Absolutely not! ABIs are part of the definition of a platform. The Itanium C++ ABI is more or less the same on all (non-AArch32) *NIX systems, but the C ABIs are very different. For example, the C ABI on x86-32 on FreeBSD will pass a union of a pointer and an integer in a register, the Linux ABI will pass it on the stack.

The EU rule requires that you either provide a Micro USB port or an adaptor. A USB-C port and a USB-C to Micro USB adaptor would fit that, though there is an effort underway to allow just USB-C. The design requirements of USB-C included making chargers and adaptors very cheap (there's an interesting story of how the two resistors that it uses to select the voltage were chosen).

That's an explicit requirement for USB-C. For Micro USB, I've seen several devices where the port is damaged, but never seen one cable with a damaged connector.

If your monitor / TV uses the HDCP DRM crap than it adds a few frames latency and so you need the audio to be delayed in the monitor by the same amount, even if it's going to external speakers. This was the main reason for pushing audio into the HDMI spec, though there are some other processing steps (e.g. upscaling using inter-frame information) that can also introduce latency and make being able to delay the audio by a fixed, display-controlled, amount useful.

If you're buying an Apple screen, then it will have the USB hub in the display and will provide power. If USB-C connectors become mainstream, then I'd hope that other manufacturers will too.

No, they require a dongle and Apple will sell you one for $80. Just as existing Apple laptops require a dongle to talk to VGA projectors and Apple will sell you one for $20, meanwhile third party vendors will sell you one for $5. Apple always charges an insane amount for dongles.

You might want to look up what an IOMMU is and for how many generations of x86 processors they've been a standard feature.

Nope, no cache flush for compare and exchange. Modern CPUs use a modified version of the MESI protocol, where each cache line has a state associated with it (modified, exclusive, shared, invalid in MESI, a few more in modern variants). When you do a compare and exchange, you move your copy of the cache line into exclusive state and everyone else's into invalid. Before this, you must have the line in the shared state (where multiple caches can have read-only copies). When another core wants access to the memory, it will request the line in shared state. If another cache has it in its exclusive state, then the exclusive line will be downgraded to shared and a copy of its contents sent to the requesting site.

If atomic operations had to go via main memory then they would be significantly slower than they are and would be a huge bottleneck for multicore systems.

They don't flush, no. They will add memory fences, which will generate cache coherency bus traffic, but won't trigger a write back to main memory (modern CPUs can snoop the cache of other cores, so the data will be sent cache to cache).

The main reasons for flushing the cache are:

• If you have some non-volatile DRAM and want to ensure consistency.
• If you're doing DMA on anything other than the latest Intel chips, so that the DMA controller will see the data that you've flushed from the cache.
• If you're writing a JIT compiler or some other form of self-modifying code (including a run-time linker) and need to ensure that i-cache and d-cache are consistent (I think x86 does this automatically, but I could be wrong).
• If you're writing a crypto algorithm and want to make side-channel attacks via the cache difficult.

Indeed. In comparison with how close you can get in the Louvre, the prints have a lot more discernible detail than the original...

Network transparency is completely supported. The protocol used is called HTTP. The windowing system that runs on top of the Freon graphics driver layer is the Chrome web browser.

The three laws of robotics come from Asimov. Clarke's three laws are:

1. 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.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Meetings are for things where you need realtime discussion and free-flow of ideas. They're good for working through problems (as long as they're sufficiently small) with a whiteboard and then photographing the board for archiving. They're absolutely terrible for status updates and so on, which are effectively broadcast communication.

Because education needs to be expensive, and if you're not spending a lot on the education itself then you should at least move to one of the places with the highest cost of living in the US.

I subscribe to the theory of natural selection when it comes to clothes. The purpose of the washing machine is to supply evolutionary pressure. Clothes that don't survive die off and don't reproduce (i.e. I don't buy similar ones in the future). Eventually my wardrobe is full of clothes that are fit for their environment. The same applies to crockery and the dishwasher.