So a stateful RPC system is RESTful, as long as it uses HTTP? Surely that's not what you mean.

In my opinion, when you use HTTP as a transport for some ugliness, you should not call the resulting contraption HTTP.

For some reason recently we have this technologies like AJAX and REST, that does not mean anything concrete, just "we are using this to achieve that and need some name for managers".

And that is what I'm trying to say: Why in the world do we need to label some more or less trivial idea with some cute initialism?

A lot of people don't get the distinction between HTTP and "HTTP as a transport for some ugliness".

The cute initialism isn't the point. The paper that coined the initialism (and describes why HTTP was designed the way it was and what you'll lose if you use it as a transport for some ugliness) is.

But reality is that the paper is just analysis of how Web/HTTP works and or how it is supposed to work, not introduction of some new approach.

Of course, I don't think that anybody credible disagrees with that.

That doesn't mean that REST "does not mean anything concrete", though.