I recommend following @Tupp_Ed (Simon McGarr) on twitter as he's very involved in copyright issues in Ireland. He previously came to fame when the Irish Minister of State for Research and Innovation refused to participate in a debate on the Irish equivalent to SOPA unless Simon stepped down from the panel.
You can hop directly to the original mailing list post here: http://lists.openwall.net/linux-ext4/2010/01/04/8 (the entire thread is a good read for anyone curious about file system benchmarking).
Looking at the interface the icons represent different load thresholds which can be customised, e.g. 100K ops per second on the http component gives a hurricane icon. So I guess it's a slightly whimsical at a glance status.
I think most people don't use mod_python directly, but instead use it as a means of running their web framework. So, for example, django comes with support for mod_python (http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/modpython/).
mod_wsgi (http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/) is rapidly becoming popular, it's an implementation of the python wsgi spec which has a plethora of toolkits and libraries available.
If you want to go low level I'd recommend mod_wsgi + a library like webob. Otherwise I recommend django on top of mod_python (or mod_wsgi).
To give you a switch in the other direction story: I was a long time linux user, always very happy and quick to defend it. However, I found myself being ground down by hardware support and the pain it took to get basic things to work. I migrated from redhat to debian to gentoo and was always ultimately frustrated by the effort it took to get anything working. (Sound was always a big source of fun.)
So a friend got a mac, purely on the grounds it was less hassle than a linux pc, and frankly, after looking at all the amazing things he could do (wow, he can plug in a vga cable and have the monitor work without restarting X) I was seriously feeling won over. I finally bought a powerbook and was instantly chuffed by the fact I could do real work and not waste time mucking about with hardware. Honestly, my productivity increased by an order of magnitude. I realised how much it was really my ego vs the machine when it came to getting things working.
These days I don't faff about with macports or fink (they just don't work well enough) but instead I run ubuntu in a vmware instance. To top it off, my vmware ubuntu with 512MB of RAM runs faster than my dual core, 4GB ubuntu desktop. Go figure.
Putting aside hardware support, it's the software I love. Mac software authors have a wonderful sense of design and detail, which I always find lacking on linux or windows.
I develop using python and deploy on a combination of redhat, debian and windows boxes and the only real platform related pain I've experienced is the repeated stupidities redhat enterprise inflicts upon people. (You know it's enterprisey when they only give you five packages, forcing you to use random, untested rpm repositories around the world.)
Ok, maybe the hardware support is the biggest reason after all, just this week my linux co-workers were high-fiving over undocking their laptops without having to reboot them. Most of the time.
In a nutshell if the server goes away while a client is in recv the client will never know and waits forever.