A relative of mine (actually his company, which he was majority owner of) was sued once on a patent matter. He never got the notice. The reason was, it was delivered to his attorney of record a few days after he fired that attorney. His new attorney had filed papers to change the attorney registration but it was still apparently working its way through the bureaucracy. There was a default judgement, and he didn't hear about it until a collection effort was made more than a year and a half after the original notice. Eventually it got a new case and was settled out of court as a non-infringement. The lawyer who received the paperwork ended up declaring bankruptcy so in the end several people were out a lot of money. Stuff like that does happen, sometimes.
Is this the same Disney that wants to destroy your right to enjoy your computer hardware and software technology just so they can methods to prevent you from accessing the content you have already bought and paid for? Is this the same Disney that so many people are now telling friends and family to boycott? Is this the same Disney that has bought and paid for Senator Hollings, D-SC?
Even sharks are not that bad. They do sometimes bite each other in a feeding frenzy, but this is much less often than lawyers threatening to sue each other. I love this story. I'm going to send it to all the lawyer mailing lists I know of.
If he has a sleazy ISP that just gives him new IPs, then of course you're doing all the rest of the customers a favor in the long run by blocking the whole ISP. That's an ISP that's probably re-assigning "cursed" IPs to a new customer anyway.
OTOH, for as long as the ISP leaves him on the same IPs, just block the spammer. If the ISP says to him "no new IPs because the only reason you want them is to evade those who are blocking you for spam", then I would NOT block that ISP, because they are effectively saying "you stay blocked by those who don't want spam, or you leave and go somewhere else, and if you leave, you pay out the remainder of your contract term anyway". So the spammer faces either staying with blocked IPs, or switching ISP and having to pay extra to the old ISP or meeting them in court.
I'm all for paying to have a slashdot free of obese ads. I'll probably pay more than average because I do read quite a lot regularly. I think I can live with that. Of course this will only happen once there's a way for me to pay giving my CC number or sending my check to someone I trust (see my sig if you want to know what I mean).
Anyway, I'm a bit concerned about the moderation process. Periodically I do get some moderation points. Sometimes I don't have the time to do anything with them (fortunately they last a few days, so usually I eventually do). But when I do, I pick some current topic I don't really have any need to post on, and start reading to see who's on topic with real contributions. By picking a topic of less interest to me, I think I can be less biased than I would be for some other topic that interests me greatly. But by so doing, I'm reading a lot of comments that I otherwise would never have seen... page views I otherwise would never have made.
CmdrTaco... I recommend that moderation be changed slightly as follows. When a user is logged in and has moderation points, it gives them the option to make an election to moderate whatever thread they want to, much like it does now, but via a separate link. Confirm they really want to, and really understand they won't be able to post there. Then that thread can be viewed without ads, without cost, for the first 100 pages viewed. When a moderation point is used, add 100 again to the number that can be viewed on that thread. When all moderation points are used up, let the moderator keep their free ad-free views for that thread so as not to discourage delaying moderation (the moderating should be done because a comment is worthy, not avoided because it might mean the ads come back or the pages have to be paid for again). In other words, up to 500 free views on threads elected for moderating.
While I would pay to access/. ad-free, I would end up not doing any moderating any more if I had to also pay for the moderated pages. I'm not interested in paying to moderate just like I'm not interested in paying to vote for politicians.
Millions of net users have Microsoft Windows and don't have a problem with it. So why not make/. based on VBscript and ActiveX and other Windows specific stuff. Go look at the/. logs (for CmdrTaco) and see the stats for yourself.
Of course you do say PayPal was just the first choice because it was quick. Then you defend it for the same reason used by many sites to totally exclude minority groups (BSD and Linux users) from their sites. Now I know/. would not really exclude BSD and Linux. So please, stick to the defense of PayPal strictly in terms of how quickly it was to set up, and commit to other methods. Some others, like BidPay, are oriented to just auctions, but maybe a nice long talk with their CEO can make him realize there really is a market for micropayments to web sites... and sell him some ads to be viewed by those who don't pay up.
BTW, I've never lost any money on PayPal in the past. Like some people have suggested to everyone... I read the terms of service... so now I've made sure I never will lose any money on PayPal in the future.
While Korea government officials are busy whining about a little dog eating joke, their country is getting cut off from the internet because its servers are remotely harboring e-terrorists. Korean government officials and bureaucrats need to get some clues. A lot of clues.
Maybe Jay can do a joke about how the Koreans use dogs to run the treadmills for the generators that run the Korean spam servers in all the schools and government offices... before they chop 'em up to be put in little cans to be sold as meat.
Seriously... block Korea... I do... and I don't regret it.
If they cut him off, he just goes somewhere else. Maybe a different ISP in town. Maybe colocated through an ISP remotely. There are plenty of those around just begging for business enough to forget to ask "are you a spammer?" (I believe most would not provide service to a known spammer, but they probably would not know until the complaints come rolling in). Anyway, he's a moving target. You can block the open relays he uses. Unfortunately, more come online every day. You can scan for his IP range in the 2nd Received line and block on that basis. But if you force him to be a "gypsy spammer" then that won't be fixed, either. So, let him stay where he is, if you can block his spam. That means it will be a longer time before you get all new spam from him because he got new IPs. If you know anything about security (duh... you do) you can figure this for yourself.
With IPv6, address space assigned to large ISPs will be a lot better aggregated. Of course that won't stop them from breaking it up into a lot of prefixes, but hopefully that will only be for their really sub-autonomous networks. Lots of big ISPs were given some big chunks like/16, but they got those many times. So that means many prefixes announced even if they could aggregate them if adjacent. At least with IPv6 they can be given all the space they will need for 100+ years right now.
Routing in IPv6 is also different. The low 64 bits as I understand it won't play any part as that is pretty much going to a single LAN, so the routing announcements shouldn't need any more than the high 64 bits, and maybe even just the high 32 bits. Here's the list of RFCs that match string search for "ipv6" and "route". I haven't actually read them, so maybe you can easily find where I'm all wrong.
If ARIN (and APNIC and RIPE) would assign portable space in smaller pieces and make some kind of rules requiring ISPs to route them when there is one prefix in an AS, regardless of size, then I suspect ISPs will find it a lot easier to do NAT. Right now a small ISP doing "the right thing" and deploying NAT for all business customers, instead of giving them each a/29 (and thus using only 1/8 the IP space), is delaying their ability to reach the holy grail of ISP-dom: portable IP space and an ASN. And while this is happening, larger ISPs are still flooding BGP with hundreds or even thousands of prefixes for gobs of discontiguous IP space.
if you mean "4 inside, 6 outside" then it has some limitations. If you're on a 4-only box inside and want to connect somewhere, it has to have an IPv4 address, or you have to have some IPv4 address mapped to the IPv6 address with corresponding DNS change (I hear this is what the BSD folks are doing). Doing servers this way is easier as the client (outside) is connecting to a specific IPv6 address, and the NAT can translate that easy enough to (inside) IPv4 (no DNS juggling needed).
Such network address translation should at least prevent any delays in upgrading servers from delaying IPv6 deployment to the backbone. Clients will seriously need to be upgraded, and if Microsoft drags their feet, that can set things back really bad. But we also need solid IPv6 router code for the backbone, and I gather that Cisco is not moving very fast on getting it widely implemented solidly. Maybe when the economy picks up they might be able to (if they see the demand for it).
Just put 6to4 capability in, or right next to, your border router. Put some IPv4 private IPs in for the inside pool, and away it goes. It should be easy (but I don't know if implementors are that smart) to take a/104 chunk of your IPv6 space and map it 1-to-1 to the whole 10/8 space by keeping the low 24 bits the same. That should give you plenty of time to transition your inside servers, and all your access customers (if your an ISP) or all your offices and cubicles (if your a business) to working on IPv6.
The cost to "upgrade" to IPv6 can be simplified by having IPv6 be translated at or near the border to IPv4 private addresses on the inside. No OS upgrade needed. No application upgrade needed. Just make sure your border routers can do IPv6, add the NAT, and you're live.
There will be NATv6 whether you like it or not, and regardless of what the RFCs say about it. There are legitimate uses for it. I may want to have the same hostname for a variety of different services, but put those services on different machines behind the firewall. There's a form of NAT for that. I may want to load balance 1000 servers to one name (which DNS will limit to just a few IPs at most... and don't forget that AAAA records take more space out of the response packet than A records do). I may want to hide my internal infrastructure and make everything appear to be right at the border. And perhaps I just don't want to upgrade some server to IPv6, preferring to leave it at IPv4, and let the NAT present IPv6 to the world while my intranet sees it as IPv4.
Since we already have mastered the logic needed in a variety of forms of network address translation, IPv6 is just a matter of some code changes to accomodate the larger IP address.
Many businesses are now disabling Javascript for their staff computers, and often doing things to enforce it, varying from policy "thou shalt not enabled it under penalty of job loss", to crippling it (probably crashing the browser when it gets any Javascript) via DLL or register hacking, to even filtering it out on proxy servers. And this is because some web sites (accessed by typographical errors, perhaps) use Javascript to take over someone's computer (such as trying to convince them they must view some porn to get their computer back). Javascript is a security concern to the client side.
And there are still some sites where even just programming errors cause one to be trapped in error popup hell. So I leave it off. Until browser developers can isolate Javascript into a very secure padded cell where it can do no harm (and I'm not going to say this is easy, but it certainly needs to be done), I'll leave it off.
Want me to upgrade my browser? Put one out that does Javascript securely (and doesn't break other stuff, conforms to standards... and if you insist it conform to all W3C standards then I will insist it conform to all X windows standards) then I will be more enticed to upgrade.
The really irritating web sites are the ones that have what appears to be a basic, simple, text hyperlink, but they implement it with a Javascript function call that does nothing but go there. Then when there, it doesn't even need any Javascript there at all (often times it's only the first page where these Javascript abuses take place).
It seems many web designers, such as some from A List Apart, seem to confuse the support of standards with standards compliance. There is a difference. Compliance is an issue considered for each supported standard. A browser may not support some standard for some reason (maybe it was written before that standard was finalized). But it could well be compliant with those standards it does accept. So please don't use the term "standards compliant browser" when you're upset because it doesn't support every W3C standard out there. Use "browser that fully supports every W3C standard" when you mean that.
The reason I don't upgrade is that NEW browsers are MORE broken. I don't measure brokeness in terms of whether some new standard is supported or not... that's called incomplete. Older browsers do suffer from incompleteness. But newer browsers have bugs... general bugs in everything as opposed to the inability to support the new feature some graphics designer wants. "Standards compliance" does NOT mean every standard has to be supported. An older browser is just as compliant today as it was when it first came out... it just doesn't have all the neat new bells and whistles.
Always allow for two generations of browsers when including the unstable buggy new ones. There are often many issues why browsers (or any other application) cannot be immediately upgraded. The world does NOT revolve around implementing what graphic designers want first. Of course upgrading is good, but it is never an instant thing. Once the next generation is out past beta, allow 18 to 24 months for a significant portion of the population to have it. And that's counting from when the browser is out, not when the new standards are out.
Most things you describe are good things, but I do disagree with your notion of jumping ahead to next generation browsers so quickly. Using the new standards is good, but the page should be made to work over a two generation browser range (that means including Netscape 4.7). It doesn't have to look as pretty in the old browser, but it should at least be functional. Every text should be visible. Every button should render. Learn to design flexibly. Sticking to validated standards is good, but being capable of being used with the standards actually implemented one generation back (while the new generation matures) is still essential. Compliancy is NOT about having to use all of the standards out there. It's about using what standards you need to have correctly. The point is, if you don't actually need XHTML, then don't make a site that can't work without it. And even if some part of the site really need XHTML, or CSS, Javascript, then don't make the rest of the site crippled by requiring it everywhere.
If you need to put some pressure somewhere so you can present some really cool new designs in front of more and more people, then join me in pressuring browser developers to work on writing less buggy, more stable, and faster performing code. Unfortunately, it takes time for software projects to mature when there is a flurry of new things to implement. And at some point the developers really can't go any faster anyway. This is something else we all need to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
A relative of mine (actually his company, which he was majority owner of) was sued once on a patent matter. He never got the notice. The reason was, it was delivered to his attorney of record a few days after he fired that attorney. His new attorney had filed papers to change the attorney registration but it was still apparently working its way through the bureaucracy. There was a default judgement, and he didn't hear about it until a collection effort was made more than a year and a half after the original notice. Eventually it got a new case and was settled out of court as a non-infringement. The lawyer who received the paperwork ended up declaring bankruptcy so in the end several people were out a lot of money. Stuff like that does happen, sometimes.
Is this the same Disney that wants to destroy your right to enjoy your computer hardware and software technology just so they can methods to prevent you from accessing the content you have already bought and paid for? Is this the same Disney that so many people are now telling friends and family to boycott? Is this the same Disney that has bought and paid for Senator Hollings, D-SC?
Even sharks are not that bad. They do sometimes bite each other in a feeding frenzy, but this is much less often than lawyers threatening to sue each other. I love this story. I'm going to send it to all the lawyer mailing lists I know of.
Depends. Are you already using an 8k bit key?
My boss said he heard that rot-13 might be crackable! So I told him to switch to triple-rot13.
Need to know what IP addresses to block? Find out here.
If he has a sleazy ISP that just gives him new IPs, then of course you're doing all the rest of the customers a favor in the long run by blocking the whole ISP. That's an ISP that's probably re-assigning "cursed" IPs to a new customer anyway.
OTOH, for as long as the ISP leaves him on the same IPs, just block the spammer. If the ISP says to him "no new IPs because the only reason you want them is to evade those who are blocking you for spam", then I would NOT block that ISP, because they are effectively saying "you stay blocked by those who don't want spam, or you leave and go somewhere else, and if you leave, you pay out the remainder of your contract term anyway". So the spammer faces either staying with blocked IPs, or switching ISP and having to pay extra to the old ISP or meeting them in court.
I'm all for paying to have a slashdot free of obese ads. I'll probably pay more than average because I do read quite a lot regularly. I think I can live with that. Of course this will only happen once there's a way for me to pay giving my CC number or sending my check to someone I trust (see my sig if you want to know what I mean).
Anyway, I'm a bit concerned about the moderation process. Periodically I do get some moderation points. Sometimes I don't have the time to do anything with them (fortunately they last a few days, so usually I eventually do). But when I do, I pick some current topic I don't really have any need to post on, and start reading to see who's on topic with real contributions. By picking a topic of less interest to me, I think I can be less biased than I would be for some other topic that interests me greatly. But by so doing, I'm reading a lot of comments that I otherwise would never have seen ... page views I otherwise would never have made.
CmdrTaco ... I recommend that moderation be changed slightly as follows. When a user is logged in and has moderation points, it gives them the option to make an election to moderate whatever thread they want to, much like it does now, but via a separate link. Confirm they really want to, and really understand they won't be able to post there. Then that thread can be viewed without ads, without cost, for the first 100 pages viewed. When a moderation point is used, add 100 again to the number that can be viewed on that thread. When all moderation points are used up, let the moderator keep their free ad-free views for that thread so as not to discourage delaying moderation (the moderating should be done because a comment is worthy, not avoided because it might mean the ads come back or the pages have to be paid for again). In other words, up to 500 free views on threads elected for moderating.
While I would pay to access /. ad-free, I would end up not doing any moderating any more if I had to also pay for the moderated pages. I'm not interested in paying to moderate just like I'm not interested in paying to vote for politicians.
Millions of net users have Microsoft Windows and don't have a problem with it. So why not make /. based on VBscript and ActiveX and other Windows specific stuff. Go look at the /. logs (for CmdrTaco) and see the stats for yourself.
Of course you do say PayPal was just the first choice because it was quick. Then you defend it for the same reason used by many sites to totally exclude minority groups (BSD and Linux users) from their sites. Now I know /. would not really exclude BSD and Linux. So please, stick to the defense of PayPal strictly in terms of how quickly it was to set up, and commit to other methods. Some others, like BidPay, are oriented to just auctions, but maybe a nice long talk with their CEO can make him realize there really is a market for micropayments to web sites ... and sell him some ads to be viewed by those who don't pay up.
BTW, I've never lost any money on PayPal in the past. Like some people have suggested to everyone ... I read the terms of service ... so now I've made sure I never will lose any money on PayPal in the future.
While Korea government officials are busy whining about a little dog eating joke, their country is getting cut off from the internet because its servers are remotely harboring e-terrorists. Korean government officials and bureaucrats need to get some clues. A lot of clues.
Maybe Jay can do a joke about how the Koreans use dogs to run the treadmills for the generators that run the Korean spam servers in all the schools and government offices ... before they chop 'em up to be put in little cans to be sold as meat.
Seriously ... block Korea ... I do ... and I don't regret it.
If they cut him off, he just goes somewhere else. Maybe a different ISP in town. Maybe colocated through an ISP remotely. There are plenty of those around just begging for business enough to forget to ask "are you a spammer?" (I believe most would not provide service to a known spammer, but they probably would not know until the complaints come rolling in). Anyway, he's a moving target. You can block the open relays he uses. Unfortunately, more come online every day. You can scan for his IP range in the 2nd Received line and block on that basis. But if you force him to be a "gypsy spammer" then that won't be fixed, either. So, let him stay where he is, if you can block his spam. That means it will be a longer time before you get all new spam from him because he got new IPs. If you know anything about security (duh ... you do) you can figure this for yourself.
With IPv6, address space assigned to large ISPs will be a lot better aggregated. Of course that won't stop them from breaking it up into a lot of prefixes, but hopefully that will only be for their really sub-autonomous networks. Lots of big ISPs were given some big chunks like /16, but they got those many times. So that means many prefixes announced even if they could aggregate them if adjacent. At least with IPv6 they can be given all the space they will need for 100+ years right now.
Routing in IPv6 is also different. The low 64 bits as I understand it won't play any part as that is pretty much going to a single LAN, so the routing announcements shouldn't need any more than the high 64 bits, and maybe even just the high 32 bits. Here's the list of RFCs that match string search for "ipv6" and "route". I haven't actually read them, so maybe you can easily find where I'm all wrong.
rfc1752|rfc1809|rfc1825|rfc1883|rfc1884|rfc1887|rf c1888|rfc1933|rfc1970|rfc1981|rfc1999|rfc2000|rfc2 019|rfc2080|rfc2101|rfc2185|rfc2199|rfc2200|rfc229 2|rfc2300|rfc2353|rfc2373|rfc2400|rfc2401|rfc2460| rfc2461|rfc2465|rfc2466|rfc2473|rfc2491|rfc2492|rf c2500|rfc2526|rfc2529|rfc2545|rfc2546|rfc2590|rfc2 600|rfc2626|rfc2700|rfc2710|rfc2711|rfc2740|rfc274 5|rfc2746|rfc2765|rfc2766|rfc2767|rfc2772|rfc2799| rfc2800|rfc2874|rfc2884|rfc2893|rfc2894|rfc2899|rf c2900|rfc2956|rfc2983|rfc3000|rfc3002|rfc3053|rfc3 056|rfc3068|rfc3089|rfc3111|rfc3132|rfc3162|rfc317 5|rfc3178|rfc3234
If ARIN (and APNIC and RIPE) would assign portable space in smaller pieces and make some kind of rules requiring ISPs to route them when there is one prefix in an AS, regardless of size, then I suspect ISPs will find it a lot easier to do NAT. Right now a small ISP doing "the right thing" and deploying NAT for all business customers, instead of giving them each a /29 (and thus using only 1/8 the IP space), is delaying their ability to reach the holy grail of ISP-dom: portable IP space and an ASN. And while this is happening, larger ISPs are still flooding BGP with hundreds or even thousands of prefixes for gobs of discontiguous IP space.
if you mean "4 inside, 6 outside" then it has some limitations. If you're on a 4-only box inside and want to connect somewhere, it has to have an IPv4 address, or you have to have some IPv4 address mapped to the IPv6 address with corresponding DNS change (I hear this is what the BSD folks are doing). Doing servers this way is easier as the client (outside) is connecting to a specific IPv6 address, and the NAT can translate that easy enough to (inside) IPv4 (no DNS juggling needed).
Such network address translation should at least prevent any delays in upgrading servers from delaying IPv6 deployment to the backbone. Clients will seriously need to be upgraded, and if Microsoft drags their feet, that can set things back really bad. But we also need solid IPv6 router code for the backbone, and I gather that Cisco is not moving very fast on getting it widely implemented solidly. Maybe when the economy picks up they might be able to (if they see the demand for it).
But you don't need them. Everything can be handled right in the NAT (if programmed to do it) without anycast.
Just put 6to4 capability in, or right next to, your border router. Put some IPv4 private IPs in for the inside pool, and away it goes. It should be easy (but I don't know if implementors are that smart) to take a /104 chunk of your IPv6 space and map it 1-to-1 to the whole 10/8 space by keeping the low 24 bits the same. That should give you plenty of time to transition your inside servers, and all your access customers (if your an ISP) or all your offices and cubicles (if your a business) to working on IPv6.
Or we can put together our own IPv6 network with some tunnels to get started, just like 6bone but without the hassle.
The cost to "upgrade" to IPv6 can be simplified by having IPv6 be translated at or near the border to IPv4 private addresses on the inside. No OS upgrade needed. No application upgrade needed. Just make sure your border routers can do IPv6, add the NAT, and you're live.
There are plenty of useful functions for NATv6. See my post above.
There will be NATv6 whether you like it or not, and regardless of what the RFCs say about it. There are legitimate uses for it. I may want to have the same hostname for a variety of different services, but put those services on different machines behind the firewall. There's a form of NAT for that. I may want to load balance 1000 servers to one name (which DNS will limit to just a few IPs at most ... and don't forget that AAAA records take more space out of the response packet than A records do). I may want to hide my internal infrastructure and make everything appear to be right at the border. And perhaps I just don't want to upgrade some server to IPv6, preferring to leave it at IPv4, and let the NAT present IPv6 to the world while my intranet sees it as IPv4.
Since we already have mastered the logic needed in a variety of forms of network address translation, IPv6 is just a matter of some code changes to accomodate the larger IP address.
Many businesses are now disabling Javascript for their staff computers, and often doing things to enforce it, varying from policy "thou shalt not enabled it under penalty of job loss", to crippling it (probably crashing the browser when it gets any Javascript) via DLL or register hacking, to even filtering it out on proxy servers. And this is because some web sites (accessed by typographical errors, perhaps) use Javascript to take over someone's computer (such as trying to convince them they must view some porn to get their computer back). Javascript is a security concern to the client side.
And there are still some sites where even just programming errors cause one to be trapped in error popup hell. So I leave it off. Until browser developers can isolate Javascript into a very secure padded cell where it can do no harm (and I'm not going to say this is easy, but it certainly needs to be done), I'll leave it off.
Want me to upgrade my browser? Put one out that does Javascript securely (and doesn't break other stuff, conforms to standards ... and if you insist it conform to all W3C standards then I will insist it conform to all X windows standards) then I will be more enticed to upgrade.
The really irritating web sites are the ones that have what appears to be a basic, simple, text hyperlink, but they implement it with a Javascript function call that does nothing but go there. Then when there, it doesn't even need any Javascript there at all (often times it's only the first page where these Javascript abuses take place).
What kinds of things do you need to do that require so much Javascript? Hopefully you're not using Javascript to implement hyperlinks.
It seems many web designers, such as some from A List Apart, seem to confuse the support of standards with standards compliance. There is a difference. Compliance is an issue considered for each supported standard. A browser may not support some standard for some reason (maybe it was written before that standard was finalized). But it could well be compliant with those standards it does accept. So please don't use the term "standards compliant browser" when you're upset because it doesn't support every W3C standard out there. Use "browser that fully supports every W3C standard" when you mean that.
The reason I don't upgrade is that NEW browsers are MORE broken. I don't measure brokeness in terms of whether some new standard is supported or not ... that's called incomplete. Older browsers do suffer from incompleteness. But newer browsers have bugs ... general bugs in everything as opposed to the inability to support the new feature some graphics designer wants. "Standards compliance" does NOT mean every standard has to be supported. An older browser is just as compliant today as it was when it first came out ... it just doesn't have all the neat new bells and whistles.
Always allow for two generations of browsers when including the unstable buggy new ones. There are often many issues why browsers (or any other application) cannot be immediately upgraded. The world does NOT revolve around implementing what graphic designers want first. Of course upgrading is good, but it is never an instant thing. Once the next generation is out past beta, allow 18 to 24 months for a significant portion of the population to have it. And that's counting from when the browser is out, not when the new standards are out.
Most things you describe are good things, but I do disagree with your notion of jumping ahead to next generation browsers so quickly. Using the new standards is good, but the page should be made to work over a two generation browser range (that means including Netscape 4.7). It doesn't have to look as pretty in the old browser, but it should at least be functional. Every text should be visible. Every button should render. Learn to design flexibly. Sticking to validated standards is good, but being capable of being used with the standards actually implemented one generation back (while the new generation matures) is still essential. Compliancy is NOT about having to use all of the standards out there. It's about using what standards you need to have correctly. The point is, if you don't actually need XHTML, then don't make a site that can't work without it. And even if some part of the site really need XHTML, or CSS, Javascript, then don't make the rest of the site crippled by requiring it everywhere.
If you need to put some pressure somewhere so you can present some really cool new designs in front of more and more people, then join me in pressuring browser developers to work on writing less buggy, more stable, and faster performing code. Unfortunately, it takes time for software projects to mature when there is a flurry of new things to implement. And at some point the developers really can't go any faster anyway. This is something else we all need to deal with.