Speaking from knowledge of search engine indexing; you can't search on regular expressions because the search index is heavily heavily optimised and the only way to search for a regex would be to generate all the possible expansions and search for them individually. You could do it, it would just fuck up everyone's processes.

If you've done anything with SQL think about how slow wildcard text searches are compared to an indexed primary key search, then multiply by a couple of orders of magnitude since search engines throw away generality for extreme performance on a particular kind of search.

I've recently been trying to do something similar in C# (the other Java), and that syntax would be really handy.

For instance, pulling values out of an XML object if you want parent.element("person").element("addresses").element("work").element("line3").Value ... but when the XML was parsed the person might not have any addresses, a word addres, or whatever is meant to be on line3. You have to check each level individually for null, which is a damn lot of code for nothing useful, or you write a helper function which either returns the final value or null if any of the hierarchy is null.

They've just put that in the language directly, which is fine by me.

Do I have to do everything for you?

without making any value judgement, 117 male births for every 100 female probably isn't chance.

Easy, all the particles would have tiny pointy beards if that were the case.

I'm not a biologist, but sexual reproduction stirs the gene pool more. Without genetic crossover you're limited to variation directly by random mutation which is really really slow compared to randomly splicing half your genome with another viable genome from your species.

I think there's something good about having your genome jump around to make it a moving target for parasites too, otherwise you get problems like with potatoes and more recently bananas where the crop varieties are all clones and a single disease can wipe out the lot.

Furthermore, bdelloid rotifers are a kind of microorganism which has evolved to only reproduce asexually, and nobody has quite figured out how that works for them when it doesn't for almost every other species. The wikipedia page is sparse, but it will get you started if you're interested.

Guido doesn't know the photo you took is of the ballot you put in the box. Sure, if Guido wants to buy my vote I'll take his money and vote how I like.

Why do you think that I see. How do you feel about that?

I'm sorry, but after being drug to several 3D movies...

You probably mean 'dragged', but I love the image of one of your friends whispering "hey, watch this, he'll do ANYTHING after this, I bet we can even get him into some shitty 3D movie!" before spiking your drink while your back is turned.

Exactly! We have a designated source of nonsense. Ad-libbing will not be tolerated.

From my perspective the important difference is that Blizzard is in a monopoly position with respect to Starcraft accounts whereas news services are fairly fungible and you can get any old account (or none) for The News.

I'm not up on the details of the RealID thing, but doesn't the id requirement extend beyond forum posts to other game functions like matchmaking and support? That's where I see the rub; choose between privacy and Starcraft versus choose between privacy and the ability to comment on a news site which is like all the other new sites. One is more coercive than the other.

You mean 'anthropogenic' warming. You shouldn't call the warming 'anthropomorphic', it hates that.

You can have them as long as you take Russell Crowe too ;)

the only undeniable statement is "I think, therefore I am".

That's just an assertion. It depends heavily on the definitions of "I", "think", and "am". "Therefore" is probably ok.

You have a low slashdot id and a decisive tone; I expect you're right but I'd love to know why. Can you provide a link?

My layman's knowledge of cryptography tells me that compression and encryption algorithms both increase the apparent randomness of their output data relative to the input. I thought that with a decent encryption algorithm you shouldn't be able to get any statistical information about the plaintext as that leads to attack vectors, but maybe I misunderstand and you just can't get much information.

The charitable way to look at it is that each vendor writes a benchmark for the aspects of the browser which they think are most important, and those aspects are also obviously what they've put the most development emphasis on since they're regarded as the most important.

If you write a benchmark against your top development priorities and a rival eats your lunch despite having a different set of development priorities, you're probably not a top-tier vendor.