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Tim Berners-Lee Says World Wide Web Must Emerge From 'Adolescence' (venturebeat.com)
The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed "vague but exciting." From a report: Speaking to reporters at CERN, the physics research center outside Geneva where he invented the web, Berners-Lee said users of the web had found it "not so pretty" recently. "They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realizing that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said. "It seems we don't finish reeling from one privacy disaster before moving onto the next one," he added, citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy. People who had grown up taking the internet's neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had "rolled that back."
It's neo-feudalism. That's what the wealthy globalist elite seem themselves as; a small group of people with a god-given birthright to educate the plebs as to who really should be in control. In addition, that "freedom" and "democracy" is just a tempest in a teapot, but the teapot you shall remain.
Yeah, well, a whole fuck-load of people just got "woke" and realized there's a whole universe outside that teapot!
Life is not for the lazy.
Yet clearly the guy is somehow at the same time both Hitler and incapable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time.
Yep, just like Reagan somehow "was" both an evil mastermind and an imbecile, all at the same time.
I've lived through all this before.
Yeah sure and all the vitriol and bile and 'fake news' and propaganda from state actors and crime and [insert miscellaneous internet bullshit here] that the internet is chock full of now is just so fucking great. It's just so fucking wonderful that the Corporate World has de-facto taken over control of the internet and turned it ironically into the 'walled gardens' (with invisible walls so the sheep don't get panicked) you accuse so-called 'learned scholars' of pontificatiing from. It's just such a fucking wonderful internet that national governments have exerted more and more control over, in most cases to quash anti-government sentiment, freedom of speech/freedom of expression/information sharing in general and to spy on their own citizens so they can arrest people they don't like. If you really like the gods-be-damned internet the way it is right now in 2019 then I question your values, ethics, and morals. The internet has been perverted into something not-so-great, a mere shadow of what it could have been. That's what he's concerned about and rightly so. In many ways we would have been better off if it had never been invented in the first place (or at least never opened to the general public).
You can't have a no-deal Brexit, it violates the peace treaty in Ireland.
The backstop is already required under UK law, because they have Treaty obligations that prevent a hard border inside Ireland, and they also have obligations to themselves to enforce some sort of customs regime.
Voting on Brexit without having a solution for that was fucking idiotic in the extreme. It was a farce of a vote, and was only an opinion poll anyways, not a binding resolution.
What sort of idiot country would put an issue that big, with that big of an (entirely negative) economic impact, up to a public vote that only needs 50%+1?! That's totally insane. A more rational idea would be to do something that extreme if you got over 2/3 of the vote.
If you can change the legal basis of your sovereignty with 50%+1, your country is destined to be a backwater, because crazy fads are a thing that easily can touch 50%+1 of the people. But at that point, other feedback loops kick in, and it is really hard to get over 60% on just a fad. If the UK had been putting their past decisions of this magnitude up to that sort of vote, there wouldn't even be a UK!