Yeah, well, the dirty little secret in the business is that fish ladders don't really work, and never have. Same with turbines. Fish don't survive them in any appreciable numbers. Leaving the river in place, makes a small plant even smaller, so not much future in that.

Of course you could make an "artificial" pump only station without even caring about fish, but then there's the problem of placing it somewhere. There's not a lot of places that are suitable.

We did exactly that with our large northern rivers. Developed half of them, and left the other half. When it comes to the south, there's only one that's worth the bother, the rest we are trying to restore. As I mentioned in a previous reply, we get 94% of our energy from 10% of the plants. The rest are basically a nuisance. Tear them up for the fish.

Yes of course it can "work", in the sense that it can deliver electricity. No-one is questioning that. However, they destroy a lot more waterway than what they deliver electricity, so since we actually want fish (to eat), on the whole, small scale hydro is a net loss and that's why we're decommissioning them.

As a comparison there are about 2000 hydro electric power stations in Sweden, 10% (200) of those produce 94% of the energy... So there's clearly room for clearing out a lot of small plants without affecting production at all basically. (And then there are 2000 decomissioned power stations, many of which still have the dams intact, so tearing those out is at the top of the agenda).

In Sweden at the moment (where we have about 50% hydro, give or take), we're busy tearing down all the small dams and generation facilities in the south, since what puny amounts of power they generate doesn't outweigh the loss of fish habitat and migration routes.

Truth be told, small scale anything sucks (with the possible exception of solar panels on your roof for AC and possibly charging your electric vehicle.) Wind and hydro electrics in particular work better the bigger they are. And when it comes to hydro electrics it's better to royally screw up a large river or two and get your moneys worth of electricity and to hell with the fishies, than piss about and destroy every little stream with not much to show for it. And no fish whatsoever, anywhere.

Because the voting process should be as much as possible kept apart from the judicial system. (And especially for a country that puts out warrants for arrests because of unpaid parking tickets and the like. And often does so in error to boot).

The whole idea of "social death" and the like is a very dangerous thing, especially in a country that locks up so many people as the US. In Sweden you can actually vote in prison, and that's as it should be. If you have enough of your population in prison that they become a political factor, then maybe it's time to look at your laws?

For a country that prides itself on its "checks and balances" letting the law enforcement and judicial system have a direct effect on the voting public is a glaring oversight. The police only gets a say if ballot stuffing and the like is suspected. For everything else it's "hands off".

Nope, I don't buy that (having no particular dog in the race). Voting based on the candidates/parties stance on gun control (whether for or against) is actually highly rational in a two party system like the US where the voters don't really have a choice anyway. Many of the questions affecting society and the economy are very complex and difficult to get a grip on in the first place. When you add to that that the powers that be don't actually present a choice between two different outlooks, but will actually pretty much do the same thing when in power anyway, as their options (given the current system and economic/political climate) are severely limited, it becomes highly rational to let your vote be decided by a single issue where the alternatives actually are clear and in stark opposition, and that you feel actually will have an effect on your personal situation (whether you're afraid of other people having guns or the only hobby you can squeeze in to forget the daily grind is a let of a few at your local range).

So, I don't see tribalism as much as rational behaviour in the face of an impossible situation. Doing the best you can with the limited information and scant possibility to change matters, in either case.

The reason Sadam was embargoed, as the story goes, is that he did the one thing that is forbidden, namely convert his oil fund to Euros. Iraq was selling oil for Euros by 2002. This severely threatens the petro dollar, which in turn threatens the whole US economy and the dollar as the world reserve currency. It's noteworthy that when Iraq came back on the oil market, the dollar was restored. They didn't sell one drop of oil for Euros.

Now, I don't really have a dog in the race, but it's a compelling theory. Google it and you'll find it expounded upon in great detail.

Executions have never really worked as a deterrent, and they don't in the US today. The most thorough research where pairs of counties all over the US were compared, a slight (non significant) brutalising effect were all that could be shown. (I.e. the death penalty tends if anything to lead to worse crime, not less.)

But sure, those were where executions weren't public. In the bad old days in England when pick-pockets were hanged for their crimes, who were busy working the audience of the hangings? Pick-pockets...

For those of us for which deterrence works, prison and social condemnation has already maxed out our unwillingness to commit crime. For the rest, the chair is as abstract, and useless a deterrent, a punishment as a long prison sentence.

What? Are you going to force anaesthesiologists to perform executions? How? By threatening them with the death penalty if they don't do it?

Fucking PermGen space. It's like they've specifically added a setting that's nothing more than a ticking time bomb, just to keep people on their toes.

Nope. If you consistenly could find your car at the top of the hill for no extra effort, that would be great. And should be included in the efficiency (why not?).

It's not as if a heat pump has to put the heat back into the ground/air/water after you're done heating your house, like you would have to with the car if you ever drove it down the hill, so not a good car analogy, but points for trying.

Thank you, I'm late enough for work as it is :)

Nothing for the Java devs here I see. Because there's nothing funny about Java. It's just stolid and lumpen.

When first announced here Rust looked very interesting, with some bold ideas for making programs better in the lower-level problem domain. Since then it's been under tons of development and community vigour, version 1 looked very different to 0.0.1, I need to reinvestigate!

The final switch seems like it would be a useful construct. Python doesn't really have good Enums unfortunately, just some approximations such as using namedtuple._make(). Whereas in CoffeeScript you can assign the result of an if-else block to a variable, which allows for silly conditionals always a potential :)

Well yes, but if we were Perl programmers, we'd have just both been telling jokes at each other while trying to work out what was supposed to be funny about the other's joke.

If we were PHP programmers we'd have got the punchline and the setup in the wrong order, and be getting confused over all of the similar sounding jokes that aren't funny, but never seem to go away.

If we were JavaScript programmers we'd be on StackOverflow, asking for the best joke ever and a word-by-word explanation of why it was funny.

I really will stop now.

My view is that Python is an imperative language that is moving towards functional programming - much like both Ruby and JavaScript it's never going to get there, but it's a definite shift from when I started coding it at version 1.5, and IMO it's much cleaner to consider code as a series of transforms of varying kinds than a grab bag of tools.

I suspect switch lost out due to the C-style switch-with-fallthrough and "clever" shenanigans like Duff's Device that can make them anything but obvious what's going on, and back in 1991 avoiding that probably looked like a good idea for an easy to learn language. I once worked on an application that's core consisted of a 3,000 line switch statement for handling messages, with both fall-through all over the place, and parts of it callled back into itself in what may have been an attempt at code re-use, but was probably just as stupid as it looked... *shudder*

I like Coffeescript's switch, but that's partly because I like having every construct being an expression, removing an element of the code/data divide.