ICANN are going to start allowing some seriously weird-ass domain names with, like, squiggles n shit. I don’t know what the they’re playing at. I might have to start an indigenous BRITISH internet, with hearty domain names and family-friendly blog posts about Bagpuss, sausages, oak trees and white supremacy.
Let’s have some nice, clear, PROPER English.
The internet delveloed by the US in English has been used by the world . The world has not compensated the US. Educated people understand English,the lessor must not disrupt the sucess for all these years that was/is a gift of the USA to the world.
Harold Regner, Carrollton
I feel a bit sorry for Harold. He came so very close. He got himself a connection and obviously managed to fire up a web browser. Then he failed to find any porn and had to settle for an all-American, magnanimous flag-wank while imagining himself giving away baskets of internets to grateful Chinese peasants.
92 Responses to “Internet For Hire”
It’s no use trying to steal Catherine Oliver’s record for most misspelt words per sentence. She does it by accident. This cheating bastard must have done it on purpose.
I mean, those faked videos of people falling off ladders into buckets of paint on You’ve Been Framed are more believable that this feeble attempt.
The World Wide Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (of ye olde Hadron Collider fame).
I think Berners-Lee was the one who decided that it should be free to use for all (which given the amount of money ‘the guy who invented the Internet’ could potentially have earned from the project, is really quite generous).
A gift to the world – from the Europeans. And they speak lots of languages. Sometimes with different letters in the alphabet. Shocking.
I don’t recall the US actually applying for compensation; maybe the paperwork got lost in the mail strike. Where should the World send the money, Harold? I’ve got a brass razzoo all bagged up and ready to go.
Hal, you are an acromegalic armadillo’s arse-wedge, if I’m right.
Plainly Harold speaks English as his second language
I blame the internet for the fact that I feel like I have to check the spelling of everything I write.
I’m so insecure that I sometimes think that Harold and Catherine Oliver might have me bang to rights on the order and number of correct letters in words (spelling), but then I realise that no, I can spell, and they really are just thick cunts.
I know he’s not a native English speraker so it’s a bit unfair to criticise….. Anyway…..
Arse!!!!
Harold’s problem is he doesn’t know how to write “deviant pornography” in Cantonese.
越轨色情 if that helps, Harold.
Harold has a point, edumacated poiple haven’t compensated the US for its gift.
To be fair with the ability of Harold to reach out across the globe and share his views with all, I think they can have it back, i’d rather play with the cardboard box it came in anyway.
I actually thought you were doing the accent.
Sorry, “actuarry”.
I love Wales because it is beautiful and it is home, but I don’t want to have sex with it.
I’ve been playing away with the Isle of Man (I’m a leg woman).
I’m wanting my compensation for developing control of fire. Damned yankee imperialists owe me. No fire, no SUV.
I also want compensation for developing ability to go “Ug Ug”.
Fuck off, it was my idea.
Indeed it was. However, the item being discussed was the Internet, which is not the “World Wide Web” (there’s a hint there, in that the names are significantly different). “The Internet” came from ARPANet, and was most certainly invented by the septics (more specifically, it was built on the work of Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn), some 14 years before Tim Berners-Lee came up with the implementation of the Web.
For most users, though, the internet was invented by Microsoft – after all, that big blue “e” on their desktop is “the internet”, no?
homo erectus & prometheus
Do artr! Naoh naka artr!
I think you’ll find
Hal? It’s a double bluff!
I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, millie.
Isn’t it googles wot does tinternet?
“The World Wide Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (of ye olde Hadron Collider fame).
I think Berners-Lee was the one who decided that it should be free to use for all (which given the amount of money ‘the guy who invented the Internet’ could potentially have earned from the project, is really quite generous).
A gift to the world – from the Europeans. And they speak lots of languages. Sometimes with different letters in the alphabet. Shocking.”
To be fair, the americans were doing much of the work on packet switching networks when Tim was still in short trousers, so Harolds assertion isn’t entirely incorrect. I suspect that your correct usage of WWW and not internet means you know this stuff. I suspect that Harolds partial correctness is purely coincidence, and he is still deserving of ridicule.
JC & Hal in cohoots. It’s all starting to make sense.
Oh pissflaps. I must not get halfway through replies, then get distracted by work, before finishing them and looking like a tit for repeating what someone else has said.
Lets face it, Harold is obviously American, and as with 80% of them,believe that they are the saviours of the world and should be thanked,nay, revered, and any invention has to be American as the rest of the world are a bunch of thickie no brains. Basically he is a buffalo’s bloated bollock-and American.
@Prometheus – you didn’t invent fire, you stole it back from Zeus after he hid it. You were compensated by having your liver eaten daily by an eagle. Remember?
I love winning Internet arguments. Ug Ug.
Correction there, apologies to Canadians, Mexicans etc, Harold if from the United States of America and not America, but he is still a buffalo’s bloated bollock.
Yes, more languages means less accessible.
Why didn’t ICANN think of that? Such a simple solution!
You must try to limit the amount of work you do. I suggest that you implement defined work breaks so you can separate the work you do from the important everyday stuff which needs to be done.
Aggghhhh!!!!! That’s where I live.
Luckily, I don’t think I know him.
Irony Warning:
I suspect Mr Digby spends his holidays on the Costa del Sol, shouting loudly at the locals “Ou eh La Boggo dago boy” and complaining about the lack of good English food. Complete nob jockey.
The USA didn’t invent the concept of compensation. I demand compensation to whoever invented compensation from the US.
Of course, having now demanded compensation without inventing it, I’m going to have to pay a princley sum in compensation towards said country.
Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to drive to the local burger van. however, I need to know who invented the car, the burger and the burger van, in order to pay compensation once I’ve been.
Who invented the invention? And the demand? Would these people also recieve compensation every time compensation was demanded?
I fear we are now living in a compensation culture
“I fear we are now living in a compensation culture”
Well, a lot of people are certainly compensating for something…
I just fear.
I fear change.
Mostly coppers and five pence pieces.
It’s hardly a gift considering that the CIA makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate false information. According to unofficial statistics, the CIA is behind 95% of all conspiracy theories. These false ideas and stories act as a smoke screen for the real conspiracies and illegal acts carried out by the organisation.
So that’s where Neil gets his ideas.
I hope your postal order of compensation to the inventor of conspiracy theories is in the post. While you’re at it, you better post one off to the inventors of the postal service too.
God forbid your letter gets there by train, plane or van…
That was a piece of bullshit I made up to throw into the mix.
I may be missing something here, but didn’t the web already function in every language that uses the Roman alphabet? Which doesn’t belong exclusively to English speakers – the clue’s in the name.
How on earth anyone can object to opening it up to users of other alphabets is beyond me.
Of course, things would be different if any Americans had had the chance to make a few bucks in the IT and telecommunications industries.
ICANN eh? More like ICANN’T…hur hur hur
Don’t worry, I didn’t even bother taking my coat off…
Not it wasn’t it’s all true don’t listen to him he’s part of the conspiracy!!
I distinctly remember building a web site in the summer of 1993 (for my Comp Sci tutor who was always bang into new shit) and thinking “This is fucking shit, nobody’s ever going to use this”.
Then I went back to my vt100 and Solaris so that I could FTP POVrays of teapots and print out ASCII boobs on the dotmatrix.
Berners-Lee has a lot to answer for.
@Makhno
The web already functions in every language using every possible alphabet. All it needs is for the person defining the page to define the character encoding used, usually UTF-8 or UTF-16, and Robert, as they say, is your mother’s brother.
I would consider it unsurprising to find webpages using Klingon (it’s not officially supported by unicode, but there’s a “private use” area that has been put aside for klingon usage by some sad bastards).
OK, OK. It is true. My Uncle runs the whole fake conspiracy theories shebang from his allotment shed in Chiswick. The CIA pay him off with parsnips and Russian whores.
From the Daily Mail, some thing about someone saying something about the queen on the BBC… I think (hope) it’s taking the piss, but it has a rating so far of +61
Blockquote buggery.
This is all very well Harold, but how are the US going to compensate the ancient Babylonians for the use of zeroes in binary code? They did think of it first and fair’s fair.
Apart from the National Front, the Police oh and Thatch and her team of milk snatchers.
“People weren’t racist during Mrs Thatcher’s era.”
One could attend a function at the Conservative Party Conference wearing a ‘Hang Nelson Mendela’ T-shirt.
Those were the days.
I meant ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ T-shirt.
Dear People of America,
We would like to draw you attention to the following items for which payment is still outstanding. The owed sum is now of a substanial nature and a cause for concern. We would appreciate swift and full settlement of debts before the end of the calendar month or we will have no alternative but to legal steps to secure our money.
Democracy, Idea (1)……… $2,000,000,000
Capitalism, Idea (1)……… $2,000,000,000
Western Culture (1) (export model)… $1,000,000,000
Industrial Society (1) ……… $1,000,000,000
Christianity (1) ………. 0.20c
The Enlightenment ……… $3,000,000,000
Science and learning (1) … $5,000,000,000
The English Language (1) ……… $4,000,000,000
Sundry items (5,678,987,651)…….. $17,500,000,000
Yours, in trust of an amicable and prompt resolution,
Europe.
Fuck! Fuckity-fuckity-fuck! We forgot to charge the world for football! *slaps forehead*
Wales invented the equal sign [ = ]
Where do I collect my share of the compensation?
Shouldn’t that be Christianity (452314) @0.20c each, making $90,462.80 in total, payable to the Middle East, rather than Europe?
Charge? We should sue. The US not only takes the good name of Football and attaches it to a game that matches neither the Laws of the Football Association nor those pertaining to the Rugbeian code, but it has another game called “Sarker” which is nothing more than a poor rip-off of Association Foopball.
Aggravated damages all round, if I’m right.
ARPANet was much better described as the worlds first WAN. Although the line between this and the internet is fairly blurry, there is a difference.
The internet was only really born once http://, TCPIP, DNS and a few other choice technologies were implemented.
Wikipedia describes ARPANet as the predeccesor to the global internet. In fact, in 1983 the primary protocol was changed to TCPIP, and the entirety of ARPANet was joined onto what became the internet.
Pedantic? Yes. But technically the Internet IS the World Wide Web. ARPANet was, well, ARPANet.
Yeah, but we could probably charge an introducer’s fee.
Also, we’ve forgotten to raise charges for the Industrial Revolution.
Also, we invented tons of different brands of Christianity while the Jews only thunk up the one. Lightweights.
Is the second one an example of this ‘seriously weird squiggles ‘n’ shit’ that has made Harold so upset?
Just an example of how much the internet has done for us, I remember in 1991 doing “ICT”, as it was laughingly called, which involved colouring in a sheet full of ASCII references to make a shape. In my case it was a ghost.
Then we had to enter the locations into the computer – don’t touch the screen, for God’s sake – perfectly priming an entire generation of youngsters for the exciting world of data entry.
I too remember thinking, “What the fuck, this is crap, no-one would ever do anything as stupid as this.”
And you know what – I was fucking right, and that fat ginger cunt that was my teacher wasted countless child-hours on that bollocks.
I don’t know who should be more annoyed – me for having him waste an hour of my Monday mornings, or him for wasting 40 hours a fucking week on that shit.
If you’re going to be pedantic, it’s best not be completely wrong as well.
There were plenty of us using TCP and UDP over IP on something we all called “the internet” long before the WWW became its primary use. HTTP is an application level protocol, like FTP, SSH, DNS, POP3, SMTP, NTP etc. The success of the web is largely down to the properties of the markup language it mainly transports, rather than any particularly interesting aspects of the protocol itself. The TCP/IP stack that HTTP takes advantage of had already been allowing academics and geeky teenagers to reliably swap emails, software, gifs and pedantry for many years.
People using the term internet when they meant www is something that genuinely used to annoy me back in 1996. I’m a terrible pedant myself you see. Your bad pedantry stirred it all up again. I mean, come on, if you’re going to be pedantic you have to be RIGHT.
Someone find the bit in my pedantry where I’m wrong
DNS can refer to the entire system or just the protocol, and you failed to distinguish between the two. You should have said DNSP.
Mark down one for pedantry.
Hehehe. Straight outta wikipeedja
But I think that including it in a list of protocols, that I’ve described as “protocols” is fairly unambiguous. I’ll have that pedantry point back, plus a bonus point.
I counter-pedant (can that be a verb? I think it should be on the grounds that English is a changing language [q.v. David Crystal for extra points]) that when we normally refer to DNS it isn’t as a protocol, but as a system, and so its inclusion in the list of protocols is a prima facie mistake, as all the others are automatically assumed to refer to the protocol and not the servers, unless specified (i.e. we have an issue with our SMTP server).
5,000,000 pedantry points, no backsies.
The only way you can correct this now is to list, off the top of your head, all the RFCs in relation to DNS. Otherwise everyone will become highly confused and instantly migrate to Debian, even if they’re using it anyway.
I’d just like to say one thing:
gopher gopher gopher gopher GOPHER.
I think they owe us damages.
Oof. Nice move. I shoulda bagsied the moral high ground.
DNS is both a system and a protocol – the system depends on people following the protocols for each agreed RFC.
I’ll see your gopher and raise you FidoNet.
I’ll see your FidoNet and raise you a MUD cyberpunk spanking fantasy room.
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP)…
The starting point for host-to-host communication on the ARPANET was the 1822 protocol… In 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced NCP as the principal protocol of the ARPANET, and the ARPANET became just one component of the fledgling Internet.
TCPIP was developed by DARPA, but was NOT part of ARPANet.
Damn. It ate my /pedant.
An AberMUD ate my life for several years.
Never quite understood the cybering thing though. Maybe it was great, but I was much more interested in real women, even if they couldn’t teleport or edit lflags.
At least you were right this time.
Now you need to work on relevancy.
I can be your pedantry guru if you like.
““The Internet” came from ARPANet”
“TCPIP was developed by DARPA, but was NOT part of ARPANet.”
I dunno, seems relevant enough to me. Perhaps you’re right, maybe I do need some pedantry mentoring. I can’t make sense of this crazy world anymore.
I guess that’s why you’ve got your own column.
You should work on your smugness. It’s a crucial part of pedantry and the main way you infuriate people. The whole point of pedantry is to infuriate people (otherwise it’s just normal, everyday “being right about shit”). You’re only about 60% infuriating. A good pedant is 90% infuriating, even to people who don’t give a shit about the subject under discussion.
A great start is to use the phrase “I think you’ll find…”.
Also, avoid things like “Pedantic? Yes”. It often helps to pretend you’re not being pedantic but merely “being right about shit”. Fucking infuriating that is. Ask my missus.
I think you’ll find that people who object to pedantry (which is a derogatory term used by people who have little education or knowledge of the subject in question) have little education of knowledge of the subject in question, which is why they are most often wrong.
OK – I have to go and talk to some infuriating shit about Microsoft Groove not being the same thing as Microsoft Sharepoint now.
I think this will be the perfect opportunity to hone my skills. I’m mentally queing up “I think you’ll find” now.
1993. JANet -> JIPS. IRC. Remember when Google was called archie?
Awesome start, and you can also use “What you don’t realise is”, “If you’d read a little more”, “In fact”, and my personal favourite, “Actually…”.
While I’m reminded of MUDs, if you want fond memories have a look at this article. I first read it in Playboy back in 1993 or something, and this line stuck in my head forever, which is why, despite hours trapped on LPMUD that’s what I always think of when I think of MUDs. And I still went on and messed with all these services. You know smoking’s bad for you, but kids just do it anyway…
Things just don’t change much, do they?
Ah, JANET – the UK being arse-backwards in its domain naming (@uk.ac.heriot-watt.cluster was a friends email address.)
UUCP bang paths. (Ooo-err, missus)
Thanks for the correction – makes Harold’s objections all the more baffling, doesn’t it?
I fear Jon in Kent may be serious. I saw a post once on Harry’s Place, back when I still frequented it, which didn’t go *quite* so far as to claim people weren’t racist in the 80s, but did insist that we had just achieved post-racial Utopia in 1997 before Labour came in and brought racism back through PC and multiculturalism. Of course, being Harry’s Place and not HYS, it was properly spelled and punctuated, but man, that’s some powerful amnesia.
Just returned to the site to find just how much debate a post can start. Yes, I know the internet existed (in a fashion) before the world wide web, but I was trying to make a point about it being more international in creation than Harold gave credit.
Having the bare minimum of computer knowledge required to get by when house sharing with a computer scientist, I have followed the debate on the origins the internet with interest but minimal understanding. Although it probably would be enough to post at length on HYS.
I guess it’s too late to mention KERMIT, RM Nimbus or Winchester.
I was using the Internet in 1992.
!one!!elventy!!
Having said that, I now feel really old.
Skimming through all that lot, I kept reading ‘dotmatrix’ as ‘dominatrix’. I think I must have a special kind of dyslexia that converts everything into smut.
Well bugger me, i never realised how old some of this technology is.
God, that site is rubbish. The level of idiotic smugness on display makes HYS seem like a cheery, self-deprecating and useful website. It’s like someone took everything shit about The Guardian and then magnified it to the power of cat spunk.
No, having no idea whatsoever about the subject, but some strong and completely misguided opinions and a vague way of tying it into “not-racist but” racism would be enough to post at length on HYS. Minimal knowledge on any given subject is enough, in HYS terms, to make a post that gets leapt all over calling you a lefty lunatic who relies on “facts” not “reckons” for his opinions.
I thought it was all computers joined up with telephone lines.