Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!