You can have a walled garden with Apple or Google. Just stay with their ecosystem. Forced walled gardens on hardware you bought are anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and should be illegal. If you want that, your choice is to buy whichever you want and just never install another app store.

It goes beyond cities. Some neighborhoods have specific taxes/fees to pay for local improvements. Figuring out the tax rate at a particular location is actually a business in and of itself.

No, your AppleID and GoogleID only serve this purpose if you're stupid enough to allow it to. And they can (and do) do the same thing on desktops. And yes, my windows machine can and does receive all the notifications my Android phone does. You're just making shit up.

The only difference between a phone and a computer is the phone has a cellular radio in it. And that's not even 100%- an Android tablet may not have a cellular radio, and I've had laptops that did.

No, you should have a choice to be in a walled garden or not on any device. Now if you like Apple's garden, that's fine. Don't install any other app store. I expect that's the route the vast majority would go. But there's no reason to tie hardware choice to the store choice. And allowing them to do so is anti-competitive, dangerous to the market for software makers (Apple has many time banned apps because they decided they wanted to make a similar app), and causes increased prices for consumers (there's no competition on those percentage cuts by Apple). Not allowing competition harms the consumer, with no benefit.

They don't low ball the instant win because of social engineering. They do it because they don't want the player to take it. Going for the big prize is better TV. The low balling is just to make it more enticing (and also mathematically wrong) to stop. The game show doesn't even care, they buy insurance to cover the prize payment.

Not just AI, but everything. There's an old story about how Ken Thompson (inventor of Unix) once wrote a compiler that recognized the code for a login function and had it automatically inject a backdoor in the compiled output. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.c2.com%2F%3FTheKenTho... So yes, you need to be able to trust your tools. And yet another reason to carefully read and understand what code does, no matter what the source.

They mean parents. If your parents make 200K+, you'll be inelligible. As most college aged students rely on their families for support, and pretty much none of them have 200K (or even 20K) in income themselves. That's the same way pretty much all college financial aid works. Its fair for the majority, although there is a minority estranged from parents or who's parents refuse to help that get screwed over.

The stock market doesn't create money. It moves it around.

But the money wouldn't be sitting around doing nothing if there wasn't AI. It would be invested in other ventures and industries. So it wouldn't be buying servers to run AI, but it would be used to build a factory. Or make video games. Or a dozen other industries. For AI to increase GDP over what it would be without AI in the world, AI actually has to provide value. Otherwise its net neutral to GDP (arguably net negative, if those other industries would have increased the capacity of the nation to produce).

AI investment isn't magical new money being created just for AI. If AI didn't exist, that money would still be invested, it would just be invested in other things. So investing money in AI won't raise the GDP unless AI itself manages to raise the GDP. Of the three factors of production, AI effects only labor. By either replacing people or making people more productive it would reduce labor cost allowing people to do more work. Thus far, it isn't achieving this on a large scale (there are probably individual cases where it has, but they're minor). Until AI actually makes people do more, it won't increase the GDP. Which may or may not ever occur, but it definitely isn't there yet.

Not riddled. There would be certain sections that are unsafe that deal with direct device/memory access. Those could be separated out, and the algorithmic parts of the kernel (which is the vast majority) can use that as an API when needed. Far less of the kernel deals directly with device control than you'd think.

Some of it is real. When I worked there 20 years ago in the printer division, a manager had a demo where he literally stood on an inkjet and it continued to print. The engineers congratulated each other on building such a reliable product. The managers saw that and decided they could afford to make it from cheaper parts. Some things actually were better back then.

That makes it pretty much in line with any other use of a bank. Withdraw cash? They won't get involved. Write a check? Once its cashed it's gone. Wire transfer? If they haven't withdrawn the money yet you can get a hold put on it and get it reversed, but only if it hasn't been removed yet. What more are you really expecting them to do?

The nice thing is it doesn't require you to add another app to your phone or attach to your bank account. It's isn't giving your info to a third party or inserting a middleman. Its just using your bank.

They are the same. They both hold an address that points at the object, either directly or indirectly (Java uses a double pointer to allow moving of data). If you don't get pointers, you won't get references. 99.9% of the mistakes you make with pointers are also there with references. If you don't get that, I shudder to think of what your code looks like.

You understand that every single language has pointers. They just call them references instead, but the behavior is absolutely the same underneath the hood. All the same issues. The only thing you don't have is pointer arithmetic, which should be avoided in C++ as well unless you're in ultra high performance code.