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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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Internet != WWW.
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
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
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
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.
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.
Not that you're an ignorant fool, but from 1975-1990, when Thatcher was PM, British GDP increased from 100,000 million pounds to 557,000 million pounds. That's about 11% per year on average, and far from "destroying prosperity", I think most countries would consider that pretty good economic performance. The changes she made made it more inviting for other companies to come and invest in Britain. For example, the company I was working for in 1979 when Thatcher came to power, Mitel Corp, built two plants in Britain. Later, when Terry Mathews left Mitel and started Newbridge Networks, he built more plants in Britain, creating thousands of jobs. I remember sitting in on a management meeting a few years after Thatcher came in, and Mathews was asked if he would have invested in Britain under a Labour government. He just snorted derisively and said "No".
What was once true, is no longer so
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
Those GDP figures do not take into account inflation. In 2003 pounds, the 1975 GDP was 577,489 million pounds and the 1990 GDP was 814,956 million pounds. That's an annual increase of approximately 2.3%. Or 2.2% if you look at per capita GDP growth.
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.
Thatcher came to power in 1979, not 1975. Bear that in mind next time you call someone an ignorant fool.
As another poster has commented, those figures don't take into account inflation, which reached 18% at one point. Also, between 1978 and 1983, manufacturing output dropped 30%.
I'm sure that felt great for the 3.6 million who were unemployed in the early 80s (more than three times the number unemployed under the previous Labour government).
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.
These are Conservative policies?
The major Tory policy stolen was that indirect taxes get noticed a lot less than direct taxes, so you can pretend to be tax cutting when you aren't -- which is exactly what John Major did.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"Not that you're an ignorant fool, but from 1975-1990, when Thatcher was PM"
....
Ummm - you later say yourself that she actually came to power in 1979 however the years you note were key to building growth in the UK. Not much to do with politics as you may suggest though;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullom_Voe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_crude
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_oilfield
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis
you may wish to review what percentage of UK GDP North Sea Oil represented during Maggie's years
Sure Labour was a dog wagged by the tail of the Trade Unions in the mid 70's but to try to say Maggie's policies "made the country" isn't very accurate.
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
Well done - another muppet who's quite happy to make puerile assertions without having the bottle to put their login id against it.
"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.
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!
"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."
Well, we're all born in the UK, and we're all inherently superior to y'all USians.....
If nothing else, we're superior in understanding words. It's obvious that some people are superior to others by accident of birth - compare an athelete with someone who is born disabled. You probably didn't mean that. When you can tell me what you meant, I'll tell you where you were wrong!
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
Correct. Now, when did Labour get into power, allegedly by espousing Conservative policies? Was it by any chance two elections ago, in 1997?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
And how did she achieve this ?
By selling off the state owned utilities, that WE had paid for through taxes for generations, with the resulting loss of public accountability.
Now our water distribution network is owned by the international conglomerates, as is our power and others. Hardly any of our engineering companies are british owned, and even then, they are usually owned by finance houses (instead of professional engineers) so they are under the threat of downsizing/asset stripping/resale at the slightest downturn in share price. Greed is the name of the game, if you haven't got the latest consumer item, you're a nobody (in the minds of the proles). The majority of workers can't afford to buy houses because wages are low, and you can't get state accommodation because it's all been sold off.
The health service is in meltdown, the money we have all payed in towards our pensions has all been used for other things, and we are driving wages down further by allowing massive immigration from eastern Europe.
The worst part is, *she* started this, and when we all sighed with relief as labour were elected we were deluded. Labour has done nothing to halt the decline in social values but has continued to accelerate it, as well as dividing communities and flooding us with orwellian restrictions.
Money is everything in this country, and you can blame thatcher for that - fair and square.
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
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.
Thatcher and Reagan helped created the society of 2/3: 2/3 of the population living an average life, 1/3 living in poverty so as that the 2/3 are happy. But look where are we now: poverty is on the rise in UK and in USA.
People with money will only invest if they can hold on to their money and multiply it. But is that good for the common folk? in the end, all money will be in the hands of the elite (as if it wasn't, but anyway).
You can try seeing it this way: Earth is a closed system, so the value of its resources, including workers, is fixed. The value created from work is part of the value of the Earth's resources...therefore, when someone earns money, the money earned are taken from the pockets of someone else, or from the natural resources of Earth.
Therefore, capitalism will ultimately fail, albeit more slowly than communism: in the end, everything will be at the hands of the few, and the many will suffer.
We are seeing the first symptoms of this problem in economies like Germany, where consumption has fallen dramatically the last few years. USA's economy is based on consumption, but what will happen when the day comes that people will not have enough money to spend? when they wear the same old shoes and clothes for years, don't buy any electronic devices, don't buy new cars etc? the economy will go down, that's for sure.
And don't say that "right now, USA's economy is healthy". There are certain tricks that are done to keep it that way. For example, imported goods get taxed, so as that local industries don't fail. Or the arms & weapons industry must keep selling their stuff in order to be prosperous.
Under this light, Thatcher was successful only for the time period that she acted (from 75 to 90). But her plan was short-sighted in the long run, just like everyone else who things that capitalism can work indefinitely.
I would pay my respects to the first guy who comes around with a system that can last millenia and bring prosperity to many generations. As it is right now, no economic system can exist for more than a couple of centuries, without brought down by revolutions and wars.
ha, took me a second. I'm surprised someone has modded this up. Someone has to find this funny. Come on mods, let's give a little love here.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
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.
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
1/3 in poverty? more like 1/8. It's a debateble whether the official measure of poverty overstates or understates the problem. I lean towards overstatement, due to everyone being materially better off. The official poverty rates were formed with an assumption about food being about 30% of expenses, which explicitly has changed. The standards are increased by the Urban consumer price index, but they have not actually gone back and recalculated things from the beginning, and the original assumptions aren't as good as you might hope.
Incidentally, the earth is NOT a closed system. Economics is NOT a zero sum game. Two people engaging in trade can both be better off because of it.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
At least with a Constitutional Monarchy...
1. our businesses don't have to spend so much money on bribes
2 our politicians aren't owned by oil companies and
3 they are able to represent the people who elected them and aren't afraid to pass inconvenient laws.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
It was abandonment of collective ownership, one of Labour's core principles.
That doesn't make them Tories.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Parliaments for Wales and Scotland? Not a Tory policy. Done
Reduction in child poverty? Not a Tory priority, and not a Tory manifesto promise. Done.
Reduced class sizes for KS 1 and 2? Done (see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nscl.asp?ID=6065
Free education for all under fives? Done
Do you want me to go on
Now you might argue that they were all bad things... and I've no interested in arguing with you. But that they've been done is uncontrovertible.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
First of 1/3 of the country is not in poverty. Half the world can't fill a glass with clean water - THATS poverty.
Look, the point of a capitalistic society is that predominantly you are responsible for your own well being within the laws that make society work. Part of that includes those that can't help themselves but not paying for those that wont help themselves. Socialism only works for a period of time until those creating the wealth leave where they get the fruits of their work rather than pay extortionate taxes.
And all I hear about is how the tax breaks here in the US are going to the rich...yes, because they're paying the most in taxes. If you lined all citizens up and asked them to step forward who are 'net' giving to the country then the rich would be out way ahead. The top 1% richest people pay over 30% of the tax bill, the top 10% bay 65%. So my friend, if you want to get rid of say the top 10% richest then please be prepared to have just 35% of your income.
Therefore, capitalism will ultimately fail
And be replaced by what?
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