I couldn't mention everyone. Good example, feel free to add to the list.

Except they were not.

Newton is not acient history. He is firmly modern era. And his theories are still in productive use today. Because he was not wrong.

But even going back as far as actual ancient history, for example Democrit was absolutely correct. And the theories of Archimedes are still in productive use today. Because he, also, was not wrong.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/...

You can develop an intuition for quantum mechanics if you play with it enough. In the same way you develop an intuition for gravity, although maybe not always intentionally. In the same way you develop intuition about anything you develop intuition about.

Our senses are well suited to observing quantum mechanical effects, especially those involving light. We can see light without needing special instruments. (I say although I do wear spectacles.) There is a lot of fun to be had with polarised glasses and mirrors. And lasers! Lasers are fun.

Mathematicians also develop mathematical intuition by playing with mathematical concepts. That kind of insight has led to surprising discoveries.

But, of course, intuition can also be misleading. The proof of the theorem is in the calculating.

TL;DR: Humans can actually understand reality. That's how we have science, in the world in which we actually live.

You mean Great Britain?

I don't see how that is relevant. All islands, private or not, are subject to the law of the land, regardless of how big the nation or nations claiming that land.

Some governments have declared human genetic engineering illegal, others have not. (The government of GB, the UK, seems to have no problem with it.) But the designer babies themselves are always human, and being human isn't banned anywhere.

It was an observable fact in the 1880s whenPaul Lafargue wrote that Capitalists don't want workers to be productive.

He cited how letting workers sleep more than four hours a night by reducing work hours per day led to increases in production just when the markets were getting saturated. The owners reduced the work hours in an attempt to reduce productivity, to maintain scarcity and keep prices from falling too much, but alarminly their policy had the opposite effect.

He went on to say that the universal employment envisioned by the Communists was a horrible idea (for which he was disowned by his father-in-law).

Then there is David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs, which lists some of the ways in which the modern work place is designed to destroy as much productivity as possible.

Of course it has to be on record, but those are rarely published in newspapers.

It is possible to get married and not tell anyone (other than the official and a witness). You can keep a marriage secret from nosy relations.

The point is that it is a personal matter. It is difficult to get married in anything other than person.

Ah. So cat is the malware.

So: host, nslookup, dig, dnsip, and related tools are malware now? Including libresolv, and equivalents in Rust and Go? Also the Python standard modules, of course?

It is already banned in the USA.

Although there is nothing preventing an executive order making it twice as forbidden.

The first two designer babies were twin girls in China. November 2018. After their successful birth, the treatment was immediately banned in China.

(In contrast, test tube babies are still legal. The first artificial human was a girl in 1978,)

Designer babies are banned in most of the world, for some reason. It is nice to see that apparently the UK is an exception. Although technically these are not designer babies, as their DNA hasn't been altered. Donor eggs aren't really a radical concept.

Some people do get married in secret. It is a contract between the people getting married. It is rarely done by proxy.

But if you say it isn't personal, you won't have a problem getting married to an object or abstract concept in your absence and without your knowledge until after the fact. It's nothing personal after all, it's, how did you put it:

Are you talking about adoption?

Amaya: The last of the web authoring browsers. I remember it fondly.
It isn't fast, but it can do everything, as long as "everything" doesn't include XHTML2 and HTML5.

In practice, Chrome is the reference implementation. Whenever Chrome breaks compatibility, it is every other browser that is broken.
The W3C was created to prevent exactly that from happening.

Which is why the WHAT-WG is now the officially inofficial web standards body. It documents Chrome in a way that makes it look as if it wasn't all about Chrome. They call it a "living document", which means there will never be a standard for HTML5. Shame, because there are some useful things in there, like definition lists.

HTTP is not connectionless, it is based on TCP, which emulates telephone connections.
HTTP 1.1 has support for re-using an open TCP connection.
(HTTP/3 uses QUIC instead of TCP, which does connection multiplexing instead.)

HTTP is stateless, or at least it's supposed to be. It's a request-response protocol for documents. For that purpose, it has largely replaced Gopher and FTP.
It has the advantage of reporting the MIME type of the document.

HTTP and HTML date from 1989, which is a little more than 26 years old. Closer to 36. (I guess the naughties never happened?)
HTTPS dates from 1994, JavaScript dates from 1995, and CSS dates from 1996.
HTTP/1.1 dates from 1997.

There is the Gemini Protocol which has all the advantages of HTTP(S), but is much cleaner and simpler and faster.

Google does not seem to like it.

Anyway, neither HTTP nor Gopher nor Gemini are very good at being hypertext protocols. They don't do versioning, they don't do back-references, and what support there is for distributed caches in HTTP ("proxies") doesn't work very well - it is designed for reducing traffic, not for providing redundancy. (BitTorrent does that better.)

Support for gzip in connections is very useful. It means that compressed documents can keep their multipurpose internet mail exchange type, rather than the server reporting an application/gzip with no clue what to do with it. And text comresses very well.
And re-using existing connections reduces latency, because you don't need a three-way handshake for every document.
Those are solutions, not band-aids, but you are correct in that they don't solve problems other than the ones that they solve.

Connection multiplexing, what HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 do, only increases overhead. It belongs to the problem space, not to the solution space.

The script tag in HTML allows specifying which scripting language to use, but in practice, only JavaScript is relevant, and that is not guaranteed to work. The venerable Lynx Browser/a> simply ignores it, as explicitly allowed by the W3 specification. In theory, you could implement a VM for any scripting language in your browser, like Dart, Coffescript, or Lua, but nobody bothers.
Probably for good reason. Injecting random executable code (like JavaScript) into documents (like HTML) is generally considered a severe security risk. Remember the grief that Microsoft got for executable macros in Word and WMF documents. Zero-click remote code execution.

HTML has a few severe short-comings when compared to more mature mark-up languages like ROFF or LaTEX.
For one, it does not distinguish between spaces between words and spaces between sentences, which makes text unnecessarily harder to read. How can you tell if a period at the end of a word makes the end of a sentence or an abbreviation?

Then there is the ambiguity of paragraphs. XHTML allows paragraphs to be nested, HTML4 and HTML5 do not. Now, you might think that nesting paragraphs doesn't make any sense, but HTML documents are full of div-Tags for structure. There is no standard way of grouping a picture with a caption, for example. Sections are separated by headers, but HTML layout engines generally don't treat the text between sections as one unit. But why should you need a tag specifically for for separating paragraphs anyway, except for nesting?

HTML does have the distinction of being media agnostic. Where DVI and PDF have strict page layouts, HTML doesn't care if it is rendered on an old black-and-white television screen, an RGB laser projector, a sheet of A4 paper, a sheet of US Letter paper, a text-to-speech system, or a Braille line display, or anything else. How an HTML document is rendered is inevitably and by necessity up to the user agent. And so it does not provide the typical 12 section layout from print media.

It is not particularly fit for the purpose of author-defined layouts. That's what PDF is for, which can also contain forms and random executable code.
And of course HTML is used for exactly that.

Does it? The BCC is one those web sites that still work in Lynx, NetSurf, and Dillo. That is not a good example of what is going wrong on the web.

The main problem is the web frameworks that are desperatly trying to re-invent X11 with extra steps and more overhead.