temporary boost at the ballot box.
I don't see Saint Diana on the list. Strange that...
Max.
Hmm, the Tom Clancy dedication - Ronnie, the man who won the war has a fan it appears. In hindsight now that we have the soviet documents about how their empire was falling apart the Stategic Defense Initiative and other attempts to provoke some military action in the cold war were an expensive, dangerous and counterproductive sideshow with a variety of corrupt profiteers feeding off the edges while contibuting toys that did not work.
Well, the following is from Wikipedia, so you can take it with a grain of salt if you like:
On 19 January 1976, she made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union. The most famous part of her speech ran: "The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns."
Also from Wikipedia:
n the Cold War, Mrs. Thatcher supported United States President Ronald Reagan's policies of deterrence against the Soviets. This contrasted with the policy of détente which the West had pursued during the 1970s, and caused friction with allies who still adhered to the idea of détente. US forces were permitted by Mrs. Thatcher to station nuclear cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
However, I will agree with you that when Gorby came to power, she famously said "He is a man we can do business with". But perhaps she sensed that Gorby was a man who could be talked into the sort of reforms that were needed to break up the Soviet bloc. I'm not on intimate speaking terms with the lady, so I'll never know for sure.
At any rate, I never suggested she wanted to go to war with the Soviets, just that she wanted to put up a strong front againt them, while practically every other country in Europre was begging to make some deal with the Soviets that would have kept the entire Warsaw pact intact.
What was once true, is no longer so
LMAO. Go back and see what Thatcher really did - put millions out of work, declared there was no such thing as society, deliberately started wars and destroyed british industry. If I had a time machine she's be one of the first babies to be forcibly aborted.
I was reading the newspapers at the time and paying attention. Reality has ended up a little different to what you have described - hence the lack of a war at the time in Eastern Europe. What she did would be seen as "appeasement" by hardliners that forget that you do not have to give away your country to talk to those you disagree with. There was no fighting, there was negotiation.
I don't think there's debate about whether Thatcher was good for the economy.
Most debate is centred around whether this outweighs the things it took to achieve it: increased police powers, reduced personal freedoms, CCTV culture, greed culture, privatisation of swathes of industry and transport infrastructure. The iron lady certainly took her toll on cultural britain.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Why a man like Tim Berners-Lee, who has done more than practically anyone is history to improve the exchange of information between human beings would accept honors from the nobility, not once, but twice.
Thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, KBE, OM, I now know a lot more about why I'm a Citizen and not a Subject than I ever learned in school.
Note to the Commonwealth of Nations and the United Kingdom--abolish the monarchy. No man or woman is inherently superior to another by accident of birth.
The point being, that Berners-Lee is actually in much better company than the list given in the introduction might have suggested, and this award extends beyond the British gene pool to Americans like Eliot and Anglo-Americans like Churchill.
Pining for the fjords
Every prime minister is given an honour after his/her term in office ends. John Major was made a Knight of the Garter (and also made a Companion of Honour); so was James Callaghan (he was also given a life peerage), and Harold Wilson before him. In fact the tradition is to give former prime ministers a peerage (Margaret Thatcher in fact received one - so she is Baroness Thatcher and sits in the House of Lords), but in the past few decades, becoming a member of the House of Lords has lost its appeal to many politicians.
In other words, Thatcher receiving the Order of Merit is not really a reflection of her personally - it's just a tradition that has been happening for many decades, to recognize the former prime ministers. After Tony Blair steps down this month he will eventually receive an honour - maybe Knight of the Garter, maybe Order of Merit, maybe even a peerage.
Well done - another muppet who's quite happy to make puerile assertions without having the bottle to put their login id against it.
USSR really did try to match purported US military achievements, and it really did cause budgetary problems. For example, the US Space Shuttle was sold to Congress as a dual military & scientific platform with extraordinary capabilities (low cost, under 2 month turnaround time, etc.).
...) were the icing on the cake. I don't know if there was actually a clever scheme to embarrass and bankrupt the USSR, but nevertheless the policies did have that effect.
When the Politburo heard the specs, this raised a red flag, so to speak, and they demanded that the USSR build something at least as good. But of the course the Shuttle design was way oversold. It does have unique abilities, but it is also incredibly expensive... but while the US can afford to waste that kind of money, the USSR could not.
It was the same story with spy satellites, nuclear submarines, fighter aircraft, supersonic bombers, and more. The harebrained ABM schemes (pop-up missile defense, brilliant pebbles, orbiting muon beams, nuclear-bomb-pumped X-ray lasers,
"Previous recipients have included Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Sir Edward Elgar, Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher."
Damn, talk about the odd one out!
Silver
I think the plan [Operation Mikado] referred to landing a C130 onto an airfield [Rio Grande] in ARGENTINA and then attacking the aircraft, which were being used to lauch Exocets, and kill all the pilots. When it was presented to the SAS, it was remaned "Operation Certain Death". I remember reading one sergeant and one other point-blank refused to do it, understanding full well that such a mission would be plain old suicide. [You don't put 55 SAS troops into that kind of situation, they are too valuable. And it should be made clear that SAS members are not exactly known for cowardice...]. Both men were kicked out of the SAS for this.
After that the mission was slated to go ahead, but was eventually shelved after a recon helicopter landed short due to bad weather and had to be torched whilst the lads on board legged it into Chile. If it had gone ahead, I don't doubt that the men would have destroyed every single aircraft, missile and pilot on that base, but at a terrible cost in lives. Also, the Argentinians would have wasted NO time in telling the world that UK forces had invaded Argentina, etc etc.
Sorry I can't find a detailed reference to it, it was buried in a book by an ex-SBS or SAS trooper and it's not a well-known facet of the war. The plan itself wasn't Thatcher's, it was Admiral Lewin's.
"Worked on" rather than "invented", and the best known brand of soft ice cream was, of course, "Mr Whippy". Very appropriate, and an indication that those were simpler times.
I 'd say she cured the disease but nearly killed the patient. Of all my (Danish) companies factories, the UK one is still the one with the most problems because of the negative influence of their unions. Hard handed cleaning was necessary. But Thatcher also paved the way for disasters like the privatization of British Water and the total underfunding of British Railway system. At one time she closed coal mines which were still profitable, just to break the power of the mining unions. That, in my book, is a bridge too far.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
No, but, if Al Gore's work directly starts translating to a reduction of CO2, and in the future his efforts are seen to have really made a difference, he would indeed be eligible. His crusade against Global Climate change has been there for 30 years.
Have a nice day!
They're discussing it here.
Try not to be so overt when you're shilling your crappy webshite.
"i dub dub dub thee sir berners lee"
.....
as you where
Toodle-pip
Amias
[site]
Do you remember gopher, do you?
Or even ftp using a browser.
the http:/// is not casual. it simply wasn't clear back then that you would not need to specify the protocol used in the future.
The idea of linking documents in a computer network was revolutionary and in spite of all the flash and youtubes and what have you, that simple idea is the core of the Internet as we use it today.
THe disparate bits and pieces to create it where all around the place but it took the ingenuity of Sir Tim to put all those bits together in a stroke of simplicity and genius.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why don't you move to France? You could discuss the merits of protectionism with the locals in the dole queue.
The unions were out of control, even the last labour government had tried to reign them in - only to be humiliated. Brutal, yes it was. But it only needed to be quite so brutal because the idiots of the previous decades protected massive nationalised companies from real competition. Thats what killed British industry, decades of protectionism that left us with manufacturing industries that hadn't a hope of competing globally. Thatcher just convinced the corpse to lie down, and IMO this was her greatest acomplishment.
This sig all sigs devours
Continuing in the same vein, not only did HTML/HTTP/URLs link nodes across a network together, it also made the links apparent. There were all kinds of hypertext systems in the 1980s (Hypercard and Notes blew my mind, and OWL and Folio had great insights too) and there was SGML, but when Sir Tim came up with
<a href="some protocol:a host/path/to/resource?some action">the link text<a>
he changed everything. It's easy enough that several million people have Learned It In 21 Days and figured out how to put it in their own documents and programs, and now we're here. Anyone who claims that because analogs of the parts were around, Sir Tim's synthesis isn't earth-shattering, is deluded. He's by far the most significant person alive.
=S
She was the most gullible Prime Monster they ever had. Reagan and Kohl outsmarted her at every turn. They all decided to cut back on subsidies to heavy industry, but only Thatcher went ahead. Reagan and Kohl did nothing, and the US and Germany still have their manufacturing base. Poor old Blightly lost everything but its accountants! Now all the kids want to be marketing managers, but they have nothing to market, bless them. Berners-Lee left for America a long time back.
I stole this
I can hardly say if I'd prefer to share a merit with Bertrand Russell or with sir Edward Elgar. Such great people!
linuxav
I wouldn't call someone who is sceptical of Margaret Thatcher a twit if I were you. They have every right to be so.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but what war did Thatcher deliberately start? I'm not a particular fan of Thatcher, but there are more than enough facts out there about her that there's no need to fabricate criticisms.
somebody set him up the BOM
Indeed. Granted I think one of your great ancestors x 600 back in the stone age may have killed someone over their wheel invention. So I think I'll take what you say with a very small grain of salt, too.
(btw, you can translate that into a *yawn* at your post)
Excuse me? MIME might be an important part of HTTP but is its certainly not at the heart of it. You could run a complete , albeit simple webserver without ever sending any mime information in the headers simply by using plain HTML or text.
And Margaret Thatcher is the Ronald Reagan of the United Kingdom.
Couldn't they just name an airport after her, instead of sullying the award?
Lies about crimes
A few pioneers like Jobs, Gates, and the YouTube guys have had second and third megahits. Im stil waiting for Tim's encore.
of all orders compromised in the afterthoughts of
"from the Queen who gained here position by murdering, invading and generally creating misery historically"
Wow. You really have something against the Queen of England, haven't you? What happened to you?
Were you beaten up in school by a Brit? Did he steal your lunch money? Did he shit on your face?
Crushed your self-respect hard, didn't he? I bet you cried for weeks. Does it still hurt?
Do you hate everything British now? Can't even bear to speak the language properly?
It must be terrible to live like you do. Have you considered suicide?
To properly honor Tim Berners-Lees the BBC article could at least have used a link to two...
Given the combination of France and protectionism in one post, I am compelled to link one of the great ant-protectionist essays.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
If you ask me the only thing either of these two [we|a]re any good at was propelling their own image and keeping themselves on the front pages.
Although widely believed to be such a person, Tim can only be called "the inventor of WWW", if we really need to identify a name with each concept — he didn't think of anything, not immediately obvious to anyone skilled in the art. Even then, we should be crediting the inventors of Hypertext, which existed long before Tim's work — if we can identify them, that is. The hypertext system, which Tim built at CERN, did not even use multiple servers.
Yes, manners and politeness would certainly help anyone. Being brilliant goes a long way too. But there was nothing, for which a patent could justifiably be issued — and only that qualifies as "invention" in my opinion.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This Internets thing is completely useless.
crap.
...of the Russel Stover's variety, lol.
Well excuse us for not trying to build an internet reputation. I'm sure yours is very important to you.
errr wtf?
You appear to have missed a Conservative PM called John Major, who governed from 1990 to 1997. Are you sure you know much about British politics?
I stole this