It's not irrelevant. To understand what the program is actually doing and how the computers actually work, you need to understand pointers. They aren't necessary in day to day work, but not understanding how they work will lead to subtle bugs.

Lots of things are pointers under the hood. But that's really irrelevant to the point.

Yeah, EVERYTHING is implemented at the base level in assembler, so pointers are in use everywhere. And I learned assembler first. But if that's your idea of where one should start, someone else can say we need to start with transistor theory, with just as valid an argument.

Pointers aren't required for most purposes. They're often just an optimization, frequently a questionable optimization. It's true that C pretty much requires pointers, but in C++ references can generally be substituted with greater clarity. Pointers are almost never used in Java (are they ever?), and certainly not in Python. Or many other languages I could name. (Yeah, they still exist "under the hood", but that's not the point of an exam of early or intermediate programming skill.) For that matter check out D https://dlang.org/ . That's a language that would be my favorite if they had a better way to document your code (last I checked Doxygen didn't do a good job) and it it had a slightly better library. (As it is I currently prefer C++ except for stuff that's heavy in unicode, where I'll switch to Python.)

C is actually easier than Java, though doing anything complex is harder.

A C++ subset doesn't have to be any harder than Java, and can be at least as capable. (The problem would be documenting it...and for students, learning to use only the subset.)

Part of the problem is that there's no way to pay "journalists" as a whole. Because of electronic payment networks' fees per transaction, online newspapers have to sell a monthly subscription, not a single issue they way they would with cash in a vending machine. And a subscription to NYT includes zero articles from WaPo or WSJ. This means readers get sucked into the ideological bubble of the one publication that happens to be part of their subscription plan.

Creating new rail corridors is very expensive. It's not like when the original lines were laid down and we can just upgrade their paths. There are right of way issues that would displace millions these days.

But yes, rail is ideal where it is available. That's why we have a multi-modal delivery infrastructure.

What we will eventually see are convoys or "road trains" of many trucks heading down the interstate; possibly, but not necessarily, with one human in the first rig. They will then be broken up as they peel off for regional routes which will initially mean a human driver will take them over for those last mile deliveries in a city.

I concede that I have not viewed incest-themed video games, as sexually explicit works do not appeal to me. However, US law classifies a video game as an audiovisual work, little different from a motion picture. I'm aware of more than one film adaptation of Lolita, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov depicting sexual abuse of a minor. I'm not aware of any statute or regulation that disqualifies a work of authorship from having "artistic value" solely because it is interactive. Could you give me something to cite about categorical exclusion of interactive audiovisual works from having "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" per the Miller test?

The conviction was reversed and remanded. From Wikipedia's article "Miller v. California, section "Opinion of the Court":

The result of the ruling was that the Supreme Court overturned Miller's criminal conviction and remanded the case back to the California Superior Court for reconsideration of whether Miller had committed a misdemeanor.[5]

[5] Beverly G. Miller, Miller v. California: A Cold Shower for the First Amendment , 48 St. John's L. Rev. 568 (1974).

From the opinion of the Court, 413 U.S. 15 (1973):

The judgment of the Appellate Department of the Superior Court, Orange County, California, is vacated and the case remanded to that court for further proceedings not inconsistent with the First Amendment standards established by this opinion.

Could you give me something to cite about Miller's conviction having been upheld on remand?

I quoted the part of the Miller test on which authors and publishers would most likely rely in a defense. The Miller test is not like the fair use test in the copyright statute (17 USC 107), in which the judge is expected to weigh the factors against one another. A work has to meet all three parts of the Miller test to be obscene.

This is where we disagree on how the opinion of the Court ought to be interpreted.

What's the storage *density*? I have the impression that grid scale batteries often use (relatively) low density storage, so they take up a lot of space. Lithium batteries are relatively high density (lots of storage/volume). Dense storage is, of course, part of what makes them so dangerous when they catch fire.

Perhaps it you wanted this to last through a blackout you'd need to give up your basement, rather than just part of it as with lithium batteries.

Unnh....there must be a reason Japan was researching whether uranium could profitably extracted from sea water. I believe that it was because decent ores for uranium were becoming scarce. (I used to know whether that was the reason they gave, but I can't certainly remember any longer....I think that was it though.)

AltaVista gave me more accurate results than Google ever has, much less recently. But you did need to use reasonable logic, and "near" was an important addition.

Google was easier to use. That was their sole advantage.

Including the DNS transaction, the public IP address of the server, and the SNI field of ClientHello?

The assertion is that it does more than that, that it allows to systems to be remotely disabled.
OTOH, I've read of precisely such a feature being requested by some who were fearful of AI, so it's not unbelievable (though it would clearly need more than one chip to accomplish this).

It's not really clear to me. It *could* be either way. But I *suspect* the Chinese are both being honest and grandstanding.

I've noticed that a lot of these US-based PCB fabs that offer manufacturing have a limited selection of board thicknesses, such as 1.6 mm and little else. That doesn't help if you're interfacing with another device that needs a 1.2 mm thick PCB, such as a Nintendo Entertainment System Control Deck.

Usually software support ends before the device becomes unusable. I still have my mother in law's 2nd gen iPad floating around on a bookshelf somewhere but it's basically useless as no apps support the newest OS you can load on it. I've never ever paid for phone or tablet repair. If you regularly need device repair you probably should be buying cheaper plastic devices, not glued together pieces of metal and glass.