Even worse, they were not just concatenating the strings in memory. They were making a new string each time and copying the old one first, then concatenating. Their choices of computer languages and their lack of understanding of those choices makes this a problem.

Realistically, she'll do anything serious on a desktop or server machine. Therefore the laptop is at best a let's try something simple or used as a remote terminal to her real processing.

Any recent Windows or Macintosh laptop will work for this. She can just load a VM on either platform if she want to play in real Linux with the portable, but most of the serious work will be done by logging in remotely via RDP, VNC, or whatever to some real horsepower. Having the Mac/Windows gives her all of the usual Office tools as well. I'm a programmer/engineer, not a physics person, but my Macintosh has worked perfectly for stuff like this. Friends have Windows machines they are just as happy with.

Wrong. The hot material in the reactor core, whether thorium, or uranium or any other material, has a lot of stored heat energy which has to go somewhere even when the nuclear reaction stops. It still needs cooling for a long time after it stops producing new heat.

Basically, me too. I've seen it both ways. I actually saved the file on my desktop so I can be sure I'm looking at the same thing each time and it has flipped. I mostly see blue and black/brown, sometimes light blue and light brown, and rarely the pure white and gold. Pretty weird, but also pretty cool.

I agree. Tell her about your life. My dad died young. I was the oldest of the kids and they loved hearing stories I could tell about Dad that they never got a chance to hear/experience.

As far as advice for her, just emphasize that in the long run effort usually outweighs raw ability. The most likely road to success in life is to choose a career you like and work at being the best you can be. As a parent now, my spouse and I praised effort much more than results when the kids were young. We can see the results in our older children. They don't give up easily.

Whatever happened to off-line backups? One mistake can't wipe you out then.

The original question wasn't about money cost, it was about "carbon cost". Hence my answer.

Construction "costs" are probably similar to building a coal or natural gas plant of similar capacity. The actual electricity production is the same in all of them; only the "boiler" changes.

Although evaporation losses still need to be dealt with.

"could be resolved with better storage solutions"

And this is exactly the point! This is a problem that has yet to be solved. There are no "better storage solutions". Compressed air storage, etc. are all things with huge inherent losses. On the scale we're talking (megawatts and gigawatts), there are no practical solutions at this time.

At the scale of individual homes, yes we could be using some sort of battery type arrangement. Passive heat storage works ok for home heating, but cooling is still an unsolved problem for the summers.

I don't think recursion was part of the FORTRAN standard until pretty recently. There were some specific implementations of FORTRAN compilers that supported it as an option (Data General in the mid-80s for example), but DEC (VAX), CDC, and Cray did not and they were the big three in the scientific/engineering world. The ANSI standards for FORTRAN 66 or FORTRAN 77 did not have recursion.

yes, sort of like bifocals. Although, a quick google search shows other kinds of contacts with other ways of having multiple prescriptions in one. I haven't used them though.

No, they orient themselves (gravity), so when you lay horizontally they get crosswise. When you stand up, they right themselves. Takes a couple of minutes though.

I second this idea.

On the servers I manage, the usage is fairly stable so we have alerting set at various levels for each file system. Some are set above 95% and others as low as 60%. I want to know when disk usage changes abnormally, no matter what the absolute level is.

Some disks are less important than others so they just send email alerts. The file systems that are critical send text messages since we're a 24x7 shop.