HN user
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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].
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):
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)