That's in Java 7, in the form of the try-with-resources statement.

The Supreme Court disagrees (PDF).

Really? I don't see any "does not apply to children" clause in the first amendment. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that children have a right to free speech.

You can use any name you like, as long as you are not intentionally using a name to defraud someone. There may be restrictions on the name you use for certain particular legal purposes (though there aren't in England - to change your name, you just need to start using your new name, a deed poll is just a record of the change if you need official documentation of it).

But with the added overhead of reference counting, which is an additional method call every time an object pointer is copied or passed or returned from a function. This is a bit of a problem in C++, where method calls can be inlined; with Objective-C's more heavyweight method calls, I would think this would be a fairly big overhead. I'm sure it's a much larger overhead than real garbage collection (although it does have the advantage of being deterministic).

So, what you're saying is, I have to artificially complicate my design in order to deal with a limitation of the language? Neat (actually, you can use garbage collection with C++, and C++0x provides limited support for this).

No, they're a government agency operating publicly-owned equipment. They have responsibilities not to interfere with the exercise of free speech.

Government action that interferes with free speech is a violation of the First Amendment, whether that government action is specifically a law or not; see for example, limitations of the restrictions public schools can and can't place on the speech of students. BART (which is a government agency) likewise is limited by the First Amendment in what restrictions it can place on speech - it probably can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech, which might include disabling cell phones for safety purposes, but certainly this incident raises First Amendment questions.

Except that no-one else on the platform, and not the CCTV that's available, backs up the story about the guy coming at the policeman threateningly with a broken glass bottle and a knife (see here). And given the record of the BART police over the past few years, I'm not sure we should give them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they're accurately describing this situation.

Wayland pretty much is "the compositor without all the layers in between." See this description of the Wayland architecture.

No, strings with a listed length would also be pointers to a series of integers - it's just that, instead of giving a value special semantics (0 as end of string), you give a position in the series special semantics (store the length in the first two bytes). In both cases, you need your string-handling functions to be aware of whatever the convention is.

I don't know that that's true. Operations that do need to know the length of the string could be quicker, and I'm not sure that these cases are less frequent. What are the common cases you are thinking of where C-style strings are faster?

I assume you haven't used the ATI drivers, then. IME, the open source drivers are much more stable and easy to get working than fglrx.