"Phil Cook" <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote in message
news:op.uh81hewkc3xi7v@news.povray.org...
> And lo on Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:44:32 +0100, somebody <x### [at] ycom> did spake,
> saying:

> > If the goal is to support building of faster computers through demand,
> > give each employee of LHC a copy of FarCry 2 and send them home. It
> > would be much cheaper than $10 billion.

> I agree, if the goal was to build faster computers; however that would
> require someone with a ton of cash to say "Hey we need faster computers"
> to which the response would be "Why?"

You got to be kidding (on both accounts). IBM, Intel, AMD, Sun, nVidia...
etc are those someone's with a ton of cash, and I don't think anybody asks
why we need faster computers (no POV user that I know of anyway).

> > He was working at CERN when he made the invention, but he could have
> > very well
> > have been working at IBM or Apple or Walmart or Starbucks
> > (well, he'd have better access to networks
> > at that time with the former two).
> <snip>
> > The important point is, CERN's high energy physics research did not give
> > rise to Tim Berners-Lee's invention.

> Most importantly a) The abilty at CERN to display pictures and text at the
> same time would have been very useful, and b) No-one at CERN came in and
> told him to stop working on it and get back to what he was supposed to be
> doing. Somehow I don't see that happening at IBM, Apple, Walmart, or
> Starbucks.

Admittedly not likely at Walmart and Starbucks, but IBM, Apple, Bell (in its
heyday, now Lucent to an extent), Xerox, even the newcomer Google... etc
have thousands of such inventions for each one that came out of CERN. Can
you name a *second* practical invention that came out of CERN off the top of
your head, for example? Can you name a practical invention that came out of
Fermilab, RHIC, SLAC... etc? Not that there haven't been, but my point is
that Tim Berners-Lee's is a singular and more or less a random case.

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