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.
> Unless you build you computer yourself from silicon
And the chip design, and the fab control software, and the tools that make the tools that make the tools.
And descrete components won't help you because transistors are large enough to conceal a mircocontroler emulating a transistor and listening for high-frequency handshake signals.
Relays are probably safe since you can make those yourself out of iron and copper (rods, springs and wire), and conveniently those are the same things you need to build motors!
There is a simple antidote to this problem, as long as you have 1) the source code to the compiler you suspect of being bad, and 2) a second compiler (binary only), written by someone who is not friends with the first one. For instance, if you want to verify that gcc is not evil, you need the gcc source, and MS Visual C++. The basic idea is summarized by Bruce Schnier here:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...
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:
