Wikipedia's notability guideline (note it's not actually an official policy) has all sorts of loopholes built in to it to allow a clique of editors to kill something they don't like. In this case, they would argue that Deletionpedia was not really notable in and of itself, but was only notable because of some notable incident which might be worthy of having a separate article (but that article would likely never be written, or would itself be deleted on some other grounds).
Actually... yes, that is the way it happened. Debian thought they had an agreement (which they cite in that thread) from Mozilla which would let them continue to use the "Firefox" name while avoiding certain aspects of the branding requirements which proved too onerous for the DFSG. And all was well until one day a guy from Mozilla Corporation (which, ironically, is not the entity which owns the trademark) came along and started the threat process.
Once again: Mozilla's done this before. They're doing it again. Isn't it about time we had a Free browser?
Ubuntu punches above the weight of most other distros, however, and could probably come to an agreement more easily; they'd want their users to be able to find a browser they're familiar with.
Once upon a time, the same was true of Debian, and their official contact from Mozilla granted them an exception. Then, over a year later, out of the blue and in the middle of a release, a new Mozilla contact appeared, said "oh, we've decided that agreement is retroactively not valid, change what you're doing or face the lawyers", and that was that.
If they'll do it to one distro, they'll do it to two. Isn't it time Ubuntu got a browser that's certified Free software?
And yet even the original was a pretty standard boilerplate "um, yeah, so if you use this to create stuff, and then use it to send/share that stuff, you grant us a license to make the copies involved along the way, and agree not to sue us if a marketing brochure for YouTube happens to include a screenshot that shows a frame of one of your videos" kind of clause that basically everything that's ever involved user-generated content has included since the dawn of time (and has to include because of the way copyright law works in the US).
You'd think that people as generally copyright-conscious as Slashdot readers would know this stuff by now, but still every time we see these dumb-assed "THEY SAID I GRANT A LICENSE TO MY STUFF OMG THEY WANT TO STEAL ALL OF MY IDEAS FROM ME AND OWN ME FOREVER" stories while real consumer-raping clauses sneak under the radar.
You know, I see this every four years and I can't help wondering at it. No matter who the Democratic Presidential candidate is, he or she is always, without fail and regardless of actual record, said to be "the most liberal member of Congress" or "the most liberal state governor", etc. Sometimes if the primaries are close down to the wire, two or more people are simultaneously "the most liberal", according to the attack ads.
Stories about this update and reported problems showed up in my feed reader today from at least five different major outlets. A "free pass" this ain't. Even the Microsoft-bashing these days is mostly contained in the sphere of bitching about OOXML; everybody and their brother knows that if you can write a sensationalist article outlining the doom of Apple and the iPhone you'll be plastered over every news aggregator on the Web, and so that's what they do.
Meanwhile, an explanation given further up seems plausible: people complained that the phone would drop to EDGE too soon when 3G signal strength dropped, Apple changed the firmware to make it stay on 3G in those cases, and now the people who loudly demanded the right to keep using a crappy signal are upset at getting what they wanted.
Aside from using the logotype (which, in my opinion, was listed as 'fair use'), what exactly did the IOC plan to do with this? And why are they following China's commie propaganda?
There's another explanation, which is that a lot of symbols surrounding the Olympics are trademarked. And, in the US, trademark law requires that you take steps to protect your trademark, or you risk losing some or all of your rights to it. It's debatable how much that has to do with this case, since at least one of the Olympic symbols (the interlocking rings) is protected by a special statute that falls outside normal rules for this sort of thing, but it could be a factor.
And yes, I like to call it privicy not having my picture taken each and every time I walk outside my house, no matter how legal it is.
An interesting commentary on average Slashdot ideals, and on the state of our society.
Incidentally, the solution is to secure copyright in some aspect of your house/property. People who make films, for example, have to hire firms to basically go pixel-by-pixel through each scene to ensure they haven't accidentally caught a copyrighted image or logo in the background, and then hire lawyers to negotiate licensing and fees for any scenes which have done so. For stuff that's already and deliberately in public display. The Spider-Man franchise really got in trouble for this, btw, when they photoshopped out a bunch of (copyrighted) billboards in New York and replaced them with ads from the film's paid sponsors.
Well, from what I can tell the hysteria here in the US is nothing as compared to some Commonwealth countries; in the UK, for example, I hear it's now forbidden for children to be taken out in public at any time, and any and all discussion of the fact that children exist is forbidden, in hopes that pedophiles will thus be misled into believing that there are no children.
No. US medical privacy law is actually quite strict, so strict in fact that it's not legal -- absent your written authorization -- for your doctor to send a bill for treatment to your insurance company, because --again, absent your written authorization -- that's a disclosure of personally-identifiable medical information. So in order for the insurance to be useful at all you have to sign such an authorization.
Just to follow up: Python has two flavors of tests -- unittest, which was originally the PyUnit software you've already been pointed to, and doctest which lets you write interactive examples -- and Django's test framework has baked-in support for both of them, along with extension points to plug in your own system if you prefer. There's also a dummy HTTP client which can send requests and inspect the responses being sent back (including verifying data-processing from the backend), and a co-worker of mine has released some software which generates a test suite from a live browser session to ease creation of your tests.
Personally, I've always felt that Python's doctest system is one of the greatest things since sliced bread; for example, it lets us produce a single document which in one context can be processed as API documentation but, in another, is executable as a unit test suite for the features it's documenting.
The scary part is, I know the person who filed that ticket... and the person this is assigned to; they're the same person.
And why is that scary, exactly? Marty wanted the feature, knew what needed to be done and put in the work to write the code. Should we forbid that?
I do find it strange that a potentially large change that hasn't been included as part of 1.0 alpha will appear in 1.0 beta.
There's a release roadmap explaining what's being worked on, when it's due, when feature freeze will happen, etc. It's not terribly hard to find (e.g., Google "Django 1.0 roadmap" and it's likely the first result). Alpha had to have all the major features, where "major" is defined roughly as "affects practically everyone who uses Django" (e.g., the admin refactor; the WSGI-handling changes, things like that). The first beta will also be the feature freeze, and has to have every feature; file backends are slated to be one of those features but -- since most people get along just fine without them -- it's kind of hard to argue that it's a sweeping change to Django.
It does have something called "generic views" which can provide basic CRUD and various common views (such as date-based views). However, these are more for prototyping, and would generally be replaced in a production app with something more custom.
I have a crap ton of production code built around generic views. They're in Django precisely because things like "show a detail view of one object" or "show all objects from March 2006" shouldn't require you to be constantly writing and re-writing code: the repetitive parts of the logic can and should be encapsulated in a generic handler. In the book I cover some examples of how to take advantage of this by using the various supported parameters or writing short one- or two-line wrappers around generic views, and I've got an older (but still perfectly working: hooray API stability!) blog post covering the same topic.
This is why I don't do production work with newer frameworks like these. The next time I need to change something, half of my application could be broken!
For example, the FileField isn't friendly for organizing things by users
Which will change with the swappable file backends being introduced by ticket #5361, which is scheduled to land for 1.0 beta (and thus to be part of the 1.0 release in September). That ticket's been held up a bit by a related piece of work which landed not too long ago: configurable file-upload handlers.
All of the features that you list seem to be about limiting the options of the programmers rather than extending the capabilities of the base language.
Devoid of context, yes, I can see that.
In context, however, not so much. Consider Django's built-in template system (which you don't have to use, btw; most people do because it leads to easier interoperability with arbitrary applications, but you're free to drop in whatever you like -- it's just Python code on the backend); most people instinctively get upset when they find out that it isn't just the host programming language embedded into HTML (a la PHP, ERB, "classic" ASP, etc.). But I've found that it's extremely rare for me to have a need for such a thing, and when I do the template system is extensible from the Python side, so I can implement what I need and get on with life. A good example I ran into the other night while helping someone debug: he was doing a product-review site where each product had a government-issued safety rating, from one to five stars. What he wanted was basically a way to say something like:
{% if product.safety_rating > 3 %}This product has a high safety rating.{% endif %}
(the curly-brace constructs are how Django's template language delimits certain constructs, such as conditionals, loop expressions, etc.)
Now, you can't actually do this: arbitrary Python expressions like product.safety_rating > 3 aren't supported by the language. What he ended up doing was moving this logic into a method on the object representing products, so it became if product.has_high_safety_rating instead. For most cases in most applications, this is a better option (it's more reusable, and leads to easier maintenance since you don't have magic numbers hard-coded everywhere). And for times when you need it, you can dip down to the Python level and extend whatever syntax you need into the template system (one night I sat down and implemented a bunch of comparison expressions; it took about five minutes).
The parent comment you're responding to is also slightly incorrect on a few points; for example, Django doesn't "enforce" MVC in any particular way and actually deviates from it in some ways that made sense for the Web (e.g., the concept of the controller really has no place in most web applications, since there's only a single channel for interaction with the app: HTTP). All Django cares about is that for each URL you want to handle, you provide a callable object which accepts an HTTP request as its first argument and returns an HTTP response. Beyond that, the sky's the limit. Django also doesn't force you to use its ORM; several of the bundled applications in django.contrib make use of it (since, if you've got Django installed, they can rely on the ORM being available), but nobody says you have to use it in your apps.
One issue, however, is that it is still changing rather quickly. Things in version.95 or.96 can be substantially different than the current development version.
Hi, I'm James and I wrote Practical Django Projects, and I have a confession to make: I cheated while writing the book. You see, I'm also Django's release manager, which meant I had a good idea of what would land in trunk and what would change by the time we went to press. Except for activating/hacking on the admin interface (the admin refactor just landed over the weekend), everything in the book should be up-to-date and usable on the Django 1.0 alpha we released Monday.
# of people matching = size of group * size of group * chance of match
Well, not quite. Simply squaring the number of people in the group gives you the permutations, but that's larger than the number of combinations: in other words, simple squaring treats "Alice and Bob" and "Bob and Alice" as being different subgroups when, in fact, they're the same two people. So what you want to do is halve the square of the group size to get the combinations:
(6,000,000 * 6,000,000) / 2 gives 18,000,000,000,000 unique combinations of two people each.
18,000,000,000,000 combinations / 1,300,000,000 ("one in 1.3 billion") is 13,846 and change.
Therefore, in a database of 6 million people, you should expect to find 13,846 pairs, such that for each of these pairs there is a "one in 1.3 billion" characteristic they share.
Of course, each one of those pairs will probably share a different "one in 1.3 billion" characteristic, but still it's a pretty scary figure to meditate on when you consider how heavily we like to rely on DNA evidence these days.
Aside: there's actually been some very heated debate amongst attorneys as to whether TV shows like "CSI" unfairly bias jury members to accept forensic DNA evidence as unimpeachable, since they create a popular perception that such evidence is always correct and always fingers the bad guy (and, hence, whether questions about this sort of thing have any place in jury selection). It makes for fun reading.
Actually, it's a balance. For the purpose of freely expressing your views and opinions, there are certain narrowly-focused exceptions to copyright (e.g., you can reproduce representative portions of a work for purposes of criticizing or commenting on it). This allows both copyright and free speech to coexist. However, note that the information doesn't "belong" to the entity who holds the copyright (a common misconception); all that belongs to that entity is a temporary privilege to control the reproduction and distribution of the information. It may seem like hair-splitting, but it's a very important distinction.
So the USA gets it in July and the rest of the world has to wait until November?
Yeah, when the EU found out that Apple had posted both metric and non-metric specs online, they confiscated the first shipment. Also, I hear that a small town in France has changed its name to something vaguely sounding like "iPhone" and got declared a Protected Designation of Origin, which will delay things even longer...
If it really is that broad, there's very little chance of it surviving a legal challenge.
You'd better hope that a solid Constitutional argument can be made against it, since all federal and state laws in the US are subordinate to ratified treaties. Only the Constitution can outrank a treaty in the American legal system, and the US Supreme Court has been known to turn a blind eye to Constitutional concerns when the Walt Disney Company's profit margins are alleged to be threatened.
And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is 'cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do, and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in, say, "Shrink, you can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant." And walk out.
You know, if one person, just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And if three people do it, three, can you imagine -- three people walking in, singin' a bar of "Alice's Restaurant" and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, singin' a bar of "Alice's Restaurant" and walking out. And friends, they may think it's a movement.
Well, definitions vary wildly. In the course of my (philosophy) degree, I did quite a bit of study into religion, and generally speaking the following are considered good indicators of a "cult", though there is no single universal set of definitive criteria.
So, in general, a "cult":
Typically follows one or more highly charismatic leaders, whose word is taken to be unquestionable.
Clearly divides the world into "us" and "them".
Believes that the world outside the "us" group is fundamentally bad/evil.
As a result, believes that interaction with the outside world is dangerous to members of the "us" group and is to be avoided when possible, or carefully supervised.
As a result, tends to form more or less isolated enclaves to minimize contact with outsiders, or mediate such contact through trusted group members in positions of authority.
As a result, believes that untrained persons interacting with the outside world are tainted and need to be carefully reassimilated to the group.
Typically holds beliefs radically different from what is considered mainstream or acceptable for the immediately-surrounding society.
As a result of the above, typically experiences a high degree of tension with the outside world, which can create a feedback loop (above tendencies lead to tension, which aggravates above tendencies, which leads to more tension...).
Of course, many groups show one or more of these tendencies, but aren't widely considered (and really shouldn't be considered) "cults". And some groups that are "cults" show none of these tendencies. And this status can evolve over time; for example, many early Protestant movements were, by these criteria, "cults" at the time of their founding, but -- as Protestantism gained wider acceptance -- became closer to the mainstream and so lost many of the above tendencies.
Yes and no. While it's DBAPI 2.0 compliant, it only supports the "qmark" paramstyle
Which is fine. Adapters don't have to support all the styles, they just have to tell you which one they support. And since the value of the paramstyle constant is a string, a given adapter only gets to pick one. From there it's not too terribly hard to write flexible code that generates queries with the appropriate placeholders.
Actually, the Python SQLite adapter supports the standard Python DB API (PEP 249), and so you can just follow its recommendations (which includes using placeholders).
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia's notability guideline (note it's not actually an official policy) has all sorts of loopholes built in to it to allow a clique of editors to kill something they don't like. In this case, they would argue that Deletionpedia was not really notable in and of itself, but was only notable because of some notable incident which might be worthy of having a separate article (but that article would likely never be written, or would itself be deleted on some other grounds).
Actually... yes, that is the way it happened. Debian thought they had an agreement (which they cite in that thread) from Mozilla which would let them continue to use the "Firefox" name while avoiding certain aspects of the branding requirements which proved too onerous for the DFSG. And all was well until one day a guy from Mozilla Corporation (which, ironically, is not the entity which owns the trademark) came along and started the threat process.
Once again: Mozilla's done this before. They're doing it again. Isn't it about time we had a Free browser?
Once upon a time, the same was true of Debian, and their official contact from Mozilla granted them an exception. Then, over a year later, out of the blue and in the middle of a release, a new Mozilla contact appeared, said "oh, we've decided that agreement is retroactively not valid, change what you're doing or face the lawyers", and that was that.
If they'll do it to one distro, they'll do it to two. Isn't it time Ubuntu got a browser that's certified Free software?
And yet even the original was a pretty standard boilerplate "um, yeah, so if you use this to create stuff, and then use it to send/share that stuff, you grant us a license to make the copies involved along the way, and agree not to sue us if a marketing brochure for YouTube happens to include a screenshot that shows a frame of one of your videos" kind of clause that basically everything that's ever involved user-generated content has included since the dawn of time (and has to include because of the way copyright law works in the US).
You'd think that people as generally copyright-conscious as Slashdot readers would know this stuff by now, but still every time we see these dumb-assed "THEY SAID I GRANT A LICENSE TO MY STUFF OMG THEY WANT TO STEAL ALL OF MY IDEAS FROM ME AND OWN ME FOREVER" stories while real consumer-raping clauses sneak under the radar.
You know, I see this every four years and I can't help wondering at it. No matter who the Democratic Presidential candidate is, he or she is always, without fail and regardless of actual record, said to be "the most liberal member of Congress" or "the most liberal state governor", etc. Sometimes if the primaries are close down to the wire, two or more people are simultaneously "the most liberal", according to the attack ads.
Stories about this update and reported problems showed up in my feed reader today from at least five different major outlets. A "free pass" this ain't. Even the Microsoft-bashing these days is mostly contained in the sphere of bitching about OOXML; everybody and their brother knows that if you can write a sensationalist article outlining the doom of Apple and the iPhone you'll be plastered over every news aggregator on the Web, and so that's what they do.
Meanwhile, an explanation given further up seems plausible: people complained that the phone would drop to EDGE too soon when 3G signal strength dropped, Apple changed the firmware to make it stay on 3G in those cases, and now the people who loudly demanded the right to keep using a crappy signal are upset at getting what they wanted.
There's another explanation, which is that a lot of symbols surrounding the Olympics are trademarked. And, in the US, trademark law requires that you take steps to protect your trademark, or you risk losing some or all of your rights to it. It's debatable how much that has to do with this case, since at least one of the Olympic symbols (the interlocking rings) is protected by a special statute that falls outside normal rules for this sort of thing, but it could be a factor.
An interesting commentary on average Slashdot ideals, and on the state of our society.
Incidentally, the solution is to secure copyright in some aspect of your house/property. People who make films, for example, have to hire firms to basically go pixel-by-pixel through each scene to ensure they haven't accidentally caught a copyrighted image or logo in the background, and then hire lawyers to negotiate licensing and fees for any scenes which have done so. For stuff that's already and deliberately in public display. The Spider-Man franchise really got in trouble for this, btw, when they photoshopped out a bunch of (copyrighted) billboards in New York and replaced them with ads from the film's paid sponsors.
Well, from what I can tell the hysteria here in the US is nothing as compared to some Commonwealth countries; in the UK, for example, I hear it's now forbidden for children to be taken out in public at any time, and any and all discussion of the fact that children exist is forbidden, in hopes that pedophiles will thus be misled into believing that there are no children.
No. US medical privacy law is actually quite strict, so strict in fact that it's not legal -- absent your written authorization -- for your doctor to send a bill for treatment to your insurance company, because --again, absent your written authorization -- that's a disclosure of personally-identifiable medical information. So in order for the insurance to be useful at all you have to sign such an authorization.
Just to follow up: Python has two flavors of tests -- unittest, which was originally the PyUnit software you've already been pointed to, and doctest which lets you write interactive examples -- and Django's test framework has baked-in support for both of them, along with extension points to plug in your own system if you prefer. There's also a dummy HTTP client which can send requests and inspect the responses being sent back (including verifying data-processing from the backend), and a co-worker of mine has released some software which generates a test suite from a live browser session to ease creation of your tests.
Personally, I've always felt that Python's doctest system is one of the greatest things since sliced bread; for example, it lets us produce a single document which in one context can be processed as API documentation but, in another, is executable as a unit test suite for the features it's documenting.
And why is that scary, exactly? Marty wanted the feature, knew what needed to be done and put in the work to write the code. Should we forbid that?
There's a release roadmap explaining what's being worked on, when it's due, when feature freeze will happen, etc. It's not terribly hard to find (e.g., Google "Django 1.0 roadmap" and it's likely the first result). Alpha had to have all the major features, where "major" is defined roughly as "affects practically everyone who uses Django" (e.g., the admin refactor; the WSGI-handling changes, things like that). The first beta will also be the feature freeze, and has to have every feature; file backends are slated to be one of those features but -- since most people get along just fine without them -- it's kind of hard to argue that it's a sweeping change to Django.
I have a crap ton of production code built around generic views. They're in Django precisely because things like "show a detail view of one object" or "show all objects from March 2006" shouldn't require you to be constantly writing and re-writing code: the repetitive parts of the logic can and should be encapsulated in a generic handler. In the book I cover some examples of how to take advantage of this by using the various supported parameters or writing short one- or two-line wrappers around generic views, and I've got an older (but still perfectly working: hooray API stability!) blog post covering the same topic.
This is why we have a document explaining which APIs are finalized and which may change prior to 1.0.
Which will change with the swappable file backends being introduced by ticket #5361, which is scheduled to land for 1.0 beta (and thus to be part of the 1.0 release in September). That ticket's been held up a bit by a related piece of work which landed not too long ago: configurable file-upload handlers.
Devoid of context, yes, I can see that.
In context, however, not so much. Consider Django's built-in template system (which you don't have to use, btw; most people do because it leads to easier interoperability with arbitrary applications, but you're free to drop in whatever you like -- it's just Python code on the backend); most people instinctively get upset when they find out that it isn't just the host programming language embedded into HTML (a la PHP, ERB, "classic" ASP, etc.). But I've found that it's extremely rare for me to have a need for such a thing, and when I do the template system is extensible from the Python side, so I can implement what I need and get on with life. A good example I ran into the other night while helping someone debug: he was doing a product-review site where each product had a government-issued safety rating, from one to five stars. What he wanted was basically a way to say something like:
{% if product.safety_rating > 3 %}This product has a high safety rating.{% endif %}
(the curly-brace constructs are how Django's template language delimits certain constructs, such as conditionals, loop expressions, etc.)
Now, you can't actually do this: arbitrary Python expressions like product.safety_rating > 3 aren't supported by the language. What he ended up doing was moving this logic into a method on the object representing products, so it became if product.has_high_safety_rating instead. For most cases in most applications, this is a better option (it's more reusable, and leads to easier maintenance since you don't have magic numbers hard-coded everywhere). And for times when you need it, you can dip down to the Python level and extend whatever syntax you need into the template system (one night I sat down and implemented a bunch of comparison expressions; it took about five minutes).
The parent comment you're responding to is also slightly incorrect on a few points; for example, Django doesn't "enforce" MVC in any particular way and actually deviates from it in some ways that made sense for the Web (e.g., the concept of the controller really has no place in most web applications, since there's only a single channel for interaction with the app: HTTP). All Django cares about is that for each URL you want to handle, you provide a callable object which accepts an HTTP request as its first argument and returns an HTTP response. Beyond that, the sky's the limit. Django also doesn't force you to use its ORM; several of the bundled applications in django.contrib make use of it (since, if you've got Django installed, they can rely on the ORM being available), but nobody says you have to use it in your apps.
Hi, I'm James and I wrote Practical Django Projects, and I have a confession to make: I cheated while writing the book. You see, I'm also Django's release manager, which meant I had a good idea of what would land in trunk and what would change by the time we went to press. Except for activating/hacking on the admin interface (the admin refactor just landed over the weekend), everything in the book should be up-to-date and usable on the Django 1.0 alpha we released Monday.
Well, not quite. Simply squaring the number of people in the group gives you the permutations, but that's larger than the number of combinations: in other words, simple squaring treats "Alice and Bob" and "Bob and Alice" as being different subgroups when, in fact, they're the same two people. So what you want to do is halve the square of the group size to get the combinations:
Of course, each one of those pairs will probably share a different "one in 1.3 billion" characteristic, but still it's a pretty scary figure to meditate on when you consider how heavily we like to rely on DNA evidence these days.
Aside: there's actually been some very heated debate amongst attorneys as to whether TV shows like "CSI" unfairly bias jury members to accept forensic DNA evidence as unimpeachable, since they create a popular perception that such evidence is always correct and always fingers the bad guy (and, hence, whether questions about this sort of thing have any place in jury selection). It makes for fun reading.
Actually, it's a balance. For the purpose of freely expressing your views and opinions, there are certain narrowly-focused exceptions to copyright (e.g., you can reproduce representative portions of a work for purposes of criticizing or commenting on it). This allows both copyright and free speech to coexist. However, note that the information doesn't "belong" to the entity who holds the copyright (a common misconception); all that belongs to that entity is a temporary privilege to control the reproduction and distribution of the information. It may seem like hair-splitting, but it's a very important distinction.
Yeah, when the EU found out that Apple had posted both metric and non-metric specs online, they confiscated the first shipment. Also, I hear that a small town in France has changed its name to something vaguely sounding like "iPhone" and got declared a Protected Designation of Origin, which will delay things even longer...
You'd better hope that a solid Constitutional argument can be made against it, since all federal and state laws in the US are subordinate to ratified treaties. Only the Constitution can outrank a treaty in the American legal system, and the US Supreme Court has been known to turn a blind eye to Constitutional concerns when the Walt Disney Company's profit margins are alleged to be threatened.
I think what you meant to say was:
Well, definitions vary wildly. In the course of my (philosophy) degree, I did quite a bit of study into religion, and generally speaking the following are considered good indicators of a "cult", though there is no single universal set of definitive criteria.
So, in general, a "cult":
Of course, many groups show one or more of these tendencies, but aren't widely considered (and really shouldn't be considered) "cults". And some groups that are "cults" show none of these tendencies. And this status can evolve over time; for example, many early Protestant movements were, by these criteria, "cults" at the time of their founding, but -- as Protestantism gained wider acceptance -- became closer to the mainstream and so lost many of the above tendencies.
Which is fine. Adapters don't have to support all the styles, they just have to tell you which one they support. And since the value of the paramstyle constant is a string, a given adapter only gets to pick one. From there it's not too terribly hard to write flexible code that generates queries with the appropriate placeholders.
Actually, the Python SQLite adapter supports the standard Python DB API (PEP 249), and so you can just follow its recommendations (which includes using placeholders).