thrillbill wrote:

Maybe I should look at some of these posts as "humor" but I detect a couple REAL  American haters. Scary to think well educated people on this  post could be so filled with venom.

I agree with you, thrillbill.  America's image has become tarnished under Bush, but if there has to be one superpower in the world I know I would still want it to be America.  China, anybody?  Russia?

Nice post Cottman.  Of course the truth is that useful artefacts and innovations are invented, developed and designed by people in social situations and markets rather than countries. They are unlikely to have been driven by national pride. So when their less talented compatriots come along decades or even centuries later and claim such and such an artifact as Chinese, Egyptian, Swiss, Russian, Scots or even American it is ignoring the connectedness of sometimes ancient collaboration and information dissemination mechanisms. Further, some technology transfers and developments get wrongly attributed. A recent American film attributes the breaking of the Enigma code to Americans. But was Turing British or Italian - he wasn't American. He was certainly homosexual but thought that unimportant. My guess is that if he was proud of anything  he was most proud of being a mathematician.

 No one person can be attributed with the "invention" of modern computing and nearly all work is done incrementally. In the early days of electronic computing there were three significant machines being built in the UK and probably as many in the States. The personalities behind these machines were not friends but they all read each other's papers avidly. The original internet was set up as a response to Russian missile threats in America but Sir Tim Berners-Lee's coding standard appeared at the right time, defined by the decision to allow commerce on the internet, to spread like wild-fire making the World Wide Web the dominant standard. The secodary factor in its wildfire acceptance was that it was simple and elegant. Places like CERN don't look at someone's nationality before giving them resources to develop their ideas and to collaborate on the funded project. Often the most valuable outcomes of large scientific funded projects are unintended fall-out such as Berner-Lee's simple standards or teflon which is widely thought to have come out of the space race.

It's the narrow nationalism that is the problem, not the inventors, developers or designers who more often than not see themselves as global players.

You know, Mr. O'Booze, you can write crap forever, but why the fuck do you claim that I wrote it or said it?
Quote:
There are many different people living in the wasteland of USA though all are boring, and stupid and lack humour.

Gee, kenc on another thread was kind of trying to deny this idiotic anti-Americanism.

there is one thing we know for sure..American humour lacks irony.

555 wrote:

Nice post Cottman.  Of course the truth is that useful artefacts and innovations are invented, developed and designed by people in social situations and markets rather than countries. They are unlikely to have been driven by national pride. So when their less talented compatriots come along decades or even centuries later and claim such and such an artifact as Chinese, Egyptian, Swiss, Russian, Scots or even American it is ignoring the connectedness of sometimes ancient collaboration and information dissemination mechanisms. Further, some technology transfers and developments get wrongly attributed. A recent American film attributes the breaking of the Enigma code to Americans. But was Turing British or Italian - he wasn't American. He was certainly homosexual but thought that unimportant. My guess is that if he was proud of anything  he was most proud of being a mathematician.

 No one person can be attributed with the "invention" of modern computing and nearly all work is done incrementally. In the early days of electronic computing there were three significant machines being built in the UK and probably as many in the States. The personalities behind these machines were not friends but they all read each other's papers avidly. The original internet was set up as a response to Russian missile threats in America but Sir Tim Berners-Lee's coding standard appeared at the right time, defined by the decision to allow commerce on the internet, to spread like wild-fire making the World Wide Web the dominant standard. The secodary factor in its wildfire acceptance was that it was simple and elegant. Places like CERN don't look at someone's nationality before giving them resources to develop their ideas and to collaborate on the funded project. Often the most valuable outcomes of large scientific funded projects are unintended fall-out such as Berner-Lee's simple standards or teflon which is widely thought to have come out of the space race.

It's the narrow nationalism that is the problem, not the inventors, developers or designers who more often than not see themselves as global players.

Your posting reminds me of that excellent TV series, "Connections," done by James Burke, I believe.  I certainly agree that no one person "invented" the computer (most certainly, not Ada).  But I never said this, did I.

I think I said that America invented the Internet. I did not mention the more important TCP/IP protocol which is today omnipresent.  Definitely, the WWW add-on and HTML came later.  But I believe that the decision to permit the commercialization of the Internet came even later.

I can understand how you came to think that I am a "narrow nationalist," because I was replying to the absurd posting by Mr. O'Booze.  According to him, the only thing America has ever invented is "friendly fire."  That gives me a good laugh.  When, millions of years ago, Ourgh and Blourgh were out hunting mammoths -- Blourgh took aim at the mammoth's eye, and then shot Ourgh by mistake!  Whoops!  Human error!  This year, the Americans call this sort of fuck-up "friendly fire."  But I am absolutely certain that Americans were not the first people on this planet to  screw up.

Perhaps we could all agree on that suggestion?

homintern is on your IGNORE list.

Henry Cate wrote:

.....
Gee, kenc on another thread was kind of trying to deny this idiotic anti-Americanism.....

Ohhh no.  Don't drag me into this thread.
You should know by now Henry, Boozy is just being sarcastic and trying to wind you up.

These America vs Britian spats are just schoolyard fights.  They go round and round in circles and usually end with everyone playing "WW2 Trivial Pursuit".

homintern is on your IGNORE list.

"These America vs Britian spats are just schoolyard fights.  They go round and round in circles and usually end with everyone playing "WW2 Trivial Pursuit".'

is that why people keep calling me a big girl ?

Gone Fishing is on your IGNORE list.

If this were not so funny and it was not Mr Booze who opened the post  I would have  forgotten all about what a good humor I have.

Wes

Gone Fishing wrote:

Any such list, for any country, is pretty childish, so on that note HC appears to be well to the back of the kindergarten class. Most of his points have been covered / rebutted already but:

1. Establishment of the first modern constitutional democracy.

The first? In 1966, when blacks were finally given the vote?

Many millions of American citizens are still permanently disenfranchised, i.e. convicted criminals who have served their sentence, "paid their debt to society", been released but are still barred from voting (and hence fully reintegrating into that same society) for the rest of their lives.  

See http://hrw.org/english/docs/1998/10/22/usdom1351.htm and note the brief quotation from Jamie Fellner in the small box on the left.  As far as I can find, the situation has got even worse since the date of that report.  See also http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9785-2004Aug17.html



Last edited by Marsilius on Sat 4 Oct, 2008 2:34 am; edited 1 time in total

An interesting one Marsilius and yet another aspect of American democracy that puzzles me especially as voting in the US isn't compulsory anyway.

It's fairly easy to get arrested in the US as well and just as easy to go to jail. They do seem to incarcerate too many of their citizens.

It still all goes back to those wretched Pilgrims who set the standard. And what were they ?. Why British of course.

Lunchtime O'Booze wrote:

.....It still all goes back to those wretched Pilgrims who set the standard. And what were they ?. Why British of course.

Not British but English (see http://www.mayflowerhistory.com/History/pilgrim2.php.)

Only 35 of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims, and some historians think they may have either hijacked the ship or bribed the captain to land them in Massachusetts, as the vessel was originally bound for the new Virginia colony.  In any event, their landing shows the possible long-term effects of native populations have no sensible immigration policy.

Gone Fishing is on your IGNORE list.

cottmann wrote:

Lunchtime O'Booze wrote:

.....It still all goes back to those wretched Pilgrims who set the standard. And what were they ?. Why British of course.

Not British but English (see http://www.mayflowerhistory.com/History/pilgrim2.php.)

Only 35 of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims, and some historians think they may have either hijacked the ship or bribed the captain to land them in Massachusetts, as the vessel was originally bound for the new Virginia colony.  In any event, their landing shows the possible long-term effects of native populations have no sensible immigration policy.

Ok..it was the Poms and they were briggands to boot !