It sounds like you found yourself at a rather transition point, where GNOME was officially using WebkitGTK but the new Yelp hadn't been finished yet. (It ended up being postponed).
GNOME 3 has the brand new Yelp and, indeed, no dependency on Firefox. Fewer dependencies in general, actually. You might find it more to your liking :)

The things you're talking about, however, require specialised applications (or at least ones that keep X over SSH very much in mind). In addition, we still lose any kind of multimedia capability, dbus won't work, and lots of other modern components that have nothing to do with X will be absent or thoroughly confusing. In talking about the applications for X's network transparency, you're making the assumption that people only need to use Unix applications that were written twenty years ago by developers who actively thought about X.

Nowadays we have a wonderful software stack that has actually been widely adopted for this job: the web. It is designed specifically to provide interfaces, efficiently, over a big network, to any client. It takes a bit of work to implement a web interface for an application initially (libraries that don't exist yet would probably help ease the pain, as always), but then it's done and you know it works well, in a 2011 kind of working well.

I don't hate you :(

The universal gesture navigation set is kinetics. It is documented by everyone's natural intuition about the physical world. Touch interfaces work well when they feel like physical interactions, but shoehorning “gestures” into them is completely missing the point. You can't build fluid physical interaction with rigid commands that happen to involve fingers instead of letters. Sure, use gestures under the hood if you have to, but don't force your end user to think about it.

The interesting thing with the Bloq is they represent their constituents way better than MPs belonging to the Conservatives or the Liberals do. After all, their party leadership focuses on Quebec. Even with the homogenized votes, constituents can trust to be represented. If I lived there, I would probably vote for a Bloq MP (barring a level-headed independent).

I still don't know how, but a lot of people seem to miss the fact that they don't get to vote for the prime minister or even which party is in power. Those weird names on the ballot are the people who represent us. The parties are what dilute our very diverse interests so they are easy to package. The problem with ridings voting for parties instead of MPs is they dillute their own interests twice over. (And they elect morons, which is another issue).

So, as people who should know better go on about the horror of elected members of parliament representing the interests of people who voted for them in Parliament Hill, I really worry. Somehow we've deluded ourselves to approach politics like the US even though our system is fundamentally incompatible.

Is it really a backdoor when the app is given explicit permission by the end user? Sounds more like social engineering to me.

Have you seen the site? Half of it was probably written by different peoples' XSS attacks.

I would LOVE to watch it on TV, but it doesn't look like Comedy Central is airing the episodes in Canada.

So, I will pirate it (because that's all I can do), look at some ads, and tell the market research people I watched it.

Or head to Appearance Preferences and choose a different theme.

Simple! The Video tag knows it is holding video content, which can be cleverly accessed via Javascript, CSS and the like.

This should tell the rest of the story:
http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo

(And there are many others).