Good for him, but I don't get why in our day and age anyone would care about meaningless titles like this. Why do intelligent, educated people accept still play this whole sir/knight/duke/price/king charade?
He did something to help promote computer science to people who could not afford a computer. Accepting OBE, on the other hand, is equal to becoming a member of a caste system. You either believe that all people deserve equal rights, or you don't.
The titles given are taken from the aristocratic system that's still alive and kicking in the GB. And while OBE does not give the recipient anything special besides titles, heraldic supports and order of precedence, one could argue that it's supporting the aristocratic system.
If you accept a title, be it sir or knight, or whatever else there is, you indirectly accept that the person with a higher title is above you, even if they did not earn that title with the hard work like you did, but simply by being born into a right family. You accept being a royal subject, , and you accept that the king or queen, are not your equals but your rulers.
In any modern society we have titles, and honors but they have to be earned.
President, general, senator is your equal, selected for their office based on the skills (I know that a staggering oversimplification, and a very naive point of view) not based on the birth right.
To say that this is "like receiving a Nobel Prize, or Medal of Honour(sic)" or the Victoria Cross is absurd. There are 1,946 MoH recipients (excluding civil war recipients when it was awarded under different conditions), 1,357 Victoria Cross recipients and 876 Nobel Laureates. In one year "more than a thousand people have been recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours."[1]
[^1]: With one thousand awardees this seems more like an Eagle Scout Badge or
You can't change it - you can only be accepted into it.
So not only you have to do something extraordinary, someone from the caste needs to like what you did.
Or you could be born into it...
I think you're confused about what this honour actually is. Receiving an OBE doesn't imbue any extra rights or powers, it's literally just an award for doing something that helps others. That's specifically what it was created for.
You can't be born into it, and the system has traditionally honoured thousands of 'normal' people that have been nominated, usually by their peers, for doing work in their field or community.
@migstopheles I wasn't talking about being born into OBE, but about being born into British aristocracy. I admit that OBE is just a small part of the whole system of honors, but by using titles and heraldry it still helps to keep the caste system alive in the GB.
There is no caste system in the UK. There was a class system that is largley defunced, despite pretestations to the contrary. You aren't even British, so why do you care?
As you can see, some of them are themselves honours recipients, and some are not.
In no sense is this a self-awarding organisation - and the only reason there are so many recipients on the committee is because honours are given out to just about everybody who has achieved anything of note.
The UK may have a class system (sadly, all capitalist societies do and must), but it does not have "castes". Knighthoods and other honours are merely titles.
Out of interest, what do you see as the link between classes and capitalism or are you equating social class with a level of income (or ownership of assets) - it's really much more complex than that in the UK due to the remarkable amount of historical baggage we have.
"This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class. Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.
Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. [10] Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.
Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)
But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich."
I suppose one could argue that a club that has 'For God and The Empire' as its motto, and awards military-sounding titles, is about more than just getting recognition from society. Though perhaps it's not to be taken too seriously...
Many reasons, but let me quote few people who actually declined the "honor":
"I get angry when I hear the word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised."
"An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King's Cross station."
Quoting Michael Winner, a multimillionaire conservative, probably isn't your best line of argument :)
But seriously, these are both personal opinions, and the first one even seems to be working against your original assertion that the honour is meaningless.
All things considered, if you have an issue with the monarchy and the "aristocratic" government (not quite accurate, but there's a point there), that's completely valid. Rallying against an almost entirely unrelated honours system is way off-target, and I would imagine that abolishing it would do more harm than good.
I was asked - "why on earth shouldn't he accept the acknowledgement?" My reply is an attempt to provide a partial answer to that question, and is unrelated to the rest of the discussion. :)
It's simply formal recognition from the state that you have done something of value. The exact name of the reward is a historical hang-over which make it a little more quaint.
So reading the headline I thought this honor was going to Mr Upton, but instead it's someone else from the RPi foundation? The article seems to infer his fame comes more from Elite than from his educational work on Raspberry Pi.
For that matter, where are all the success stories about RPI in the educational arena? For every ten 'here's a cat food dispenser/FM Transmitter/drone tracking system' made from an RPi" stories, there should be at least one decent educational story. I've seen very little.
If we're a little more generous with our definition, a Raspberry-powered cat food dispenser, or even just the idea of having a general-purpose personal computer is educational in itself, no?
Of course, his fame comes from Elite, where else? David Braben was a well-known name long before the RPi. Nevertheless, i own a RPi and i'm eagerly waiting for the next Elite.
Then it's a bit disingenuous to headline this honorary award as being from the success of the Raspberry Pi in the educational arena.
If the Brits want to give an award to Braben for his work in video games that's cool. It's a step forward in the acknowledgement that video games are a part of modern culture. But by that token, I'm nominating Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar for the Presidental Medal of Freedom for their work on Defender, Stargate, and Robotron:2084.
By that logic noone can ever be rewarded for his work outside of his field. Of course he can be rewarded for his work on RPi, which had more impact on mankind then some video game from 30 years ago.
> where are all the success stories about RPI in the educational arena
You're right; I don't see success stories in education.
But so what? The RPi is a huge success as a prototyping tool, as a platform for one-off devices or small productions runs, and as a hacker appliance (in the good sense of "hacker").
So what if the Raspberry Pi Foundation's original intention was to advance computer education? They achieved success in a different and highly positive way. There's nothing to regret.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 98.8 ms ] threadI find views like this pointlessly cynical. The man has been done something good for society, why on earth shouldn't he accept the acknowledgement?
No, it's like receiving a Nobel Prize, or a Medal of Honour (or any medal, really).
An organisation awarding a prize to someone who has done something remarkable for his fellow men.
In any modern society we have titles, and honors but they have to be earned.
President, general, senator is your equal, selected for their office based on the skills (I know that a staggering oversimplification, and a very naive point of view) not based on the birth right.
One could. But most people would disagree.
[^1]: With one thousand awardees this seems more like an Eagle Scout Badge or
Like an Eagle Scout Badge or a Medal of Honour.
Doesn't matter how many people get it, my point is that it's a reward for either doing something positive or achieving something remarkable.
Read the comment I originally responded to.
You can't be born into it, and the system has traditionally honoured thousands of 'normal' people that have been nominated, usually by their peers, for doing work in their field or community.
https://www.gov.uk/honours-committees
As you can see, some of them are themselves honours recipients, and some are not.
In no sense is this a self-awarding organisation - and the only reason there are so many recipients on the committee is because honours are given out to just about everybody who has achieved anything of note.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...
[NB I'm really not defending this state of affairs - just pointing out that "Upper Class" traditionally meant "aristocracy" not "rich" in the UK].
"This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class. Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.
Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. [10] Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.
Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)
But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich."
http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
"An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King's Cross station."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_declin...
But seriously, these are both personal opinions, and the first one even seems to be working against your original assertion that the honour is meaningless.
All things considered, if you have an issue with the monarchy and the "aristocratic" government (not quite accurate, but there's a point there), that's completely valid. Rallying against an almost entirely unrelated honours system is way off-target, and I would imagine that abolishing it would do more harm than good.
Because they are not meaningless. They may be to you, and that's fine.But they mean a lot to a lot of people. Your views are not common.
For that matter, where are all the success stories about RPI in the educational arena? For every ten 'here's a cat food dispenser/FM Transmitter/drone tracking system' made from an RPi" stories, there should be at least one decent educational story. I've seen very little.
If we're a little more generous with our definition, a Raspberry-powered cat food dispenser, or even just the idea of having a general-purpose personal computer is educational in itself, no?
If the Brits want to give an award to Braben for his work in video games that's cool. It's a step forward in the acknowledgement that video games are a part of modern culture. But by that token, I'm nominating Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar for the Presidental Medal of Freedom for their work on Defender, Stargate, and Robotron:2084.
You're right; I don't see success stories in education.
But so what? The RPi is a huge success as a prototyping tool, as a platform for one-off devices or small productions runs, and as a hacker appliance (in the good sense of "hacker").
So what if the Raspberry Pi Foundation's original intention was to advance computer education? They achieved success in a different and highly positive way. There's nothing to regret.