I’m struck by how visceral my reaction to this is:
For my part, I don’t see any reason why the Lisp community should constrain itself to having exactly one defsystem facility.
It misses the heart of the problem so completely that it unintentionally makes it worse.
“… It’s long been our belief that REST and Roy Fielding has been palling around with Hypermedia. He barely denies it. But, my friends, let me tell you that no washed up PhD dissertation will dictate our request/response. He says it, in his own words – he talks about ‘constraints’, he toys with the idea of a transfer of ‘state’. My friends, in these times of economic crisis we need less State involvement, not more. REST doesn’t understand. Let’s give state transition back to the hard working people of the USA. Enough with this hypermedia socialism. … ‘For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.’ – Karl Marx …” – more
Thomson-Reuters raises the stakes and then calls the bluff of the Academy.
“For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client already). If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same”
It will be interesting to see if they can organize an sufficently vigorous response. The Academy has quite a number of extremely expensive suppliers. Somebody once said in my hearing “… for whom we act as tax collectors.”
Finally actionable advise on how individuals can address the current market turmoil:
If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle. — here
