Unfortunately, laws are being written by politicians with vested interests (corporations - which are run by and who's net profit most positively benefit the rich) which have the effect of NOT protecting the majority who have less power, money and influence.

The only recourse you have is to vote the yahoos out of office, but that becomes extremely difficult when your vote is put up against 'Joe Sixpack' and the like.

Agreed. This is why I finally broke down and removed Windows from my personal computer network. This also has forced me to come to terms with what I've been tentatively circling around for years: if it doesn't exist today, and I want it in my environment, I'm going to have to build it myself.

This is also why I advocate alternatives to remove inefficient middle men from the picture:

Support Indy art, music, movies and other programming (shows/podcasts) - develop alternatives to the standard advertising pay mode that really only benefits the middle men. Provide means for everyone to enjoy and stream the works, and reward Indy artists directly. radioreddit.com is a good example of just such a system at work.

Create and/or support Free and Open Source software - help make the world a better place for everyone.

Ultimately, there is too much fat in the system - time to cut it out because it is not economically feasible to continue to support it over the long haul.

If by typewriter you mean a quill pen and ink -- then yes he saw a typewriter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare
On the other hand, he may have had some means of trans-locating through a wormhole to 1870-ish, to bang out McBeth on one of the first commercially produced typewriters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter

You hit the nail on the head. Succinct and accurate. Bravo!

You must have never come in contact with an ASCII character code table before then...

Space is represented by : 32 040 20 00100000 (decimal, octal, hexadecimal, binary respectively)
Tab is represented by: 9 011 09 00001001

That is traditionally 'whitespace'. This may have different encodings using other systems (EBCDIC etc).

As for your /n 'newline' -- or better expressed as end of line, or EOL -
It all depends on what hardware/operating system you are running on when you write your text file to disk:
Linux and Unix (and numerous other related and unrelated OSs) use Line Feed to represent the EOL marker.
Windows/DOS use Carriage Return - Line Feed (2 characters) to represent the EOL marker.

Carriage Return is represented by: 13 015 0D 00001101
Linefeed which is represented by: 10 012 0A 00001010

If you are talking about regular expressions - then /n may not be considered whitespace -- because it can serve as a delimiter -- represented by $ character. This also translates to editors such as vi. In Fortran and Python, the EOL marker is significant because it represents the end of a statement...and there are was to 'escape' the EOL such that a single statement can extend beyond a single line. As such it is not considered 'whitespace' during compilation.

So really what is/is not whitespace comes down to a mix of operating system, tool/programming language and libraries (e.g. regex) used when parsing said text file.

All my tabs are written out as 4 spaces in Emacs as well... No problemo.

Emacs python mode allows you to manage blocks easily in python too.

I had some experience with Fortran long ago -- which also has some bondage regarding white space (column 6 to start a statement - columns 1-5 being significant for such things as labels), no statement ending punctuation (limited to 72 characters per line maximum), and blocks denoted through indentation (only by convention - not required). Maybe that explains why I don't find find python all that difficult?

Personally, not having to count nested ending curly braces is a godsend.

Would I use python for everything? No. But, it has replaced anything I would do today with shell (bash, sed, awk), Perl, Java or C# for my personal needs. If I want performance for systems programming - I'll still grab C or C++ (which I could also modularly integrate with python if desired for even more flexibility - avoid premature optimisation being the watchword there).

From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences

"In the early 18th century, English spelling was not standardised. Differences became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries. Current British English spellings follow, for the most part, those of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), whereas many American English spellings follow Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Webster was a strong proponent of English spelling reform for reasons both philological and nationalistic. Many spelling changes proposed in the United States by Webster himself, and in the early 20th century by the Simplified Spelling Board, never caught on. Among the advocates of spelling reform in England, the influences of those who preferred the Norman (or Anglo-French) spellings of certain words proved to be decisive. Subsequent spelling adjustments in the United Kingdom had little effect on present-day American spellings and vice-versa. In many cases, American English deviated in the 19th century from mainstream British spelling, but it has also retained some older forms.

The spelling systems of most Commonwealth countries and Ireland, for the most part, closely resemble the British system. In Canada, however, the preferred spellings include some American forms and some British, and Canadians are somewhat more tolerant of foreign forms."

There you have it.

My suggestion is to clearly define which country you hail from, so we can all judge the merits, or lack thereof, of your spelling properly.

I'm from the USA btw.

May the fork wars begin!!

I had a similar path -- started programming in BASIC and Fortran...then later taught myself C using their slim volume to lead me the way. I owe the quality of my coding efforts today in other languages in no small part to the discipline I learned from K&R.

Requiat en pace DMR

How would a computer language be able to better secure data memory from being abused (by the insertion and running of executable code)?

We could simply segregate 'executable' and 'data' memory -- but then you would be stuck with a finite size for each - dependent again upon an arbitrary choice of a given equipment vendor - rather than a more flexible solution.

Please explain how a compiler would be able to solve that problem (in all cases).