Studied some oceanography. The problem is not that beaches are transient. The problem is our idea of property. The problem is ports, seawalls, jetties. We want beach front property we can have a house on, a hotel on, a strip mall by. You can repair a beach. Just quit building within a few miles of it. It's a moving object. It will show back up once you give it the proper habitat. If you build houses and seawalls up the entire coast you will not have beaches. That means the beach disappears. The natural mechanisms that make beaches cannot do their jobs.

http://www.amazon.com/Saving-A...

No, not exactly. Doing that you end up with very small, sharp, broken rocks. You also end up with a chemically active surface, depending on the type of rock, that is very alkaline or acidic. Sand (at least beach sand) is both mechanical and chemical weathering of rocks that is then polished by water over time.

A picket style or privacy fence should be no where near a creek that floods. That's probably why the permit has been denied. Think of it as a damn that is going to trap water and junk when it floods and make the flood worse for those upstream.

This is pretty much it.

While my main job is working on computers, I do like researching other things. I've read a few books on beach engineering and coastal erosion. Here's pretty much what no one who owns beach property is going to want to hear...

"If you want a beach, you can't build anywhere close to it".

Sea walls that protect houses prevent beaches from forming and they will erode up to the wall. Piers change beach dynamics and where there was once sand, there will quickly be nothing (or in some cases the beach will advance very far out the pier ruining its intended purpose. The beach is a very dynamic place and anything you put out there changes those dynamics.

Douglas Adams was right all along.

The issue I have with this theory is, in the 4,000,000,000 years that Earth has been around, wouldn't quite a lot of this 'matter' built up in the crust and core? Where is it at? Sinking deep in to the crust?

For a long time now several banks (I'm talking EU here, I never saw this in the US, but that doesn't mean they don't have it) offer services where you can generate a temporary card number for a one-time single transaction, and the generated number becomes invalid after that single transaction. It's meant for online payments - you generate the number with a specified sum that can be spent, you make the transaction after which the number disappears. This, combined with a two-layer online banking login (password + single-use token sent by text to your phone) seems pretty solid to me. At least, I never heard anyone using it having their card data stolen.

>The installer no longer supports FTP

With FTP acting as fragile as glass in the world of NAT and firewalls, I don't see this as a bad thing any longer. HTTP is reliable when serving large files these days.

> and self signed certificates are far more secure than HTTPS

Right, and with I MITM the wireless AP you're on and replace the self signed with another, you'll go right on thinking you're secure.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltes...

IE 11 / Win 8.1 R TLS 1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0x35) No FS 256
Chrome 37 / OS X R TLS 1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0x35) No FS 256
Firefox 32 / OS X R TLS 1.2 TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA (0x35) No FS 256

Other than the lack of Forward-Secrecy and lack of GCM it looks like Citi supports modern TLS.

>and if you have to take services offline anyway, you may as well reboot

Depends on the nature of the services you run. There is no reason to blow away all your cached memory if you don't need to. That said, understanding your dependencies is important.

shutdown /l

(lower case L)

Laptops are just as bad. Many hibernate rather than shut off, and the users never reboot them. Luckily the task scheduler can still do the same thing.

"the legality of a manufacturer-owned dealership"

I understand that sometimes a manufacturer doesn't want to deal with the upkeep related to a self-owned dealership chain. However, I don't understand why it shouldn't do it, if it wants to do it. Oh well, I understand, but I don't 'understand', since it's a stupid law (i.e., franchise laws related to vehicle sales). Who the hell care about protecting franchises? Yes, stupid question, obviously lots of people care, they're just not common people like you or me. The best compromise would be to allow any manufacturer to sell directly, if they want to, and let franchises survive by the rules of the 'loved' capitalist market rules - if they can't make enough profit, let them die off, simple as that. They can't beat manufacturer prices? Hell, who cares, I wouldn't mind buying cheaper cars. They could beat the prices? That'd be great, I'd buy from them. Unfortunately things are never that easy, but it would be nice if they would be, for a change.

Never having been involved in Linux development, but following it since the early days, I always had the feeling that without Linus' strong leadership - including sometimes strong language - Linux would've been derailed and forgotten years ago. He is right in many aspects, including the need for a strong hand in some cases in the FOSS world, especially when you're developing something as important as the Linux kernel. Such an important piece of tech/sw can't be rapidly and consistently improved with constant debates about directions. Of course, Linus' leadership might not be the best possible, but I think a lot of us is willing to accept his sometimes strong language and style given the results he produced over the years. The end doesn't always justify the means, but in this case I think it does.