Multi-touch on my Macbook is great. Two finger scrolling, three finger flipping from page to page makes life significantly easier. Yes, I can do everything with a mouse, but usually don't have mine out if I just have my laptop. And of course I can always use the keyboard, but why when I can do the same thing 10 times faster with a few finger movements.

If you're going to go the VPS route, I suggest RimuHosting. The have absolutely amazing tech support (I've never waited more than a half-hour or so for support, without using the emergency option), great performance, actively monitor their servers, and do a great job keeping the hardware and networking running. They're willing to compile custom kernels for you (mine has ipsec and tun/tap support for openvpn), provide a nice admin panel for dns/mx/general server statistics, and apparently will help you with software installation and configuration without (in general) charging you.

I've been with them for a few years now, and have absolutely nothing negative to say.

The lack of voice over LTE is because it will use the same data channel for voice (i.e. VoIP). So it's not like any of the hardware has to be change. The reason it's not being deployed now is that there's no consensus over how voice should be done on LTE. I'm thrilled that VZW is waiting. LTE will be the global standard, and it will be good if they maintain full compatibility with global networks. Unfortunately, VZW is one of the first companies to deploy it - it appears the rest of the world is lagging behind.

As for it needing to retain CDMA on phones, that's also good. IT will be a while before VZW deploys LTE with the same coverage as CDMA. This is needed for backwards compatibility.

While I understand it's a slow process, consider that VZW, unlike most of their competitors, is actively pushing forward with LTE.

There are very few times when off-line maps are useful in a car. For those times, there are real GPS units (ones that have batteries that last for 16 hours instead of 2 hours and can survive a fall or water or the like). The thing that makes Google maps navigation so useful to me (on my Droid) are the live traffic updates. Plus, I don't have to worry about downloading maps onto my cell phone. Everything is updated all the time, and I can have my phone re-route me on alternate routes based on current traffic.

Actually, the carriers aren't particularly happy about this. Being in the hardware business is a very expensive pain in the neck for carriers. Verizon, for example, essentially provides free tech support and replaces phones for free in their stores while the phone is in warranty. Verizon would love to have a way of getting away from this and telling people "Go buy a phone somewhere else and call us for service".

The problem is that the American public now expects not to pay for a phone, which means the companies don't have much of an option. If anything, VZW is moving away from this since their LTE deployment will be fully standards compliant (at least as of right now). What their future pricing structure will be, though, is hard to say.

Actually, it's primarily lack of funding to build archives and, therefore, lack of access to the data. I think most astronomers have no problem sharing data, as long as they're properly credited and the data is used for something other than the original use (i.e. detecting exoplanets instead of dark energy). There are, of course, differences in the optimum observing strategy and obviously you can't figure everything out from the same instrument/observation, but additional observations are always good and there are usually ways to use the data.

What most people probably don't know is that the majority of data from ground telescopes (except for a few roboticized telescopes) is kept only by the observer. Observations often yield something "weird", in which case the "standard" procedure is to ask colleagues if they know what the "weird" thing is. If no one has any clue, the data is often put aside for later analysis, and typically forgotten about. Everyone is guilty of it, but it is entirely possible that what is one person's trash is another's gold mine.

Amusingly enough, at the last AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting, there was a grad student discussion session with some of the higher ups in AAS. One of the things we grad students were very much in favor of was an observation archive with exclusivity for the PI for 12-18 months (this is the standard for NASA space missions). The reason we were given that this would never happen is funding.

First problem is that most newspapers are useless except for very local news. It used to be that you actually needed to subscribe to the local newspaper to know what was going on. With the web (blogs and the like)...that's simply not the case anymore. Which means that (at least for me) there are very few newspapers that actually provide anything of value...and that's primarily the investigative reporting. Sadly, this also seems to be one of the things that is being eliminated first.

The newspapers' only chance to survive is to differentiate themselves from the cable networks and actually write their own interesting articles, rather than just use articles from Reuters/AP. They should also adapt to the growing number of smartphones and realize that this is the delivery method of choice going forward. If they offer a low price ($10-20/month?) service and restrict free articles to one or two per day per person, they can open a new revenue source, and I think many people would have no problems paying for this for good newspapers (the NY Times comes to mind), especially if they were able to get articles delivered in a good format for smartphones.

The point of Bluetooth is not to transfer gigabytes of data. The point of bluetooth is to be able to connect a headset to a cell phone while barely lowering the battery life. The point of bluetooth is to be able to have wireless headphones that can run on a small battery. Wifi direct will be great for printers and the like, but Bluetooth is not going anywhere.

Linux is probably not going to be officially supported by any school's IT department. However, that doesn't mean that they won't allow you to use a Linux computer. Of the 3 school networks I've used as a student (1 as undergrad, 1 for summer research, 1 for grad), all followed this rule (I graduated from undergrad 3 years ago). The least supported will be custom applications for scheduling/payroll/etc... But many of these are being moved to the web in a cross-platform environment (this is the case for my undergrad school). You may also have problems registering your computer. Very often, you can just call up the IT department and provide the MAC address. A bit annoying, but not difficult. Worst case, boot into Windows (or use VMware/VirtualBox) for anything that requires Windows.

You shouldn't need a VPN as a student. Most schools now proxy library connections. It's a bit annoying, but very easy. Wifi can be problematic since Linux sometimes has issues with WPA2 Enterprise connections. But it gets better every time I upgrade my Linux laptop and recently I've had as many problems with Macs as Linux for wireless support. I've had problems with printing because my undergrad institution used a custom Kerberos application to do it, but worst case print it as a PDF and use a flash disk at the library. Any classroom applications needed will usually be installed on lab computers and won't be something you can use on your own computer anyway.

In short, install VirtualBox/VMware in case she needs it, be a bit flexible, and don't worry about it.

But as others have said, this is the least of your worries. She should be picking a school based on everything else, not their support of Linux.

One problem with this is that contact lenses float on your eye and are not stationary. This is a serious problem, because to keep a constant orientation, you'll either need to constantly rotate any light emitters to stay in the same place (probably not possible), or weight the contact lens as is currently done with astigmatic lenses (not a great solution).

Apart from this, contact lenses tear, break, get lost, etc... At the moment, my soft lenses cost $5 apiece. If one tears, gets lost, or something else equally destructive, it's not a problem. If the same lens cost $1000, that would be a much bigger problem. And I'm not sure there's a good solution to this. If you make the lenses soft, they'll degrade quickly (as current soft lenses do). If you make them hard, then they will fall, get scratched, and the like over the long term.

US cellular service is actually not too difficult to understand. CDMA is technologically superior to TDMA. It provides better call quality. The original GSM was based on TDMA (UMTS is, in fact, CDMA). In the US, where the government decided to let companies develop their own networks, AT&T and Verizon became the two dominant carriers (I'm ignoring a lot of the history here).

AT&T used to be TDMA (I'm guessing because it was an easy upgrade from AMPS). They then switched to GSM, but because the European frequencies were in use here, they used different frequencies. AT&T is continuing on the GSM upgrade path.

VZW deployed a technologically superior CDMA network. Since most Americans don't travel between countries all that much, it's not really a major problem. The upgrade path for CDMA was much easier than switching everyone from CDMA to GSM. So Verizon continued to use that path to EV-DO.

4G would require a massive hardware upgrade regardless of what network the carriers were using originally, so VZW is pushing LTE (the 4G GSM standard). LTE will likely use VoIP for voice calls, so within a decade, most of the US should be on the same system as Europe.

Basically, the point is that there's a good logical explanation for the network progression in the US. It doesn't help that AT&T has poor network coverage, customer service, and just about everything (except phones). VZW's obsession with locking out consumers is annoying, but most of the people who care about this can get around many of these limitations, and the rest don't care.

This is why you save the receipts. Usually the receipts have a space #, purchase time, and length of time purchased. Keep them around for a month or two. If someone did this and you get a ticket, you should have ample proof that the ticket is invalid. If the ticket is not immediately discarded, sue.

No, please no. Or at least, raise the insurance requirements in California first. The current requirements are 15/30/5 (one person injury/more than one person injury/property damage). In today's world, that covers nothing. In a serious accident, today's average car won't be paid for with that, nor will anyone's medical expenses be covered. With government provided insurance, we'd have even fewer people having higher coverage limits. They don't need to be 100/300/100 (like I have), but they need to be much higher than the current requirements. Liability coverage isn't that expensive is you're a good driver, and if you're not a good driver, you shouldn't be on the road.

Cornell University actually did this exact thing to cool a good chunk of the campus. It's called lake source cooling. While there will of course be some environmental impact, the energy usage is 20% of normal chillers and thus is, I'm sure, an environmental net gain.