Five Internet Founders Share First £1 Million Engineering 'Nobel' Prize 55
judgecorp writes "The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, has been shared by five founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. In addition to Sir Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the other recipients are Cerf's colleague Bob Kahn, creator of the Mosaic browser Marc Andreessen, and a much less well known Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, aged 82. Working at Bell Labs, Pouzin invented the datagram protocols on which Cerf and Kahn based the TCP/IP protocols. The judges originally planned the prize for a maximum of three winners, but that had to change, thanks to the collaborative nature of the Internet. All the recipients praised their colleagues and pointed out that engineering is always a team effort: 'Fortunately we are still alive,' joked Pouzin. 'It is forty years since we did the things for which we are being honoured.' Awarded in the U.K., the prize is an international effort to create an engineering counterpart to the Nobels. The judges considered entries from 65 countries."
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
I am a conservative, and as such hate 90% of the 'informed' opinions that you liberal east coast elites banty about here
Whatisthisidonteven.....? Uh, buddy, just for the record, I drive a pick-up, own 6 firearms, deer hunt, went to a small rural Baptist university, and work a manual labor job. While I live on the east coast, I'm pretty far from being a "liberal elite". So if you are conservative, then you give other conservative people a bad name by making assumptions and then attacking someone based upon those wrong assumptions. It's people like you that made me stop self identifying as Republican.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think he's a troll trying to make conservatives look bad.
I'm a moderate with liberal leanings, and as far as I have seen, that style of conservative only lives in the imaginations and misconceptions of reality found in the far left kooks. The far right kooks are quite a different creature all together.
Actually, if you look at their mindsets and logical failings, the far left and far right look a lot alike, the only difference is the ideology they choose to wield.
G. WIlliam Domhoff makes the same point (Score:2)
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.html [ucsc.edu]
"Although the [extreme] Right and [extreme] Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the simil
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I am a conservative, and as such hate 90% of the 'informed' opinions that you liberal east coast elites banty about here. However, as much as I hate Al Gore, I have to give him a large share of of the credit / blame for making the internets what it has become today. A lot of you uber edumicated elite either forgot, or are not old enough to remember what the internets was like bfore it became democritized e.g. commercialized. So yes Al gore rightly or wrongly had a large part in fucking up the interwebs. Before we had to use USENET and NNTP to search for porn. Now you faggots just engage in one big circle jerk on Facey Book. Seriously, I wish all you faggots would just get off my internet, and leave me and Al alone.
and what was wrong with that?
Re:Poor Al Gore (Score:4, Informative)
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I think (I hope?) that everyone knows the context and what he actually said. The jibes continue because the claim he actually did make was also pretty out-of-proportion to what he actually did, and hyperbolizing something as satire or comedy is a pretty common thing.
Re:Poor Al Gore (Score:5, Informative)
That's actually not true either. Al Gore didn't invent the idea of internetworking, or any of the protocols, but he was in fact instrumental in making it the "Internet" (big I) that businesses and individuals could connect to and actually use. In more technical terms, his bill (the "Gore bill") worked to transition the NSFNet away from a research system and towards, well, the Internet we have today. If that weren't enough, the bill also sent the funding to NSCA, which they used to create Mosaic.
Among the many technological achievements that resulted from the funding of the Gore Bill, was the development of Mosaic in 1993... Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (recipients of this award):
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
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Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
More of these outlandish AGW claims... ;)
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It wasn't out of proportion at all. He did the one thing the engineers absolutely had to have but couldn't do: he got if funded. He believed in it and could see the vision of it. Without that, there simply would be no interenet. Money makes the world go 'round. So, I think it's fair to say he was absolutely instrumental in making it happen. It should also be noted that he has never attempted to garner any credit for the internet in a technical fashion.
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seriously snopes?
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Um, it says right there on Snopes that Al Gore said he created the internet. Did you actually read the article before posting it?
Snopes goes on to argue that he didn't actually mean what he said, but that doesn't mean he didn't say it.
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Oh please, you're intentionally misquoting the guy now. Look at the snopes page:
Argue semantics all you want, but he did say he created the internet. It's right there, clear as day. Forget what he wanted to say,
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"Took the initiative on creating" != "invented".
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Seriously? Let me explain with an example.
politician: Decides the streets need to be cleaned. So they create funding and hire street sweepers.
IN an interview thay woulod say "I tool the initiative in creting the street sweepers.
Now, do you think he is saying he generically engineered street sweepers, invented brooms and truck? Or do you think he is talking about making the funds available to have street sweepers?
This is high school level stuff. So either you are so wrapped up in a belief you can't actually
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They're leaving the self-proclaimed inventor of the internet out of his 1/5 million pounds? Guess he'll just have to settle for the $100 million he made selling his TV network.
Why isn't this getting a troll mod? Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, that was an invention of the right wing Republicans. The right wingers also like to slam him for profiting on the sale of a TV network. Text book hypocrascy given the only thing sacred to the conservative right are profits. I guess a liberal making a profit is evil to them.
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Nothing is funny if you're a republican, and as a republican I don't find this funny.
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There are many comments on Al Gore on slashdot. I did not know what it was refering too. Apparently it comes from a quote in 1999.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp [snopes.com]
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I'm Message Approval Man, and I approve this message.
Re: The internet & the web? (Score:2)
Um..websites wouldn't exist without Sir Tim! You may mean Marc's addition. :-)
I take it the honorees must be living (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise, Paul Baran (packet switching) and Jon Postel (RFC editor for IP, TCP, and many others) would probably deserve a share.
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Yes, P. Baran is the first person I was thinking of. The whole idea of packet switching (as an opposite to leased lines) became the foundation of both DARPA and X.25 networks (and many others like Frame Relay). If I remember correctly, he wrote the paper as some kind of research project.
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Also for packet switching, Donald Davies of the UK's National Physical Laboratory.
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Not sure if you're talking about the WWW or TCP/IP or what... but the WWW was never conceived as an application development environment. That was clumsily hot-glued on later. It was originally just a protocol for serving hypertext documents. Of course it was just fine for that purpose.
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Nah, St Mary's is still in but I wouldn't get excited until they beat Memphis. Then we're talking about the end times.
Can we get back on topic? (Score:3)
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Al Gore did word the statement poorly, but not enough to make a big deal out of. It's just a fun meme that has sticking power.
It's roughly comparable to Palin's "I can see Russia from my house". Actually, she said "parts of Alaska", not her house. However, it's now forever stuck in meme-dom due to a funny SNL skit.
Half-truths just sometimes have sticking power.
Related side joke: Mitt was going to make Palin his Ambassador to Russia to cut costs: she could walk to work.
Shouldn't that be an English prize? (Score:1)
>> The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £, awarded in the U.K., an international effort
One of those facts does not fit.
Re: Shouldn't that be an English prize? (Score:2)
Yeah. You forgot Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. ;-)
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You mean Britain's suburbs? WaaaOOO!
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And some wonder why people vote for Alex Salmond...!
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Leaving aside your confusion between England and the uk, the prize was created by the uk government, but is judged by an international panel, and is financed by a bunch of multinational corporations. So there is no paradox.
Marc Andreessen, (Score:2)
Purely a publicity stunt (Score:5, Informative)
None of these individuals need the money. Any one of them could raise $1 million from VCs in a few days, based on their reputation.
This money should have been used to fund new innovative ideas, but I suppose that wouldn't have grabbed the headlines for the main sponsors:
BAE Systems
British Gas
BP
GlaxoSmithKline
Jaguar Land Rover
National Grid
Shell
Siemens
Sony
Tata Steel.
It was just a stunt, and a fairly cheap one for companies of that magnitude.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The point of this prize is not to further science or innovation, but to promote engineering by celebrating notable engineering achievements and contributors to those achievements. Seems lik
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And is the Nobel prize similarly a stunt?
I don't think there's anything wrong with rewarding tim burners-lee for example. We all owe him a lot. He literally changed all of our lives for the better.
And for those that don't need the money, there's a fair chance that they will use the money to invest in promising next generation technology, anyway.
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We owe him a lot.. except for capitalizing his name, cause fuck that guy.
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When I'm typing on a mobile, you get the capitals auto-correct gives. Life's too short for doing shift on a touch screen. Though if I thought there was any chance he'd be reading, I'd have gone the extra mile out of respect.