It can, but if you're building web apps instead of web sites with a little custom functionality it will make your life needlessly difficult.http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/12/04/2227209/ask-slashdot-one-framework-to-rule-them-all#

It's more subtle than that. The Dutch schoolmaster CIO only has two pieces of software to choose from, one of which is a bunch of outdated Windows desktop apps that are terrible to work with and the one TFA is about, which is a fairly decent set of web apps that unfortunately have never worked on anything but windows (first they used all sorts of ActiveX components, now it's a bunch of Silverlight crap, apparently). So there really is very little the schoolmaster CIO can do, and given the lack of options, he probably made the best possible choice.

Technically speaking, Drupal 6 does not have elements like "Left Column" and "Right Column". If you base your themes on the Zen base theme, you can have whatever "column" you want. I'm assuming (I'm not a themer with in depth knowledge on the subject) this is because Drupal 6, too, has a notion of regions. There's probably a lot you can learn from this book that will still be applicable to Drupal 7 (the differences aren't huge). That said, I don't see why they didn't just do a quick rewrite to incorporate the main changes and slap a Drupal 7 title on the book, the way they did with the Pro Drupal Development book.

Hahaha... and it takes them over half a year to form a government, if at all... Yes, Belgium isn't the best example, but his point stands. Only it's better to substitute the Netherlands for Belgium to make it. In the Netherlands it really works this way: multiple parties have to form a majority government and this, in theory at least (in practice "politicking" screws it up), allows for multiple points of view to be represented. In Belgium it only works like this on the regional level (Flanders, Wallonia). On the national level parties from both regions have to be represented in government. Preferrably governments consist of similar parties from both regions, so for example it'll be made up of Flemish socialists, Wallonian socialists, Flemish liberals and Wallonian liberals. The problem is that the supposedly similar parties from both regions may not at all have the same viewpoints. This is what caused the coalition forming after the last election to go wrong: the Flemish Christian Democrats were elected on a ticket that would give further autonomy to Flanders. The Wallonian Christian Democrats are hell bent on preventing that (as it would put an end to federal support for economically backwards Wallonia).