That's true, it is a very different paradigm.I wouldn't go so far as to say that nobody thought it possible before Rust, but I agree it's much more effective and performant.
Ah, yeah looks like address 0 is nothing special on C64. I was thinking more about things like Qbasic and especially Visual Basic where dereferencing address 0 expecting a string or object is easy enough to do.
I thought one of the goals of Java and similar was partial memory safety? If it didn't have null it seems it would be most of the way there.
And don't forget Basic. Yeah most variants had pointers and equivalents to null, but they are 'advanced' and not meant for general code. (Although that's interpreted and you said compiled, often it could be 'complied' similarly to Java bytecode)
I finally managed to see them a couple years ago when we had that one incredible geomagnetic storm. Be ready for them to just look like faint gray streaks to the naked eye, but look just like those colorful professional photos through a smartphone camera with a night mode.
Sounds like they are incentivizing people to make external search sites from scraped data, which means the users wouldn't be able to opt out. From your description I'd be pretty surprised if that doesn't already exist
You're asking someone who may literally work at a surveillance company to publicly admit to the stuff they linked? Personally I think it was a bad idea for them to post that link or even suggest they know it exists.
Looking at the forecast: Tomorrow it'll be June 1st.