From what we just heard on the 3pm news conference, the road is "completely decimated". The sherriff described a few sections where "there was some road remaining", but the rest of it was "completely washed out down to the bedrock".
Twice in less than 40 years. I would not be surprised if they decided to simply NOT rebuild that road.
Saying "the worst is pretty much past" is awfully short-sighted, especially when you're claiming sunny skies at 11:30 am as your evidence.
Everyone around here knows that it is sunny in morning and thunderstorms brew in the afternoon. At this point, with how saturated everything is and the fact that there is more rain coming, you can't say for sure that the worst is past. Coloradoans need to remain aware of the situation, as additional localized downpours can still create flash-floods for the area.
I was looking at USGS stream data last night and this morning. Colorado DOW
Boulder Creek (the river running through Boulder) is normally running at 50-100 CFS (ft.3/sec) at this time of year. Last night it was flowing at over 5400 CFS, and this morning when I looked it was still over 5000.
For comparison's sake, that is about 30% more volume than is currently running down the Colorado River at the Utah state line.
Other streams in the Front Range are at similar biblical levels. Last measurement on the Cache La Poudre were nearing 6000. Data simply shows "E" at the moment (value exceeds maximum). Big Thompson was around 5000, but also currently shows no current data.
What we have right now are a handful of typically small streams that have transformed into Colorado River sized flows, all dumping into the same drainage system, the South Platte River.
Folks in Nebraska might want to start sandbagging.
For his birthday, will someone please get fzammett a fake grenade so he can take it on a plane and start screaming "durka durka!!!" while waving it at random mid-western passengers?
I had a friend who as a bar with two other friends. A group of seven or eight guys approached one of them because there was some bad blood in their past. Trash talk happens, push comes to shove and before my friend realizes, the three of them are getting jumped by 2-3 guys each.
My friend, being at a bar, had a pint glass with beer in his hand already. As they got attacked, he "slapped" an assailant with the glass, shattering it and causing some damage.
The assailants never had charges pressed againt them. My friend spent 18 months in prison for "assault with intent to cause harm" even though he was not only defending himself, but could have been justified in his actions even without an attack based on the provoker's "fighting words".
I know of two other cases that were very similar.
It certainly depends on the jurisdiction where the event occurs, but the concept of "fighting words" is very subjective these days and probably is based whatever hard evidence is available and exactly what was said to provoke an attack.
Not only maintenance, but also someone to be around to fix a problem caused by the robot.
I've worked in the potted plant industry since I was a child. I have been the one to move plants from A to B, and I can tell you, these robots seem like a nice idea, but they are not going to provide massive productivity gains.
First problem - they're going to be slow and clumsy. If you have four guys working, one guy can tell them "I want the #15 Yellowtwig Dogwoods to be moved from section 340 to section 275 and placed three feet apart between the Sugar Maples and the Swedish Aspen." Good luck getting these robots to understand such nuance. I guess if you're just aimlessly moving plants around, not a big deal, but the reason you're moving plants are not aimless.
Second problem - I didn't read anything in TFA that described these robots as "smart" (though maybe I missed it). Are these machines able to pop the container off and look to see if the plant is root bound and ready? Are they able to even identify which plants they're moving? Are they able to understand the difference between section 350 and 250? Sure, these are not insurmountable problems, but to get this to work is going to require a much more expensive machine (and maintenance, etc). The employees I work with are all very intelligent and understand what plants need to be in order for them to be sold.
Third problem - replacements. How are you going to manage a time/season sensitive crop successfully if there is an unexpected failure with the robots? You get more robots, but that will take time that you potentially do not have (an early winter storm will be here tomorrow... must get this done today).
Fourth problem - these are designed to grab pots that are sitting directly on the ground. Pots that sit directly on the ground have been one of the biggest problems in the industry for as long as I can remember. Once you deal with any plant where the center of gravity is higher off the ground, plants are very unstable and will not stand on their own in even a light wind. This means plants need to be tied off to something (the old way) or they need to be set inside a pot-in-pot system (the new way). Either method will greatly complicate this robot. Will it be able to untie the plant from the wire support? Will it be able to grab a pot by the lip when the lip is at ground level? This robot simply won't work.
I could probably go on and on about the flaws of this robot, but that would be excessive. It's a novel idea, yes, but I don't think it's very practical. A better idea would be an autonomous falcon robot that could patrol the field to keep pests away. That would be epic.
Problem schools are located (all of them) in problem neighborhoods. Even with the best teachers, you can't do something good with a high concentration of problem children in a single classroom.
I'm just going to have to disagree here. The best teachers (and it doesn't even require the best teachers) can do an amazing amount of good even when each and every child in the classroom is a problem child. How do I know this to be fact? Because I did it. For five years. Every problem student from 10 different school districts were sent to us. Each classroom and each teacher was given a set of students composed of literally the least desired kids from an entire metro area. Yes, there were some terrible things that happened before we could graduate a prepared 18 year old, but still we had the highest rate of transitioning these kids back to their home-school out of any facility in the state.
I do not care what kind of students compose a classroom. If the teacher cannot manage these kids, they need to be put on immediate probation, and the principal needs to be held accountable for not making sure the school is working properly. Even the best kids will become an issue if the teacher cannot do their job. Remember how rambunctious kids would get when you would have that 70 year old Greek lady come in to substitute a couple times a year?
I think that you're seeing a lot of backlash from the education industry right now (such as TFA) because the changes that need to happen to fix so many problems are going to directly contribute to the demise of so many "educators" that have made a living at students' and taxpayers' expense. Apparently we are now supposed to feel guilty for being selfish and wanting a proper education for our kids. It seems that to some it is more important to make sure we keep funding the underachieving status quo. "The school is in trouble and needs help and you want to take their money away?" they say. What is your alternative? Give them more money? Like has been done for decades?
I see these absolutely inane posts from teacher friends that say things like "It would be great if prisons had to save box-tops and public schools were actually fully funded". I read this and wonder to myself, where are they getting their figures? Do they simply look at cost per student vs cost per inmate, as if that is the most definitive statistic? Schools still receive something like 4-5 times as much funding as prisons do. These are not two things that should be compared when it comes to the cost of each. Yes, prison spending as a percentage of the total budget is going up, while the percent of spending on education drops, but this isn't to say that "prisons are taking money from schools", at least directly. If you want to get real about things, consider how the failure of the education industry has itself helped to create the greater need for prison funding, since high-school dropouts go on to commit the majority of crimes in the US.
The good news is that dropout rates have declined quite a bit since the 1970s. Kids today better understand that they can't just dropout and grab a job at the factory. However, those that do dropout are so much more of a taxpayer burden than they were in the 1970s, since they will require more assistance than ever just to continue surviving. I find it unimaginably difficult to understand how the TFA can legitimately suggest that underperforming schools continue to require such significant monetary investment when they cannot even display a hint of innovation. They are not going to "teach themselves out of this one". They need to learn to improve how they run their facilities, and if you didn't have private schools changing the way things are done because old methods are no longer effective, how would the public school ever learn a better way when they are so resistant to change?
First of all, USians, or the other variation, USAians, are terms I have never heard spoken anywhere. In fact, the only place I've ever even seen this term is here on/. I can't even begin to try and prounounce it, as it is likely said with a foreign accent which I am unaccustomed to. I'm thinking something such as "OOh-shuns" might be correct.
Second, GP simply mentioned the fact that those who hail from the United States of America, are often simply called Americans. Nowhere did he/she display any sort of "only-we-matter" attitude. That was purely inferred by yourself. Michael Jackson has a song about a mirror I think you'd do well to listen to.
Third, I propose a new term for Europeans, since European is not etymologically significant. We shall now call them EUians. The homophonetic construct of this word also serves a purpose, but I'll leave that to EU to ponder.
Google's stuff doesn't quite measure up because it's free. I've used Voice for a few years now and have never paid them a single dime.
And the "wrong" number? Well, my Voice number is my number. That's the number you use to get a hold of me. I don't mind Skype so much, I keep an account for those times when it's used for an interview or what not, but I just don't see using it instead of Voice, simply because anything > $0 is too much for a service I dislike using anyway (I hate phones and probably spend all of 60 minutes per year speaking on one).
Does this also include Gmail users who also use other email addresses as well? Am I still bound to the TOS if I use a non-Gmail address to email a Gmail user?
It would be interesting to compare the quantity of billionaires between Colorado and California. Not that Colorado would be right there in line, but I bet you'd be surprised at the amount of very very rich folks that live here, at least part-time (since a lot of folks have second/third/etc homes in Telluride, Aspen, Vail, Steamboat, Summit County, etc)
Aside from that, there may not be as many private investors, but there is certainly a lot of government investment with all the infrastructure between Colorado Springs, Denver, and Boulder.
...and the richest of those folks probably also own very old water rights, something that when/if sold would demand a very pretty penny.
I've only heard about the incident through some friends' posts on fecebook[sic]. Every one of them said it was disgusting and that she is out of favor, so I'm not sure who you're listening to that said it was a wonderful performance, but I don't think being American would have anything to do with it.
You really think so? I grew up in the Bay Area, but still had family and regularly visited Colorado (where I now live).
I remember as a kid that the only real "tech" here was the big IBM facility near Boulder (as I recall it was the printing division which turned into Lexmark, I could be wrong though). Then there was Celestial Seasonings... very Boulder... not very tech. I also recall Case Logic, which I guess was sort-of tech since they built stuff to hold disks and such, but that's a stretch.
Now, heck, there's all kinds of tech here, and I think a huge factor in that is the quality/cost of life here is just so much better than The Bay.
I know it's all anecdotal. Not everywhere is Denver/Boulder and that the conditions here are ripe for the "perfect storm" of start-ups (attractive to younger folks, lots of government money, geographically strategic). At the same time, though, the differences between The Bay 25 year ago and Denver 25 years ago are much greater than they are now, at least as far as "tech-start-upiness" goes. Also, it feels more organic here like it did in The Bay back then. You could even say that the intimidation factor of a well-funded Valley office would put off a lot of engineers, whereas the tendency for a more laid-back environment leads to less "rush rush rush" and more thoughtfulness.
Kind of like the mechanic that gets stuck in the middle of an argument between a Ford guy and a Mopar guy.
"Oh but Mopar does that all wrong! It should be done the way Ford does it!"
"Yeah but Ford insists on doing this other bit all backwards... Mopar is where it's at!"
...and then you have the mechanic...
"Eh... I get paid to fix cars. What the hell do I care which brand name is on the back?"
And yes, there is a difference between building a solution from ground-up and using an existing framework to build a solution on. The difference is that the ground-up solution will take longer and be more expensive (though, will have better obscurity). The choice is made based on a business decision... how long do we have until we need to monetize this?
So, in the end, you have programmer A telling programmer B that he sucks at programming because a (possibly poor) business decision was made by programmer A's boss. If that's where programmer A wants to hang his hat... I say go ahead and let him.
There's a difference between "impossible" and "expensive". I've never actually met a good manager, but a good manager should know the difference between something that would be "impossible" for a competitor to replicate, versus "expensive" for a competitor to replicate.
An adjective such as 'hard' should be reserved for things that are adamantious. (but does it matter if adamantious is a word or not? you still know what it means....)
There are a number of libraries that will build a PDF from HTML+CSS. They aren't perfect, but they work.
Alternatively, there's always printing as a PDF, but I've never bothered to see if that treats all your elements properly (I assume it doesn't).
I've always hated the Adobe suite of web tools, but I can't imagine that Dreamweaver (or whatever it may be called these days) would have trouble building a PDF from HTML+CSS. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if that hunk of application did a poorer job than some PHP library.
Slashdot Mirror
From what we just heard on the 3pm news conference, the road is "completely decimated". The sherriff described a few sections where "there was some road remaining", but the rest of it was "completely washed out down to the bedrock".
Twice in less than 40 years. I would not be surprised if they decided to simply NOT rebuild that road.
Saying "the worst is pretty much past" is awfully short-sighted, especially when you're claiming sunny skies at 11:30 am as your evidence.
Everyone around here knows that it is sunny in morning and thunderstorms brew in the afternoon. At this point, with how saturated everything is and the fact that there is more rain coming, you can't say for sure that the worst is past. Coloradoans need to remain aware of the situation, as additional localized downpours can still create flash-floods for the area.
I was looking at USGS stream data last night and this morning. Colorado DOW
Boulder Creek (the river running through Boulder) is normally running at 50-100 CFS (ft.3/sec) at this time of year. Last night it was flowing at over 5400 CFS, and this morning when I looked it was still over 5000.
For comparison's sake, that is about 30% more volume than is currently running down the Colorado River at the Utah state line.
Other streams in the Front Range are at similar biblical levels. Last measurement on the Cache La Poudre were nearing 6000. Data simply shows "E" at the moment (value exceeds maximum). Big Thompson was around 5000, but also currently shows no current data.
What we have right now are a handful of typically small streams that have transformed into Colorado River sized flows, all dumping into the same drainage system, the South Platte River.
Folks in Nebraska might want to start sandbagging.
For his birthday, will someone please get fzammett a fake grenade so he can take it on a plane and start screaming "durka durka!!!" while waving it at random mid-western passengers?
That's some comedy gold right there.
Because the pedestrian should be allowed to step out into traffic from behind a parked car?
Or not.
I had a friend who as a bar with two other friends. A group of seven or eight guys approached one of them because there was some bad blood in their past. Trash talk happens, push comes to shove and before my friend realizes, the three of them are getting jumped by 2-3 guys each.
My friend, being at a bar, had a pint glass with beer in his hand already. As they got attacked, he "slapped" an assailant with the glass, shattering it and causing some damage.
The assailants never had charges pressed againt them. My friend spent 18 months in prison for "assault with intent to cause harm" even though he was not only defending himself, but could have been justified in his actions even without an attack based on the provoker's "fighting words".
I know of two other cases that were very similar.
It certainly depends on the jurisdiction where the event occurs, but the concept of "fighting words" is very subjective these days and probably is based whatever hard evidence is available and exactly what was said to provoke an attack.
Not only maintenance, but also someone to be around to fix a problem caused by the robot.
I've worked in the potted plant industry since I was a child. I have been the one to move plants from A to B, and I can tell you, these robots seem like a nice idea, but they are not going to provide massive productivity gains.
First problem - they're going to be slow and clumsy. If you have four guys working, one guy can tell them "I want the #15 Yellowtwig Dogwoods to be moved from section 340 to section 275 and placed three feet apart between the Sugar Maples and the Swedish Aspen." Good luck getting these robots to understand such nuance. I guess if you're just aimlessly moving plants around, not a big deal, but the reason you're moving plants are not aimless.
Second problem - I didn't read anything in TFA that described these robots as "smart" (though maybe I missed it). Are these machines able to pop the container off and look to see if the plant is root bound and ready? Are they able to even identify which plants they're moving? Are they able to understand the difference between section 350 and 250? Sure, these are not insurmountable problems, but to get this to work is going to require a much more expensive machine (and maintenance, etc). The employees I work with are all very intelligent and understand what plants need to be in order for them to be sold.
Third problem - replacements. How are you going to manage a time/season sensitive crop successfully if there is an unexpected failure with the robots? You get more robots, but that will take time that you potentially do not have (an early winter storm will be here tomorrow... must get this done today).
Fourth problem - these are designed to grab pots that are sitting directly on the ground. Pots that sit directly on the ground have been one of the biggest problems in the industry for as long as I can remember. Once you deal with any plant where the center of gravity is higher off the ground, plants are very unstable and will not stand on their own in even a light wind. This means plants need to be tied off to something (the old way) or they need to be set inside a pot-in-pot system (the new way). Either method will greatly complicate this robot. Will it be able to untie the plant from the wire support? Will it be able to grab a pot by the lip when the lip is at ground level? This robot simply won't work.
I could probably go on and on about the flaws of this robot, but that would be excessive. It's a novel idea, yes, but I don't think it's very practical. A better idea would be an autonomous falcon robot that could patrol the field to keep pests away. That would be epic.
I always just thought they stole large bottles of malt liquor.
... I would fire their ass immediately.
...with an email stating the following:
OMG! WTF R U Doing! y wud u evar!!!! tha client wuz gonna b $$$ n now its ALL FXD! bcuz of that!
U R FIRED!!1
Problem schools are located (all of them) in problem neighborhoods. Even with the best teachers, you can't do something good with a high concentration of problem children in a single classroom.
I'm just going to have to disagree here. The best teachers (and it doesn't even require the best teachers) can do an amazing amount of good even when each and every child in the classroom is a problem child. How do I know this to be fact? Because I did it. For five years. Every problem student from 10 different school districts were sent to us. Each classroom and each teacher was given a set of students composed of literally the least desired kids from an entire metro area. Yes, there were some terrible things that happened before we could graduate a prepared 18 year old, but still we had the highest rate of transitioning these kids back to their home-school out of any facility in the state.
I do not care what kind of students compose a classroom. If the teacher cannot manage these kids, they need to be put on immediate probation, and the principal needs to be held accountable for not making sure the school is working properly. Even the best kids will become an issue if the teacher cannot do their job. Remember how rambunctious kids would get when you would have that 70 year old Greek lady come in to substitute a couple times a year?
I think that you're seeing a lot of backlash from the education industry right now (such as TFA) because the changes that need to happen to fix so many problems are going to directly contribute to the demise of so many "educators" that have made a living at students' and taxpayers' expense. Apparently we are now supposed to feel guilty for being selfish and wanting a proper education for our kids. It seems that to some it is more important to make sure we keep funding the underachieving status quo. "The school is in trouble and needs help and you want to take their money away?" they say. What is your alternative? Give them more money? Like has been done for decades?
I see these absolutely inane posts from teacher friends that say things like "It would be great if prisons had to save box-tops and public schools were actually fully funded". I read this and wonder to myself, where are they getting their figures? Do they simply look at cost per student vs cost per inmate, as if that is the most definitive statistic? Schools still receive something like 4-5 times as much funding as prisons do. These are not two things that should be compared when it comes to the cost of each. Yes, prison spending as a percentage of the total budget is going up, while the percent of spending on education drops, but this isn't to say that "prisons are taking money from schools", at least directly. If you want to get real about things, consider how the failure of the education industry has itself helped to create the greater need for prison funding, since high-school dropouts go on to commit the majority of crimes in the US.
The good news is that dropout rates have declined quite a bit since the 1970s. Kids today better understand that they can't just dropout and grab a job at the factory. However, those that do dropout are so much more of a taxpayer burden than they were in the 1970s, since they will require more assistance than ever just to continue surviving. I find it unimaginably difficult to understand how the TFA can legitimately suggest that underperforming schools continue to require such significant monetary investment when they cannot even display a hint of innovation. They are not going to "teach themselves out of this one". They need to learn to improve how they run their facilities, and if you didn't have private schools changing the way things are done because old methods are no longer effective, how would the public school ever learn a better way when they are so resistant to change?
pspahn, stop feeding the troll.
The Dude abides. It's a holiday weekend, I was feeling a little spicy.
First of all, USians, or the other variation, USAians, are terms I have never heard spoken anywhere. In fact, the only place I've ever even seen this term is here on /. I can't even begin to try and prounounce it, as it is likely said with a foreign accent which I am unaccustomed to. I'm thinking something such as "OOh-shuns" might be correct.
Second, GP simply mentioned the fact that those who hail from the United States of America, are often simply called Americans. Nowhere did he/she display any sort of "only-we-matter" attitude. That was purely inferred by yourself. Michael Jackson has a song about a mirror I think you'd do well to listen to.
Third, I propose a new term for Europeans, since European is not etymologically significant. We shall now call them EUians. The homophonetic construct of this word also serves a purpose, but I'll leave that to EU to ponder.
Google's stuff doesn't quite measure up because it's free. I've used Voice for a few years now and have never paid them a single dime.
And the "wrong" number? Well, my Voice number is my number. That's the number you use to get a hold of me. I don't mind Skype so much, I keep an account for those times when it's used for an interview or what not, but I just don't see using it instead of Voice, simply because anything > $0 is too much for a service I dislike using anyway (I hate phones and probably spend all of 60 minutes per year speaking on one).
...and with Amendment 64, et al, pot dealers are finding themselves out of a job as well.
Here in Denver, the black market dealers that like to hang around Colfax are not very pleased their career has gone south.
Lord. As I recall this was a contraction of `hlaf` (bread) and `weard` (ward, guardian). Keeper of the Bread.
Food certainly is an important thing to guard, but it kind of ruins the luster of the term "lord" duddinit?
Does this also include Gmail users who also use other email addresses as well? Am I still bound to the TOS if I use a non-Gmail address to email a Gmail user?
It would be interesting to compare the quantity of billionaires between Colorado and California. Not that Colorado would be right there in line, but I bet you'd be surprised at the amount of very very rich folks that live here, at least part-time (since a lot of folks have second/third/etc homes in Telluride, Aspen, Vail, Steamboat, Summit County, etc)
Aside from that, there may not be as many private investors, but there is certainly a lot of government investment with all the infrastructure between Colorado Springs, Denver, and Boulder.
...and the richest of those folks probably also own very old water rights, something that when/if sold would demand a very pretty penny.
I've only heard about the incident through some friends' posts on fecebook[sic]. Every one of them said it was disgusting and that she is out of favor, so I'm not sure who you're listening to that said it was a wonderful performance, but I don't think being American would have anything to do with it.
Take apart a video monitor (CRT...
I do not recommend this without a signed agreement.
But alas, we're seeing fewer tech hubs not more.
You really think so? I grew up in the Bay Area, but still had family and regularly visited Colorado (where I now live).
I remember as a kid that the only real "tech" here was the big IBM facility near Boulder (as I recall it was the printing division which turned into Lexmark, I could be wrong though). Then there was Celestial Seasonings... very Boulder... not very tech. I also recall Case Logic, which I guess was sort-of tech since they built stuff to hold disks and such, but that's a stretch.
Now, heck, there's all kinds of tech here, and I think a huge factor in that is the quality/cost of life here is just so much better than The Bay.
I know it's all anecdotal. Not everywhere is Denver/Boulder and that the conditions here are ripe for the "perfect storm" of start-ups (attractive to younger folks, lots of government money, geographically strategic). At the same time, though, the differences between The Bay 25 year ago and Denver 25 years ago are much greater than they are now, at least as far as "tech-start-upiness" goes. Also, it feels more organic here like it did in The Bay back then. You could even say that the intimidation factor of a well-funded Valley office would put off a lot of engineers, whereas the tendency for a more laid-back environment leads to less "rush rush rush" and more thoughtfulness.
Kind of like the mechanic that gets stuck in the middle of an argument between a Ford guy and a Mopar guy.
"Oh but Mopar does that all wrong! It should be done the way Ford does it!"
"Yeah but Ford insists on doing this other bit all backwards... Mopar is where it's at!"
...and then you have the mechanic...
"Eh... I get paid to fix cars. What the hell do I care which brand name is on the back?"
And yes, there is a difference between building a solution from ground-up and using an existing framework to build a solution on. The difference is that the ground-up solution will take longer and be more expensive (though, will have better obscurity). The choice is made based on a business decision... how long do we have until we need to monetize this?
So, in the end, you have programmer A telling programmer B that he sucks at programming because a (possibly poor) business decision was made by programmer A's boss. If that's where programmer A wants to hang his hat... I say go ahead and let him.
There's a difference between "impossible" and "expensive". I've never actually met a good manager, but a good manager should know the difference between something that would be "impossible" for a competitor to replicate, versus "expensive" for a competitor to replicate.
...tell me when I am potentially doing something risky.
You mean like riding a motorcycle?
Correction... English is difficult
An adjective such as 'hard' should be reserved for things that are adamantious. (but does it matter if adamantious is a word or not? you still know what it means....)
There are a number of libraries that will build a PDF from HTML+CSS. They aren't perfect, but they work.
Alternatively, there's always printing as a PDF, but I've never bothered to see if that treats all your elements properly (I assume it doesn't).
I've always hated the Adobe suite of web tools, but I can't imagine that Dreamweaver (or whatever it may be called these days) would have trouble building a PDF from HTML+CSS. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if that hunk of application did a poorer job than some PHP library.