More likely, they either require a credit card upfront with the understanding that you won't be charged if you return the device within, say, 45 days, or given that a phone is kind of useless without service, you'll sign an agreement with your carrier that the full cost will be added to your bill if it's not returned.

Farther up the east coast, a lot of older rentals have radiators with a single boiler for multiple units. The landlord is required to heat for a certain part of the year (15 October to 15 April is fairly common). There may be rules for a minimum livable temperature, and at least in NYC there are plenty of examples of "slum lords" who don't maintain that.

But to support the parent post, few if any of these units have a thermostat in them. But I suppose you do have some control. You can always open/close the valve to a given radiator (and many really do effectively have those two settings with little in between) or open a window if it gets too hot.

I'll have to agree with this. I'm partial to Mac myself, but really any reasonable quality laptop should suffice. Since she wants to do at least some coding and simulation, I'd look for a quad core i5 or i7 with a decent amount of RAM.

The choice of desktop OS should be a combination of what she's comfortable with and what's truly required. If her subfield tends to write papers in Word and/or required lots of editing of figures in "real" graphics tools, that likely means Mac OS or Windows will be preferable for the day to day OS. A VirtualBox VM with whatever Linux distro is used on the clusters available to the lab (Scientific Linux?) should take care of the rest - it should run small jobs at near native speeds if there's not much else going on, provide a developer environment similar to other work computers, and any really heavy lifting is going to be offloaded to a cluster somewhere anyway.

tl;dr version: get her any laptop/OS combo she likes with decent specs and run an appropriate linux under a VM

Unless you know where the poster you're responding to is, I don't think you should be so sure about the law disagreeing. AFAIK, in the US, transgendered and transsexual are not protected classes federally, although they are protected in some states.

The second reason there's a low recidivism rate for murderers is because most of them kill somebody they already know for some real reason. Not necessarily a good reason, but often somebody stole from them, or cheated on them, or whatever. I suppose a few enjoy it and want to do it again, and this doesn't consider serial killers or other true psychopaths, but most people convicted or murder are unlikely to do it again.

And people often browse on mobile devices with fairly hard data caps and don't want to effectively pay to be advertised to. Not to mention there are just a few examples of ad-delivered malware in recent history.

Wow, I think this is the first reply that didn't just poo-poo the whole thing.

Tires WILL heat up due to friction. From TFS, it sounds like the idea is to convert some of this heat to something useful, like electricity. No violation of thermodynamics there. If you make the assumption that otherwise that energy is wasted as heat, your overall efficiency will go up.

Now, is this truly feasible? I don't know, I suspect as others have pointed it it's more PR than anything else. It really comes down to whether the added cost and complexity can ever be offset by the amount of power recovered.

Will become? It already is, at least in some circles. How many stories have we had on /. about people not getting a job or at least having a harder interview process because they don't have a Facebook profile for HR to troll through? Granted I don't, but I think I'm just old enough that it won't matter, at least so long as I continue to put some minimum into a LinkedIn profile so I have some semblance of an online persona.

When is /. going to finally add the "sad but true" mod? Certainly applies...

Hey, maybe your mom is tech savvy. In which case she'll just add that as an alias in .cshrc or .bashrc.

Much more likely, she never uses the command line at all. I know I'd have to walk mine through opening a terminal, let alone doing anything in it.