Carplay *is* mighty useful in countries where using the phone with your hands (or even looking at your phone) is illegal while driving, but poking the dashboard is allowed; which is true for most countries I'm driving.

It's great that the apps (and maps) are updated much more frequently than the car satnav.

It's sort of useful (at least for complying with the appropriate laws) that the apps are intentionally limited in ways that make it somewhat safer to use. It can have some input from the car as well, so the car can switch to dark mode when the lights are on (in a tunnel). Or, for example, messages will not show you the text you received, but will allow you to hear it so that you're not forced to keep looking at the dashboard.

It's also irritating that this is limited to commonly useful functions, so you can use it as a nice satnav, but when you want to share your location with google maps, this is not included. Or when you want to (need to) switch google accounts, because your phone switched it, but the location is saved in the other account. Can you stand NOT disconnecting the phone, and switching it with with the phone UI?

Trivial recursion may not be desired in most popular languages, but it's closely related to Complete (aka Strong) Induction, which is one of the most important methods of mathematical proof in number theory. I could just as well posit that elegant languages are where recursion is elegant and effective, but I know I'm old.

31 pages. Far from 200. It's practically ending before you realize it. If this is coming from an "eat-all-you-can" monthly subscription ebook store, I would guess more people would go for lighter works to get more out of their money. So the data they tell us is practically useless to predict what is really wanted in a book.

Still - it looks like Clarke's first law could easily apply: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

A practical application of this is at http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ (with a plugin for a few common AIM application, most usefully for pidgin née gaim).

This one has an implementation called the "Socialist Millionaires Problem", which sounds the same, although I recall it being used only to tell if two secret values are the same on both side, thus augmenting the key exchange protocol with man-in-the-middle detection capabilities, provided the parties has shared knowledge about something (and something reasonably private).