Where do we get the social stigma associated with "meeting someone online"?...Whenever something arises that allows us to interact with people, it's usually a good thing. But tell your parents that you met someone online and you're dating them -- hell tell anyone -- that and more often than not, they'll disapprove.
I think this stigma is from people's natural tendency to fear the unfamiliar, and is fading fast. I met my girlfriend online, and everyone I know has been supportive. I think they'd be more suspicious if I met her in a bar. The internet just seems like a normal place to meet someone these days. In fact, my dad met his wife online, and my girlfriend's mom met her husband online too. Obviously, neither of our parents disapprove of online dating.
In the younger generation (20somethings and below) it is THE way to meet people for dates, and there's no social stigma attached to it.
I would say that online dating is THE way to meet people for the older generations, too. Perhaps even moreso than for young people. For those of us who have outgrown the whole bar and club scene, there are not many other ways to meet lots of people. I'm past my twenties and met my girlfriend at an online dating site. What's more, my dad met his wife at a similar site, and my girlfriend's mom met her husband online as well.
He didn't say to avoid ALL closed hardware -- Just nVidia specifically
This is a topic of great interest to me, because I hate proprietary drivers but also want a decent video card to use in linux. I refuse to buy nVidia cards, but what other modern options are there? Stallman mentioned that there is a video card company that releases their specs, but I don't know which one he's talking about. Maybe his information is outdated. I have a Matrox g400 in one system and an ATI Radeon 9250 in another, and both of these have good Free drivers. Neither of these is exactly a speed demon, but it seems Matrox and ATI have both kept their specs hidden in subsequent releases. Does anyone know the best video card with usable Free drivers?
Not true. Though a song traditionally has at least one vocal line, a number of classical composers have written songs without words, most notably Felix Mendelssohn.
Why can't HTML include a <OBJ> tag, with an "HREF" argument, that points at any object at any URL? Like a text object that is maintained by the server, not necessarily the one maintaining the document in which the document is embedded. To do so now, I have to use IFRAMEs, which have all kinds of quirks and cross-platform differences.
Actually, the <object> element, which the W3C says is for "generic inclusion" has been around for a number of years (since HTML 4.0). I believe it does what you want. From what I understand, the <iframe> element has been deprecated in recent versions of XHTML. My apologies if you are merely being facetious and know this already.
Perhaps the part that says the judicial branch interprets the law???
Which part is that? As far as I can tell, the Constitution never says anything about the Judicial Branch doing any interpreting. It is completely implicit. In fact, I think the whole idea of needing to "interpret" something in this sense (that is, searching for implicit meanings within a text) is a sort of post-modern thing that the framers of the Constitution wouldn't have given as much thought as academics do now.
Thanks, that's exactly what I was thinking of, though I couldn't remember the name of the case. I just thought the circularity in the situation was funny.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the purpose of the Supreme Court is to be the official interpreters of the Constitution? IIRC, it never says that explicitly. I suppose it could be interpreted to say that, but by whom? The Supreme Court, of course, since that is their purpose;^)
These are called dividends, and they're nice...but dividends are a longer term investment, so they're unattractive to a lot of people.
The big problem with dividends is that you are taxed on them immediately. Essentially, with dividends the government skims a percentage off the top every year, whereas if the corporation keeps the money and reinvests it to encourage growth, you should end up seeing that money returned to you in the form of higher stock prices, while avoiding the tax hit until you actually sell your stock. Due to the magic of compounding returns, you make a whole lot more money if you defer the taxes until the end rather than pay them steadily every year. So dividends are bad not only for all those moronic get-rich-quick day traders, but also for canny long-term investors. Indeed, it's this sort of strategy that made Warren Buffett, the quintessential long-term investor, into a very wealthy man.
The problems you describe are very real, though, and I think we'd be better off as a society if we got rid of taxation of dividends altogether. Of course, there are already some ways to reinvest dividends tax-free, which is good, but usually you are pretty limited in the amount of money you can put into such programs. Also, Pres. Bush managed to pass some big reductions in dividend tax rates, which IMHO is one of the few good things he's done. I suspect that Bush meant this as a favor to the "haves and have-mores" (his own phrase) that make up his base, but it really is good for society as a whole if we can discourage that growth-at-any-cost mentality in corporations by making dividends more attractive to investors.
One very convenient thing dynamic typing allows is passing args to a function which refer to different types that use a compatible API. For instance, take the following simple python function:
def cat(*args): lines = [] [lines.extend(file_obj.readlines()) for file_obj in args] return lines
This function works somewhat like the unix cat command. It takes an arbitrary number of arguments (that's what *args means in python. It doesn't have anything to do with pointers, a la C), and assumes they are file objects. It returns a single list containing all the lines read from all the files.
However, in python, who says I have to restrict myself to just using file objects? I can use other types as well, most commonly a string that has been wrapped in a StringIO class instance, which emulates the file object API. However, I might also want to pass custom classes that implement the readlines() method. Maybe I want to use this function on data I'm reading from a socket. The sky's the limit. And I can pass a mixture of all these different data types as the args for a single function call, and get the results I want with no hassle at all. Sure, this is a trivial example, but the technique is extremely useful, and I do it all the time when programming in python.
Doing this sort of thing in statically typed languages can be really painful. To be fair, in C#, it appears you can do something similar without jumping through too many hoops, but it looks like it also throws out most of the benefits of static typing in those situations. Someone more knowledeable than I would have to describe how you could accomplish such things in C++ or Java, or (god forbid) in plain C. I imagine the code would be much more complex and hard to read (and hence a magnet for bugs) in any statically typed language.
As I acknowledged above, static typing does have some advantages in catching bugs at compile time. Several types of bugs come to mind, and these are not as much of a problem as some people have made them out to be:
1. Passing incompatible types as args to a function: This would happen in my example function if I passed it an int, which has no readlines() method. Such a problem will only show up at runtime. However, these are triggered very easily, especially if you are using unit testing (which you should be anyway).
2. Passing types as arguments which, by coincidence, have the same method names, but they behave very differently: This would happen if we passed a type that had the readlines() method, but that method did something different than what we were expecting. This can be very insidious, but I can't imagine it happening very much (I've never seen it happen). This can also be minimized by using good naming practices, which I imagine most python programmers, who typically love readable code, are already doing.
3. Variable assignment using a mis-typed name: To borrow an example from another post in this thread:
Because of the mistyped name, this will not give you the results you would expect, and this can be very hard to debug. However, this problem is a bit contrived, in my opinion. This will only show up in python when you re-bind a name to a different variable, and there is almost never a reason to do this. However, if you're paranoid about this happening, give your variables distinctive names, use an editor that supports name completion, and use this feature religiously. No more problem.
And please, no Stallmanesque rants about how intellectual property should be abolished.
Are you implying that Richard Stallman has said that intellectual property should be abolished? I doubt he would say that, considering that he doesn't even think "intellectual property" is a useful term, since copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, etc. are all separate concepts governed by separate laws and having varying effects on an individual's freedom.
Perhaps this is not what you meant, but I wouldn't be surprised. It seems that every day here on/. someone inaccurately attributes all sorts of loony beliefs to Stallman. Most of his opinions are fairly cogent and reasonable. Of course, he doesn't help himself, with his unorthodox appearance and behavior, lack of social skills, and pedantry regarding unimportant topics like the whole GNU/Linux thing. Still, unlike Joe Sixpack, I would think that the typical geek would be more tolerant of such things.
Anyway, to keep this post on topic:
MP3 is definitely patent-encumbered, and I believe AAC is as well. For this reason, Fedora and probably other distros do not include MP3 players/encoders. I don't know if using a free encoder in and of itself is breaking patent law, since the patent holders have not indicated any wish to forbid this (at least in Fraunhofer's case). After all, patent holders aren't required to charge you a licensing fee. Also, there is nothing specific about Linux that forbids using licensed apps; I believe there are some proprietary media apps for Linux that have purchased licenses for MP3.
There have been some issues with Freetype's bytecode interpreter in the past violating an Apple patent. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with kerning or not; I seem to remember it dealing with hinting. The last I heard, the Freetype developers had worked out some new ideas that don't violate the patent and gave better results anyway. On my Fedora desktop (and Fedora takes patents very seriously), the fonts look excellent, much better than on Windows. OS X may still have it beat, though.
I've heard nothing about patents on subpixel rendering one way or the other. I know that it works on my Fedora desktop, and I can't imagine they would enable it if it violated a patent, considering their stance on other patent-encumbered technology.
Re:Better for windows users now
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The difference between Wimp and other GTK engines is that it uses the windows GUI engine to draw most things, so they are identical to the native windows controls. It does a better job of this in Windows XP than in previous versions, though. Wimp still causes quite a bit of pain in Windows 98.
As for wxPython, I've switched away from that to pyGTK, for a couple of reasons. First, the stable version of Wx uses a really ancient version of GTK on unix. Second, I really disliked the API. I have heard that it is similar in style to MFC, and if that is the case, I'm glad I've been able to stay away from Windows-only programming as long as I have.
You should try Amish Friendship Bread, which takes 10 days to make (you're basically growing the yeast yourself from a small sample). Very tasty stuff.
Where does the link you provided state Badnarik's position on copyright? He has a good number of position papers at that site, but I don't see any mention of "intellectual property" (too use that poor catch-all phrase).
It is true that libertarians (except for the Ayn Rand fanatics) seem to be leaning toward the idea that IP laws are unjustified government intrusion that undermines physical property ownership. However, I'd like to see where Mr. Badnarik's opinion lies before voting for him.
3) Are its DLLs rebased correctly so that they don't need to be fixedup by the Application Launcher when they load? Does it have a clean memory map? (Most non-Microsoft apps do NOT take this step - which is fully documented in MSDN - which means that their load times will be 10 to 20 times longer than apps which DO rebase their DLLs).
4) Are its DLLs bound at install-time? Binding DLLs reduces the time necessary to load and patch the import/export table of processes and DLLs, by pre-patching the import/export table and attaching a signature to it to catch if the external DLLs change. (Most non-Microsoft apps Do NOT take this step - which again is fully documented in MSDN - which means that their load times will be another 4 to 7 times longer than apps which DO bind their DLLs).
While binding and rebasing DLLs is certainly a good idea, where do you get your figures for speed improvement? According the this article at MSDN, the load time improvement, after both rebasing and binding, is only 12%-18%, depending on whether you are running 9x or NT. That's certainly nothing to ignore, but nowhere near the huge speed increase increase you claim.
It was not "Rubbish", it was small, fast and clean (At least at first).
Interestingly, when Microsoft bought DOS from Seattle Computer, it was named QDOS, which stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. It was a cheap knock-off of CP/M, and took something like six weeks to hack together. Of course, Microsoft changed this to MS-DOS, and switched the D from "Dirty" to "Disk".
You need to license GPL code before you can use it.
If by "use" you mean "run", you are absolutely incorrect. You are only required to accept the GPL if you want to distribute the software. To quote from the GPL (which you should read): "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of
running the Program is not restricted..."
I am surprised they are giving up on the desktop just as it is showing signs of life.
They are not giving up on the desktop. They will be selling support/updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which is meant for corporate workstations/desktops. What they are giving up on are the hobbyist and small business markets, who don't want to pay the steep prices for the enterprise versions, but still want timely updates. I think this sucks, because I fall into this category. I don't blame Red Hat, though, because there is not much money to be made there. If I was in their position, I would probably do the same thing.
I also underclock my Athlon XP. Modern CPU's just run too hot. Properly cooled, that thing made my system sound like a jet engine, and increased the temperature in the room about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. It is only tolerable when it's underclocked, and, to be honest, I don't notice any speed difference.
My next system is going to be low-power with minor cooling needs. I already have a Via C3 based system that I use for file serving. The whole machine has only one low-speed fan and is very quiet. I hope I can do something like that for a real desktop PC. Perhaps something with the Pentium-M CPU. I understand they're making mini-ITX and micro-ATX boards for these now.
It's part of this amazing thing called a free market
I can understand what you're saying, but this is not a free market, in the pure sense of the term. In a free market, anyone would be able to distribute any particular piece of music that they wanted for whatever price they wanted. Likewise, anyone else would be able to buy from any supplier who has the right price. Copyrights are a government intervention in this process which gives a particular entity sole distribution rights, in effect a monopoly.
This has lots of effects on the market, though not as bad as people normally assume. Whether this is a justified government intervention is open to debate, but this does not meet the criteria to be called a free market.
the thing that makes them easy to port from one platform to another is that the core system components are very simple, not based on some relatively huge and complex thing like Python.
Python runs on a great many systems, including just about every Posix system, Windows, Mac OS, etc. Being portable is not a problem. As far as far as being huge and complex, it's not like init scripts are currently written in ANSI C; they rely on a shell interpreter ( eg. bash). On my system, bash uses about 1.3 MB of RAM, python uses 2.1 MB. Hardly a big difference. Python is so much more powerful, easy to read, and less error-prone that I've wished someone would do this for years.
If for some reason you hate python, though, I don't think it is a necessary part of this process. I believe they are using it because it has bindings to D-Bus. Theoretically, anything else that can talk to D-Bus would work too. Now whether D-Bus is worth using remains to be seen, but it seems that lots of folks from both the KDE and Gnome camps like it, and they've been pretty far apart on this issue for years.
Just look at a Slashdot page -- there are no <navbar> , <section> , <linkbox>, <header> , or <footer> tags to use. What now?
Well, headers and footers are really layout oriented concepts and should be avoided in HTML. Most of that stuff should be implimented as unordered lists, since they are essentially just lists of links. If you do it this way, you can ensure that nearly every browser will be able to display the page in a legible format, even if they don't support CSS. Good for stuff like cell phones, pda's and lynx. It also makes the markup much easier to read, so coders will make fewer mistakes and debugging is easier. Of course, if you wanted to make section, header, footer, etc tags, you could use your own flavor of XML. Newer browsers could figure it out if you throw in some XSLT.
There are over 80 tags available in XHTML, enough to build just about any logical structure you could want. Of course, some of them have been deprecated because they are layout oriented. By the way, you are absolutely right about the W3C's track record, but I think they are mostly getting it right these days.
By the way, using Slashdot as an example in an HTML discussion is not a very good idea. Sure, it works for the most part, but it is some of the ugliest markup I've ever seen, and it doesn't validate as any version of HTML. If they recoded it to support modern standards, they could cut their bandwidth usage by 25% because of the cleaner design now possible. They could also get rid of annoyances like page widening attacks without breaking URLs like they do now.
ummm, that's exactly what I said. Read my post again.
Yeah, that's why I opened my comment with "I've got to agree with you completely." Maybe you should read my post again.:^) I was just expanding a little on what you said, and giving my own example, which had a slightly different spin than yours.
Slashdot Mirror
People are working on this. See this article in Discover magazine.
I think this stigma is from people's natural tendency to fear the unfamiliar, and is fading fast. I met my girlfriend online, and everyone I know has been supportive. I think they'd be more suspicious if I met her in a bar. The internet just seems like a normal place to meet someone these days. In fact, my dad met his wife online, and my girlfriend's mom met her husband online too. Obviously, neither of our parents disapprove of online dating.
This is a topic of great interest to me, because I hate proprietary drivers but also want a decent video card to use in linux. I refuse to buy nVidia cards, but what other modern options are there? Stallman mentioned that there is a video card company that releases their specs, but I don't know which one he's talking about. Maybe his information is outdated. I have a Matrox g400 in one system and an ATI Radeon 9250 in another, and both of these have good Free drivers. Neither of these is exactly a speed demon, but it seems Matrox and ATI have both kept their specs hidden in subsequent releases. Does anyone know the best video card with usable Free drivers?
Not true. Though a song traditionally has at least one vocal line, a number of classical composers have written songs without words, most notably Felix Mendelssohn.
Actually, the <object> element, which the W3C says is for "generic inclusion" has been around for a number of years (since HTML 4.0). I believe it does what you want. From what I understand, the <iframe> element has been deprecated in recent versions of XHTML. My apologies if you are merely being facetious and know this already.
Which part is that? As far as I can tell, the Constitution never says anything about the Judicial Branch doing any interpreting. It is completely implicit. In fact, I think the whole idea of needing to "interpret" something in this sense (that is, searching for implicit meanings within a text) is a sort of post-modern thing that the framers of the Constitution wouldn't have given as much thought as academics do now.
Thanks, that's exactly what I was thinking of, though I couldn't remember the name of the case. I just thought the circularity in the situation was funny.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the purpose of the Supreme Court is to be the official interpreters of the Constitution? IIRC, it never says that explicitly. I suppose it could be interpreted to say that, but by whom? The Supreme Court, of course, since that is their purpose ;^)
The big problem with dividends is that you are taxed on them immediately. Essentially, with dividends the government skims a percentage off the top every year, whereas if the corporation keeps the money and reinvests it to encourage growth, you should end up seeing that money returned to you in the form of higher stock prices, while avoiding the tax hit until you actually sell your stock. Due to the magic of compounding returns, you make a whole lot more money if you defer the taxes until the end rather than pay them steadily every year. So dividends are bad not only for all those moronic get-rich-quick day traders, but also for canny long-term investors. Indeed, it's this sort of strategy that made Warren Buffett, the quintessential long-term investor, into a very wealthy man.
The problems you describe are very real, though, and I think we'd be better off as a society if we got rid of taxation of dividends altogether. Of course, there are already some ways to reinvest dividends tax-free, which is good, but usually you are pretty limited in the amount of money you can put into such programs. Also, Pres. Bush managed to pass some big reductions in dividend tax rates, which IMHO is one of the few good things he's done. I suspect that Bush meant this as a favor to the "haves and have-mores" (his own phrase) that make up his base, but it really is good for society as a whole if we can discourage that growth-at-any-cost mentality in corporations by making dividends more attractive to investors.
One very convenient thing dynamic typing allows is passing args to a function which refer to different types that use a compatible API. For instance, take the following simple python function:
def cat(*args):
lines = []
[lines.extend(file_obj.readlines()) for file_obj in args]
return lines
This function works somewhat like the unix cat command. It takes an arbitrary number of arguments (that's what *args means in python. It doesn't have anything to do with pointers, a la C), and assumes they are file objects. It returns a single list containing all the lines read from all the files.
However, in python, who says I have to restrict myself to just using file objects? I can use other types as well, most commonly a string that has been wrapped in a StringIO class instance, which emulates the file object API. However, I might also want to pass custom classes that implement the readlines() method. Maybe I want to use this function on data I'm reading from a socket. The sky's the limit. And I can pass a mixture of all these different data types as the args for a single function call, and get the results I want with no hassle at all. Sure, this is a trivial example, but the technique is extremely useful, and I do it all the time when programming in python.
Doing this sort of thing in statically typed languages can be really painful. To be fair, in C#, it appears you can do something similar without jumping through too many hoops, but it looks like it also throws out most of the benefits of static typing in those situations. Someone more knowledeable than I would have to describe how you could accomplish such things in C++ or Java, or (god forbid) in plain C. I imagine the code would be much more complex and hard to read (and hence a magnet for bugs) in any statically typed language.
As I acknowledged above, static typing does have some advantages in catching bugs at compile time. Several types of bugs come to mind, and these are not as much of a problem as some people have made them out to be:
1. Passing incompatible types as args to a function: This would happen in my example function if I passed it an int, which has no readlines() method. Such a problem will only show up at runtime. However, these are triggered very easily, especially if you are using unit testing (which you should be anyway).
2. Passing types as arguments which, by coincidence, have the same method names, but they behave very differently: This would happen if we passed a type that had the readlines() method, but that method did something different than what we were expecting. This can be very insidious, but I can't imagine it happening very much (I've never seen it happen). This can also be minimized by using good naming practices, which I imagine most python programmers, who typically love readable code, are already doing.
3. Variable assignment using a mis-typed name: To borrow an example from another post in this thread:
def test_func(my_variable):
my_varaible = my_variable * 2
return my_variable
Because of the mistyped name, this will not give you the results you would expect, and this can be very hard to debug. However, this problem is a bit contrived, in my opinion. This will only show up in python when you re-bind a name to a different variable, and there is almost never a reason to do this. However, if you're paranoid about this happening, give your variables distinctive names, use an editor that supports name completion, and use this feature religiously. No more problem.
Anyway, sorry for the long reply to a short post.
Are you implying that Richard Stallman has said that intellectual property should be abolished? I doubt he would say that, considering that he doesn't even think "intellectual property" is a useful term, since copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, etc. are all separate concepts governed by separate laws and having varying effects on an individual's freedom.
Perhaps this is not what you meant, but I wouldn't be surprised. It seems that every day here on /. someone inaccurately attributes all sorts of loony beliefs to Stallman. Most of his opinions are fairly cogent and reasonable. Of course, he doesn't help himself, with his unorthodox appearance and behavior, lack of social skills, and pedantry regarding unimportant topics like the whole GNU/Linux thing. Still, unlike Joe Sixpack, I would think that the typical geek would be more tolerant of such things.
Anyway, to keep this post on topic:The difference between Wimp and other GTK engines is that it uses the windows GUI engine to draw most things, so they are identical to the native windows controls. It does a better job of this in Windows XP than in previous versions, though. Wimp still causes quite a bit of pain in Windows 98. As for wxPython, I've switched away from that to pyGTK, for a couple of reasons. First, the stable version of Wx uses a really ancient version of GTK on unix. Second, I really disliked the API. I have heard that it is similar in style to MFC, and if that is the case, I'm glad I've been able to stay away from Windows-only programming as long as I have.
You should try Amish Friendship Bread, which takes 10 days to make (you're basically growing the yeast yourself from a small sample). Very tasty stuff.
Where does the link you provided state Badnarik's position on copyright? He has a good number of position papers at that site, but I don't see any mention of "intellectual property" (too use that poor catch-all phrase).
It is true that libertarians (except for the Ayn Rand fanatics) seem to be leaning toward the idea that IP laws are unjustified government intrusion that undermines physical property ownership. However, I'd like to see where Mr. Badnarik's opinion lies before voting for him.
While binding and rebasing DLLs is certainly a good idea, where do you get your figures for speed improvement? According the this article at MSDN, the load time improvement, after both rebasing and binding, is only 12%-18%, depending on whether you are running 9x or NT. That's certainly nothing to ignore, but nowhere near the huge speed increase increase you claim.
Interestingly, when Microsoft bought DOS from Seattle Computer, it was named QDOS, which stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. It was a cheap knock-off of CP/M, and took something like six weeks to hack together. Of course, Microsoft changed this to MS-DOS, and switched the D from "Dirty" to "Disk".
If by "use" you mean "run", you are absolutely incorrect. You are only required to accept the GPL if you want to distribute the software. To quote from the GPL (which you should read): "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted..."
Actually, according to kernel.org, linux-2.6.0-test11 was released today.
They are not giving up on the desktop. They will be selling support/updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which is meant for corporate workstations/desktops. What they are giving up on are the hobbyist and small business markets, who don't want to pay the steep prices for the enterprise versions, but still want timely updates. I think this sucks, because I fall into this category. I don't blame Red Hat, though, because there is not much money to be made there. If I was in their position, I would probably do the same thing.
I also underclock my Athlon XP. Modern CPU's just run too hot. Properly cooled, that thing made my system sound like a jet engine, and increased the temperature in the room about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. It is only tolerable when it's underclocked, and, to be honest, I don't notice any speed difference.
My next system is going to be low-power with minor cooling needs. I already have a Via C3 based system that I use for file serving. The whole machine has only one low-speed fan and is very quiet. I hope I can do something like that for a real desktop PC. Perhaps something with the Pentium-M CPU. I understand they're making mini-ITX and micro-ATX boards for these now.
I can understand what you're saying, but this is not a free market, in the pure sense of the term. In a free market, anyone would be able to distribute any particular piece of music that they wanted for whatever price they wanted. Likewise, anyone else would be able to buy from any supplier who has the right price. Copyrights are a government intervention in this process which gives a particular entity sole distribution rights, in effect a monopoly.
This has lots of effects on the market, though not as bad as people normally assume. Whether this is a justified government intervention is open to debate, but this does not meet the criteria to be called a free market.Python runs on a great many systems, including just about every Posix system, Windows, Mac OS, etc. Being portable is not a problem. As far as far as being huge and complex, it's not like init scripts are currently written in ANSI C; they rely on a shell interpreter ( eg. bash). On my system, bash uses about 1.3 MB of RAM, python uses 2.1 MB. Hardly a big difference. Python is so much more powerful, easy to read, and less error-prone that I've wished someone would do this for years.
If for some reason you hate python, though, I don't think it is a necessary part of this process. I believe they are using it because it has bindings to D-Bus. Theoretically, anything else that can talk to D-Bus would work too. Now whether D-Bus is worth using remains to be seen, but it seems that lots of folks from both the KDE and Gnome camps like it, and they've been pretty far apart on this issue for years.
Well, headers and footers are really layout oriented concepts and should be avoided in HTML. Most of that stuff should be implimented as unordered lists, since they are essentially just lists of links. If you do it this way, you can ensure that nearly every browser will be able to display the page in a legible format, even if they don't support CSS. Good for stuff like cell phones, pda's and lynx. It also makes the markup much easier to read, so coders will make fewer mistakes and debugging is easier. Of course, if you wanted to make section, header, footer, etc tags, you could use your own flavor of XML. Newer browsers could figure it out if you throw in some XSLT.
There are over 80 tags available in XHTML, enough to build just about any logical structure you could want. Of course, some of them have been deprecated because they are layout oriented. By the way, you are absolutely right about the W3C's track record, but I think they are mostly getting it right these days.
By the way, using Slashdot as an example in an HTML discussion is not a very good idea. Sure, it works for the most part, but it is some of the ugliest markup I've ever seen, and it doesn't validate as any version of HTML. If they recoded it to support modern standards, they could cut their bandwidth usage by 25% because of the cleaner design now possible. They could also get rid of annoyances like page widening attacks without breaking URLs like they do now.
Yeah, that's why I opened my comment with "I've got to agree with you completely." Maybe you should read my post again. :^) I was just expanding a little on what you said, and giving my own example, which had a slightly different spin than yours.