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foo2312on FBI Says Chinese Operatives Active at Scores of U.S. Universities

I don't think that's an accurate representation of what the estimates are at the link. In particular, the linked page lists undergraduate tuition and fees at $45014/academic year, living expenses at $2100/month (x9 months, leading to $18900/academic year) totaling to $63914 combined tuition+fees+estimated living expenses.

foo2312on Suggest good computing history book(s)

You may be interested in Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, by George Dyson. Some additional discussion which you may find relevant is also available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979671.

foo2312on Android: I don't need your permission

It may seem a bit silly to add this, but I think it is good to link the reference for those who may not have seen it before:

Even compiling from source, one also has to trust the compiler...

(see, e.g. the classic http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html, pdf version at https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...)

foo2312on Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)

One thing which might be of (tangential) interest here is the novel The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke, where the replenishment of this sort of ice buffer plays a prominent role in the plot.

foo2312on Computer system automatically solves word problems

Perhaps also of interest in this context is the work of Gordon Novak (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/) in the 1970s, related to AI/NLP interpretation of elementary physics problems [1].

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/ijcai77.html

foo2312on The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

As far as I am aware, Apple does not seem to have a policy preventing this type of work. There was a fairly well-publicized release of an experimental codebase from Ericsson:

http://labs.ericsson.com/apps/bowser,

which has since been retired (although as far as I know, not due to any conflict with Apple):

http://labs.ericsson.com/blog/retiring-bowser.

foo2312on MacBook Air Flash Storage Drive Replacement Program

A quick way to apparently find hardware model/revision information (OSX 10.8.5):

Select "About this Mac" from the apple menu, and click on "More info..."

Click on "System Report" and select the SATA/SATAExpress page. Model and revision numbers for each installed hard drive appear to be reported here.

(edit: presumably drives connected via USB are similarly described in the appropriate page of the diagnostics/report)