I've finally given up my tendencies to write a get_name on top of a name variable. It's alot of extra noise for something that isn't actually protecting anything anyway (no such thing as privates). 

There is a very strong convention for allowing people to access the variables directly. And if you want to replace the getter/setter mechanism more formally, use [python properties](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618002/python-property-versus-getters-and-setters). If you want to go one step further and make sure variables can't be accessed and manipulate many of them at once, you need to really dig into decorators (see rocon uri module).

In conclusion, let's drop the redundant get_ and set_ calls where not really useful.