The article only notes that teenagers are driving much less. Total miles driven has only declined very slightly in the last few years (starting with the recession), and was steadily climbing for decades prior to that.

Here's a chart: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/DOT-Miles-Driven.php

What 'busy traffic' used to look like: http://blueicehouse.com/n5ssi/i35_riverside_may_1957.jpg

(part of this wonderful collection: http://gmlongroof.4umer.com/t7911-great-old-pics-austin-texas)

More recent photos: http://www.texasfreeway.com/austin/photos/i35/i35.shtml

Basically, our definitions of traffic density have changed.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra.

OK, that doesn't quite fit this situation, but you are only putting one variable into your equation - more roads. There's also:

• - More population. A lot more - the use population has grown something like 25% in the part 30-40 years.
• - More population in suburbs, and other changes to density.
• - And as a consequence of the previous item, more miles driven per capita, especially in some areas. Just because teens aren't driving doesn't mean nobody is.

Another factor - most driving is no longer 'fun' - It's fighting traffic. it's a job.

The only place you don't see traffic these days is car commercials.

I haven't seen anything that lists any Apple funding, although some articles mention Rackspace.

The primary political tension I was referring to was the continual battle between the county government and the city government here. The city has a very large (and pretty good) library system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Public_Library); they could have taken on this site as well. But it was probably easier to go bookless by not being part of the SAPL system (and Nelson Wolff, a county guy, couldn't get any credit if SA did it).

Turns out, this library is well within the city - it just happens to be funded by the county government (which isn't unheard of, although it was probably done for political reasons here).

I would argue that wi-fi and e-readers are not a complete replacement for a physical library location. Among other things, the building has useful services like desktop computers, meeting spaces, computer classes, and a place to pick up and learn about those e-readers.

The $2.3 million spent on this library could have
bought e-readers for a large percentage of the populace, easily one per household, and put free wifi on every major street corner.

Doubt it. Bexar County has 1.7 million people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bexar_County,_Texas

Why do you think the Israeli method is cheaper? They spend about 10 times as much per passenger as we do:
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/07/would_you_pay_25_for_71_seconds_of_scrutiny_in_an_airport

how do they get the really large ship i.e. tankers etc that far up the beach. Do they just sail flat out towards the coast and then let the ship plough on until it comes to rest?

Yes: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ship+breaking+beaching

Collisions are an obvious hazard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTDV2BqfOVg

From http://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-audio-listen-to-aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-fire-a-patch-employee-snapping-a-photo-2013-8 :

We hear that Lenz, based in New York, would always take pictures of people talking on company-wide conference calls so that he could post them on Patch's internal news site.

A 50% chance of passing away prior to the start of the gathering and a 50% chance of passing away after the start of the gathering.

I don't think you have much of a future as an insurance actuary.

Are you sure the damage is just limited to the configuration changes you made? The attorneys in my organization believed that the language could be extended to anything that runs on the same set of servers, and anything that interacted with the same database.

And it's even worse for libraries (e.g. iText) - there, the thought was that it could require sharing every bit of code used to run the web site. Not surprisingly, we're not using or contributing to anything licensed under the AGPL.

Bruce Schneier agrees with you:

Why do otherwise rational people think it's a good idea to profile at airports?

From paper discussed here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/another_new_aes.html

In the case of AES-128, there is no known attack which is faster than the 2^128 complexity of exhaustive search. However, AES-192 and AES-256 were recently shown to be breakable by attacks which require 2^176 and 2^119 time, respectively.

... run wires in conduit at a uniform height in every wall ...

OK, I'm confused. Is the conduit running horizontally through the wall? And then you reach through the new hole in the wall to tee into the conduit?

I'm not aware of anything UL listed / permitted by code that works that way.