Tim Berners-Lee Attains Knighthood

sandalwood writes "Tim Berners-Lee has been promoted to Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for coming up with that 'intarweb' thing we all use. Characteristically modest, he said that he was an ordinary person who created something that 'just happened to work out.' He will join luminaries like Isaac Newton, Francis Drake, and... Mick Jagger."

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[dotwaffle]

No, you don't have to be English, you can get an honourary knighthood. And Tim Berners-Lee IS English. And ARPA didn't invent the world-wide-web. Just the internet (www implies HTTP and HTML)

Knighthood...

[Ianoo]

You guys do know that getting the KBE is completely different to becoming a Knight and being called "Sir", don't you? I couldn't care less (down with the Monarchy), but if you really want to know the BBC explains it all as usual.

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[The Famous Druid]

1. No, you don't have to be English.
A great many Scots, Welsh, Irish, Canadians, etc have been knighted.

2. Some things weren't invented by Americans, the Web is one of them. Deal.

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[BenjyD]

Queen's official title:

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

UK!=England.

So I guess anyone in the commonwealth can be given an honour. However, TBL is British, so it doesn't matter.

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[be-fan]

Tim Breners-Lee *is* English. He was born in London and graduated from Oxford. While ARPANET was an American project, Breners-Lee worked on the web while he was at CERN, and it was first made available at CERN in 1990.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Knighthood...

[Politas]

That's funny, the article (BBC) certainly refers to him as "Sir Tim", and says he has been knighted.

Re:Knighthood...

[googleking]

errr - no it isn't.

KBE does mean Sir Tim.

See here [bbc.co.uk].

Exactly!

[Politas]

Sir Tim HAS been knighted. He didn't get an OBE or some other lesser award. The parent post is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[shadowcabbit]

Ah, here's the correction, from some article on knights in E! Online (hardly a credible source, but the first credible source I could find after 5 minutes googling):

A few Americans--Rudy Giuliani in 2001, for example--have received what's called Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. American knights can't use Sir before their names, but they can choose to add KBE to the end. So, the next Indiana Jones movie will be directed by Steven Spielberg KBE.

OK, then, that's settled.

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[surprise_audit]

And of course, CERN is in Geneva, Switzerland. So, not only was the Web invented by a Brit, it was invented in Switzerland, which is possibly even further away from North America than the UK...

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[kalidasa]

On Americans receiving honors from foreign states:

US Constitution [house.gov]

I.9.8: No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted?

[rsidd]

You just have to be a member of the commonwealth,

But not from a republic (like India). You have to owe allegiance to the Queen, like Canadians and Australians.

Re:Knighthood...

[MrCreosote]

BBC link explains nothing

This [wikipedia.org] explains all.

There is a difference between KBE and CBE - the K confers knighthood

Re:Wiki-Minded Guy

[mmcshane]

Interesting that you put it that way. Berners-Lee's vision for "Intuitive Hypertext Editing" [w3.org] is very similar to wiki technology. However where wikis work by shoehorning editing into [rapidly aging] browser technology, TBL envisions a user agent that doesn't differentiate between browsing and editing. In other words, every page you view is editable by the user and changes are sent back to the server via PUT or POST.

There's a mozilla extension that moves in this direction but I can't quite pull it out of my brain at the moment...

Re:...hang on for the peerage

[geoswan]

FWIW, Sir Tim's gong, Knight-Commander of the Order of the British Empire is of higher precedence [wikipedia.org] than Sir Mick's gong, as a Knight Bachelor [wikipedia.org]. I wondered whether Mick didn't get admitted to an Order because it might cheapen the experience for the existing members?

Re:Tsu Doe Nihm

[K8Fan]

Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. What Al Gore claimed was:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

A statement that is, in fact, true. All any politician can do to assist in any venture is to get a bill written to provide funding. Al Gore did that. At the time, he was considered a space case by his fellow Senators for insisting that the Internet would be important. Phillip Hallam-Baker of the web development team at CERN said:

In the early days of the Web, he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted. He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep.

...and the creators of TCP/IP said this:

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the Nati

Re:Serious Question

[AaronGTurner]

Could someone please explain to me the British fetish for its Monarchy ? The government is now a constitutional democracy, so why is there so much homage paid to the archaic traditions and figureheads of the past?

I'm English and I can't explain it. Mind you, the constitutional monarchy part only really dates from 1688 and the 'Glorious Revolution'. (Dutchman turns up with army and says 'Cheers, I'll be king now' and parliament says 'ok, but subject to these conditions', and the Dutchman says 'ok, deal'). This was followed by the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Very few people in Britain are actually fascinated with the royal family other than in the way that they are fascinated by Eastenders (soap opera) stars' offscreen antics.

A great example of this is the insane media land-grab over Princess Diana's death. Hundreds of thousands of people die in traffic accidents each year - why was hers so deserving of three whole months of media coverage, weeping, wailing, and moaning?

Princess Diana occupied a similar part of the British consciousness as Jackie Kennedy in the USA. Imagine if she'd been killed in a car wreck in Paris in 1968 with Onassis.

Re:F**k Tim Berners-Lee

[greenpanda]

Parent above is correct, the Queen does not choose any of the recipients of honours. They are chosen by 10 commitees of civil servents who put suggestions to an 11th committee to make final decisions.

Awards are not only given to famous people, but to people who make a difference and are the pride of the UK. My old headmaster has an OBE.

About the Queen using the internet for porn though, I know that's not true. She gets the Sunday Sport for her porn fix.

Re:Fuck Tim Berners-Lee

[RabidStoat]

The award is really from the government, they draw up the list of honours from various sources. The Queen presents it as she is the current head of state, there are very few awards that the Queen personally gifts.

Re:what's the humbug about Drake?

[wagemonkey]

It is actually consistent with James - he was James I - ie the previous five Scots James were ignored.
The numbering is of Monarchs of England - one of the consequence of being the senior partner/conqueror? Wales was under English rule by then so it wasn't just England, and there were some colonies in places like Virginia etc...

The Name You're Looking for is Declan McCullagh

[FreeUser]

Al Gore made an honest claim about something that he was justly proud of. And somebody deliberately misquoted him to make it appear that he was claiming to have "invented the internet".

That "someone" who deliberately misrepresented what Al Gore said (and whose misrepresentation was then repeated by other, lazy journalists ad nauseum) would be Declan McCullagh of WiReD magazine, whose yellow journalism redefines the color yellow, and who enjoys enough of a rapport with slashdot editors to have his byline placed on any story of his slashdot links to (unlike, say, this story here, and just about every other story linked to).

He single handedly drew attention to the LiViD (Linux DVD) project by publishing a hysterical article about DVD pirates writing software (before it was even working, and knowing full well that the project wasn't about copying DVDs, it was about playing them on Linux, something one couldn't do back then. He subscribed to the mailing list, he knew exactly what he was doing.)

His career is littered with the destroyed public image of more people and projects than I can reasonably count, and his deliberate, premeditated sabataging of Al Gore by deliberately misquoting and misrepresenting him places him at the lowest level of journalism ... right down there with Fox News and the National Equirer.

Re:Serious Question

[horace]

The glorious revolution of 1688 was not exactly a revolution and most of Cromwell's changes didn't last. Neither really serves to undermine the point, America had a far more brutal civil war only 140 years ago.

Religious differences had little to do with Ireland's problems which were more to do with rule from abroad. The split on religious lines is relatively new and specific to Ulster. Many of the chief revoltionaries in Ireland were protestant, Wolfe Tone and Parnell for example.

Re:$$$ for knighthood

[laura20]

Not really. The 'pay' part of it is that people who bring a lot of money into the British economy is one of the categories of people who get honors, along with humanitarians et al. It's actually a nicely democratic effect -- it means people like the Beatles get it fairly young, honors aren't reserved entirely to the fossilized and the current government's political supporters.