I think advocacy of "learning to code" is focused more on learning to exercise the sorts of logical-thinking skills needed to get code to work, rather than on narrowly-focused learning of only the programming language, operating system, or input/output device that happens to be trendy at the moment.

And then there's Lauren Ipsum, a book by Carlos Bueno that came out recently that illustrates computer-science concepts in the form of a children's adventure story.

What I can't stand is all those article-based sites (such as news sites) that insist on breaking their articles up into bite-size chunks at arbitrary points, when they're really not so long that they can't be put on a single page. Usually the actual text content is just a small part of the page, surrounded by all sorts of wasteful crap that makes each page take too long to load; a well-designed page with the entire article in one page, and less superfluous junk around it, would actually load faster than the individual pages of the broken-up article.

Perhaps some sort of class action lawsuit would be in order, with everybody who received wrongful claims or takedowns of this sort as the plaintiff, and Google and various entertainment companies as the defendants.

I actually use those ASCII file/unit/record separators on occasion in data storage and transfer formats used internally in my programs; they're handy precisely because they're so rarely used by anybody else, so they don't clash with characters within the individual data items themselves as happens often with comma-separated data, and it allows a hierarchy of several levels of structure using the different characters.

I've been burned by the newline problem many times myself; some tools make it easier than others to deal with it (UltraEdit, my preferred text editor, shows which mode a file is in and lets you convert easily; but you can still get confused by a file that has multiple ending types caused by copy-and-pasting), and if you use FTP to transfer files you can select "ASCII mode" to convert to the appropriate conventions of the destination. Everywhere you look in computing, you find the debris of all the past archaic hardware and software, platform and standards wars, and so on, preserved out of desire for compatibility. This can be both fascinating and maddening. Inquire into just about anything: Why does Windows use backslashes for directory paths? Why do URLs use forward slashes? What's the point of the double slash near the beginning of URLs? Why do some standards, such as for e-mail, specify lines of no more than 80 characters? Why is "prn" not a legal file/pathname in M$ operating systems and application frameworks? Why do most user agent identifier strings start with "Mozilla"? Why does Windows 7 have "6.1" as its internal version number? Why are reverse domain lookups done with a top level domain named ".arpa"? These things will always lead to long, tangled stories, sometimes stretching into the dim past of computing up to or beyond a half century ago. (I think the 80-character limits derived from 1890s Hollerith punch cards.) But if that's what we have after less than a century of the computerized world, imagine what sorts of historical baggage there'll be in the devices of a millennium or more in the future.

This reminds me of The New York Times v. Sullivan ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan ), a classic '60s case where the Times was sued for publishing an ad that exposed Southern institutionalized racism, and the local yokels got a biased jury decision against them; it took the Supreme Court to correct this. In this case, the plaintiff is similarly playing to local prejudices against those mean outsiders who dare to call the place a "banana republic". Will it take another landmark Supreme Court decision to vindicate the First Amendment?