Tim Berners-Lee Attains Knighthood 539
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."
Wiki-Minded Guy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Knighthood... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fuck Tim Berners-Lee (Score:0, Interesting)
I love my national traditions, heritage and "outdated" ways - It's what keeps us Brits from being totally assimilated into the rest of bland western culture of crap movies, worse music and painful political-correctness which is hemorrhaging from the United States of America.
God Save the Queen!
ARPANET Video (Score:4, Interesting)
Hello. I'm Stephen Cole, and I'm going to mess u ^ (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's something much more interesting, an interview with him - Tim (available in Proprietary err Windows Media format).
ClickOnline [bbcworld.com]
(Please don't put too much into the fact that the pageid is 666.)
A nice guy, well deserved (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The key to his success: he made it free (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone should read the classic paper [mit.edu] from Richard Gabriel that discusses this "good enough is best" in the context of lisp and unix. Although it's a little old now, it's still a good read even for those with no interest in lisp.
Re:Serious Question (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm
I am not sure that we do pay that much homage to them, certainly the Queen's Golden Jubilee Celebrations were tiny compared to those that happened for her silver jubilee (celebrating 50 & 25 years of being crowned).
Yes there are a number of British people that do care a great deal about the royal family, there are a sizeable number that believe we should have followed our French Cousins and got rid of them years ago and there whole lot of people that are just plain indifferent about them...
I certainly did not understand the public mourning for Diana (both here in the UK and abroad), It certainly pissed me off that on the day she died all but 1 of the tv channels abandoned all other coverage to only report her death (and the one that showed normal coverage then had complaints leveled at it for not showing enough respect).
I certainly wish they would abolish them (and the House of Lords at the same time)...though it may be bad for Uk PLc's Tourism figures I believe it would be a price worth paying...hmmm in fact if we borrowed Madame Le Guillotine from our French Cousins we may even increase our tourism income...:-)
Re:It amazes me... (Score:2, Interesting)
This may be due in large part to the vague definition of "rail transit", but it still sounds like the name should have survived the last 200 years in the public conciousness.
Similarly, a lot of the names of early computer pioneers change around in importance depending on what advances you consider to be the most groundbreaking. Sure, Eckert and Mauchly were important and should be venerated, but if you think ENIAC is overhyped and EDSAC/Z1/COLOSSUS/Mark I should be the one remembered as the first computer, then the identity, and even the nationality, of the people you want the public to venerate most changes. And there are cases to be made in support of each of these machines, some stronger than others.
Re:What if... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Serious Question (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the British government isn't constitutional in the same sense as the US government - there's no single document called "the British constitution". The founders of the US followed the European rationalist tradition: decide how the country should be run, write it down and embalm it for all time. (Until you change your mind - France has had five constitutions in 200 years.) In contrast, Britain's constitution follows the empirical tradition: if it ain't broke, don't fix it; when it breaks, patch it. So the British constitution is a messy tangle of legislation, common law and long-standing conventions, developed over time in a piecemeal fashion. Sort of a "release early, release often" approach to constitutional law. If the British constitution is Linux then the US constitution is Mach. (And the Magna Carta is Unix, the European Convention on Human Rights is the BSD networking stack, and the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act was written by SCO. Enough of that analogy.)
The book Systemantics, reviewed on Slashdot recently, claims that loosely-coupled systems developed in a piecemeal fashion are more stable than well-designed, tightly-coupled systems. I don't know if that's true of constitutions, but Britain has had a relatively peaceful (if slow) development from feudalism to near-democracy. Compared with almost any other country on Earth that's remarkably stable - even Belgium had a revolution.
Second, I think you're wide of the mark when you say that homage is paid to archaic traditions. British people are (in my experience) rather skeptical and cynical compared to Americans. If we tolerate archaic institutions it probably has more to do with suspicion of anyone who wants to rebuild the country in his own image (*cough*Blair*cough*) than with veneration of the past. When I visit the US I'm struck by the number of flags on display and the generally jingoistic atmosphere (and not just in the last two years). Many people seem to treat the US constitution as a sacred text, so I wonder whether there isn't more homage paid to archaic institutions in the US than in Britain (although the institutions are somewhat less archaic).
- Ernest GellnerRe:Fuck Tim Berners-Lee (Score:1, Interesting)
To Americans, being knighted is just below winning an MTV People's Choice award. ;-)
Who NEEDS it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted? (Score:2, Interesting)
A common myth is that you can't use the title outside of the United Kingdom, or that you can't use the title in the United States, etc. This is rooted in the United State's constitutional requirement that officers of the federal government and the several states not accept titles from foreign governments. This is known as Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution of the United States of America. My understanding is that there isn't anything intrinsic to the honor which nullifies it outside of the british isles or the commonwealth.
Gongs for Civil Servants (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't you have to be English to be knighted? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it's a no-go for Canadians, who are barred from accepting foreign honours. Just ask Terry Matthews [bbc.co.uk] and (especially) the notorious ex-Canadian Lord Black of Crossharbour [warrenkinsella.com].
What Canadians do have is the Order of Canada [www.gg.ca], which is essentially a knighthood without the titles (sir etc...). The Order of Canada is awarded by the Governor-General on behalf of the Queen of Canada, who just happens to be the same person as the Queen of England - who isn't allowed to bestow titles on Canadians. Simple, eh?
In other news, for a good review of the British honours system see here [wikipedia.org].
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gore had nothing to do with Internet creation (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, yes and no. The case of the first letter is significant here. The term "internet" was used in the ARPAnet community by the late 70's. But the term "Internet" was consciously introduced in the early 80's with a more precise meaning.
There were a lot of early writings that attempted to make a distinction. An "internet" was more or less what we now call a LAN or an "intranet", a collection of machines using one or more types of comm hardware, with IP used to make them all play nice together. There were (and still are) many "internets". Each may consist of a number of different (hardware) networks, but at the IP level, they can be treated as a single network. The IP protocol intercedes for the software to make the hardware networks interoperate.
The "Internet" was conceived as a top-level internet that connected all of them as a single world-wide network. This was significant not because it needed new technology, but because it was to be a permanent part of the world's communications, not under the control of any single agency or government. The significant innovation here was the idea of a permanent comm system with distributed, cooperating management.
People in academia had talked about this, of course. But by the early 80's, it really hadn't been done. There was a world-wide ARPAnet, yes, and lots of little internets in different organizations. But their interconnections were partial and transitory. I well remember the frustrations of trying to send email from within one company or school to someone in another. At that time, the UUCP email system was often much more reliable, because its store-and-forward approach didn't depend on routing and permanent connections. Even today, with much of the Internet using transient dialup connections, email depends on a store-and-forward scheme, and most home machines and portables can't put things on the web, because they don't have permanent connections. So the Internet with a capital 'I' still hasn't really been fully implemented.
Al Gore rightly deserves a lot of credit for funding development of "the Internet", which happened in the 80's. He can't take much credit for "internet" development, which happened mostly in the 70's.
Of course, if you use an OS that doesn't make case distinctions, you might not understand the difference.
$$$ for knighthood (Score:2, Interesting)
there was a time when sir mick was persona non grata in england, not for his rock-n-roll lifestyle, but because he was failing to pay taxes on his millions...