Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton 217
mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004. Berners-Lee had this to say about the honor: 'I am very proud to be British, it is great fun to be British and this award is just an amazing honour.'"
Strange, fortune just printed this out for me... (Score:1, Interesting)
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Re:And typically there are some doubters (Score:5, Interesting)
He is very humble about it as he does not see it as a pure invention, the press on the other hand just can't be bothered to learn. The web needs an inventor. Did Edison invent the light bulb?
Something in the human condition needs this widget here was made by inventor Goosebury. Why I don't know, maybe we understand ideas better when we have a psychology to project the idea onto.
More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... (Score:3, Interesting)
At the same awards ceremony, Jane Tomlinson (who suffers with a terminal cancer) was awarded "Greatest British Campaigner". I think that is just a little bit more significant. She has raised £1,150,000 (~USD$2,170,970) for Cancer Research.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/ 4215561.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Looked up some historical links... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a bunch of fun historical documents.
- Screenshot of Tim-Berner Lee's web browser/editor gizmo [w3.org] (apparently two apps in one suite, kinda like Mozilla?)
- Web page (from 1992) describing a very early version of HTML [w3.org]
- Description of the web (from 1992) [w3.org]*
- The original WWW proposal from 1989 [w3.org]**
- History of the web [vt.edu]
* = It tells you why the WWW was made... "Tim decided that high energy physics needed a networked hypertext system and CERN was an ideal site for the development of wide-area hypertext ideas"
** = excerpt: "Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990."
Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bla bla. Above figures made up, etc. But you see my point?
Re:More important than Sir Berners-Lee is ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another, more "pragmatic" way to measure the value of what someone did (versus another person) is to see which of them used what the other created. Did TBL use money that Tomlinson raised in his efforts to create and/or expand the usefulness of the World Wide Web? I would suspect not.
However, is it likely that Tomlinson used the World Wide Web in raising the money that she so admirably raised? I would suspect so.
So in the long run, Tomlinson's goals were BETTERED by TBL's achievements, and not the other way around. This isn't to say that neither achievement was important; on the contrary, they are both very important. However, since TBL's is the enabler for others, it can safely rank higher than others on the importance list.
Re:And typically there are some doubters (Score:3, Interesting)
No. That's why Edison was forced to go into partnership with Joseph Swan who beat him to it, forming the Swan Edison United Electric Light Co. (Ediswan). After Edison bought Swan out he re-wrote history to take the credit, as he normally did with other people's inventions.
There's not much Edison himself did invent other than FUD and the invention-as-slavery, your-thoughts-belong-to-us conditions which prevail to this day in the IP clauses of large companies.
TWW
Getting a little more personal on this... (Score:1, Interesting)
I make no such prediction. I am aware that my feelings about national pride are in the severe minority.
National pride is a social imperative that helps keep a country cohesive and working together. The United States would have had a much harder time getting through WWII without it. It generated the amazing cash flow to New York after 9/11. The examples go on and on.
Do you really need national pride to help other people?
My theory about you: in forsaking national pride, you seek to distance yourself from the "common man," because you view him as lazy and ignorant
I don't "seek" to distance myself from the common man. I think putting oneself on a pedestal is an unhealthy and dangerous thing. But you have to realize that some people are just better in some things than others. I lack social skills, physical strength and a number of other things. Does that mean I'm a bad person? I hope not. Should people treat me differently? Perhaps they might treat me accordingly. Should they treat me poorly? I don't think so. The same goes for intelligence.
Is it so wrong to recognize that you are smarter than some people? It doesn't mean you have to belittle people or treat them like idiots. Why must being better than anyone at anything and knowing it translate to being pompous? Sure, I get frustrated with stupidity and ignorance, but that doesn't mean I'm an ass about it. And please, don't picture me as some typical computer geek who thinks he knows it all. On the contrary, I'm an unsuccessful nobody... and not much of a computer geek.
As for laziness, as long as someone is self-reliant and not an unappreciative burden, I don't see a problem with laziness. It's only natural. I think people should be free to be lazy if they so choose.
especially them dern rednecks
I'm going to dig a hole here and share my feelings on this one, however misguided they may seem. I used to be active duty military and I was in a career field that was highly populated by said folk. The issue I had with the beer-swilling, tobacco-chewing, nascar-watching types was a culture clash. These folks were plenty intelligent in many matters, especially job related mechanics, which in many regards they were my superiror. But, regardless of who was better than who at what, we seemed to have some tension from misunderstanding one another as far as lifestyle and motives and such. So... do I get a little bitter and hostile around redneck types? Eventually, it seems. Do I judge them at first sight? I can't seem to help it. Do I treat them like they're subhuman? Absolutely not, because I've met amazing people of all nationalities, races and cultures. But still, I find it difficult not to stereotype, given the fair amount of homogenity in some cultures.
You'll note that I keep bringing up race and it's because I feel that national pride is akin to racial pride, which is why it is a source of some disgust for me. Nationalism may bring people together (like racial pride), but in the process, it also tends to draw lines in the sand.
What a swap: national pride for selfish pride.
How about national pride for global humanitarianism?
Anyway... feel free to shoot holes in my logic. I'm not above being wrong.