[Arkle]

I agree with you that Britain's technological base has been eroded by years of idiotic management and lack of investment. The reasons go back a long way - Corelli Barnett's book, The Collapse of British Power, is very good on this. But I think most people would agree that it is something of an exaggeration to say that Europe has produced no innovative technology since the war. America is the engine of the world's economy, and you're right to be proud of that, but you can be proud of it without belittling everyone else. Incidentally, your view that the Japanese simply adapt the discoveries of others may have been correct thirty years ago, but I don't think it is now.

The controlled nuclear fusion process that I referred to was at the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire in 1991. By the way, the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland.

[Cacique]

By the way, the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland.

Let's get things straight. Berners-Lee developed HTML or the kernel of Hypertext Markup Language which makes links and web pages possible. The Internet is an offshoot of the initial network established by the Pentagon in the 1950's to make computer networks survivable in a nuclear war. It was the ARPANET from which basis the Internet evolved. The World Wide Web was already in existence though we were using crappy search engines and could only downlaod files at that time before Lee came up with HTML. Incidentally the browser technology which makes browsing the web possible and reading those HTML pages was Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic; was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.