Slashdot Mirror
Britain's Scientists Are 'Freaking Out' Over Brexit (washingtonpost.com)
"To use a nonscientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out," reports the Washington Post. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes their report:
The researchers worry that Britain will not replace funding it loses when it leaves the E.U., which has supplied about $1.2 billion a year to support British science, approximately 10 percent of the total spent by government-funded research councils. There is a whiff of panic in the labs.
Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the country's universities will find themselves isolated. British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a pan-European consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers... Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling.
Meanwhile, NPR reports that Britain's vote to leave the EU "has depressed the value of the British pound," prompting many Britons to vacation at home rather than abroad -- while "Americans will find their dollars go further in Britain these days." And an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from CNBC that Ford "is considering closing plants in the UK and across Europe in response to Britain's vote to leave the EU, as it forecast a $1 billion hit to its business over the next two years."
Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community's fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the country's universities will find themselves isolated. British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a pan-European consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers... Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling.
Meanwhile, NPR reports that Britain's vote to leave the EU "has depressed the value of the British pound," prompting many Britons to vacation at home rather than abroad -- while "Americans will find their dollars go further in Britain these days." And an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from CNBC that Ford "is considering closing plants in the UK and across Europe in response to Britain's vote to leave the EU, as it forecast a $1 billion hit to its business over the next two years."
While I'm not arguing that all the remediation was useless (much was definitely necessary) the problem was definitely blown out of proportion and there is copious evidence to support that assertion.
Says someone who has no clue about the problem. As the rest of your post shows.
I fixed about 1.5 millin lines of code written in COBOL and PL1. (Two different projects, the PL1 Job was only a quallity assurance as the original code was already fixed: "manually by the consultants you hate", while my company used a kind of specialized compiler)
The company where I fixed the close to 1 Million lines COBOL code woke up regarding the Y2K problem very late. They just got bought by an american company. And the new directors went ape shit when they realized the Y2K problem was not even tackled yet (that was mid 1998).
The company would have been out of business now, if we had not fixed ist software. And so would beall the customers of said company!!!
While we worked on such projects we had a partner company, a spin off from IBM basically but based on the Software Tool Chain that was developed by a Belgium/Dutch Company in an Erasmus project. (European EU wide distributed research Projects, mainly done in universities, partly in spin offs)
We had a joined venture with the Netherlands branch of "TriLoc Software Engineering, Milwaukee".
Basically every Company whee we fixed the code for would not have survived if we had not (or if we had made majour mistakes).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.