Does Gene Ray have a teenaged / twenty-something relative somewhere that's "into computers"? If so, I think he could be your troll. :-P

You are correct. I got my wires crossed. I actually have a 7805 replacement here in my "lab" that is an actual switching regulator. And for some reason I had mentally bucketed it with LDOs, which as you noted, are just low-dropout varieties of linear regulators. And yes, switching regulators like these are a little pricier, although I believe with the RECOM R-78xx series you're just paying for the convenience of swapping out a 7805 space heater without touching the rest of your circuit. :-P

LDOs aren't that expensive, and certainly wouldn't dissipate that much power.

As a matter of viewpoint, I see this quite differently.

I think science didn't actually reject the various religious ideas. They all get tolerated. They've all been tested. There's contrarian data.

I don't find it discriminatory to give something a chance, then learn from detail that it isn't correct.

I think science is actually wildly tolerant of bizarre ideas.

Because, when it comes to car commercials, ad agencies are bound by so many rules and regulations regarding depictions of reckless driving and such things that it becomes almost impossible tp create a cool car commercial without running the risk of going to court over it (both the ad agency AND car manufacturer).

And yet, this commercial had zero driving at all!

Ok, the statement I made in my third sentence above is imprecise to the point of being inaccurate. The exact property, as described by Wikipedia:

The original proof shows that for overlapping reads and writes to the same storage cell only the write must be correct. The read operation can return an arbitrary number. Therefore this algorithm can be used to implement mutual exclusion on memory that lacks synchronisation primitives

So the part about not needing "properly arbitrated memory access" is mostly true—a read that collides with a write to the same location can return garbage. Writes still must update memory properly, and presumably must be sequentially consistent.

My first encounter with Leslie's work was Lamport's Bakery. It's a serialization primitive with some surprising properties. For example, it doesn't require properly arbitrated access to memory as the initial value read from memory on entrance to the "bakery" actually doesn't matter!

Dr. Lamport was actually kind enough to reply to an email of mine regarding said primitive. I was optimizing a version of it for a multiprocessor device we were making where I work, and I had come upon what I thought was a clever optimization. (I actually vectorized a portion of the algorithm by way of the "unroll and jam" transformation, so I could test the state of multiple processors in parallel, rather than in serial order as described in the algorithm.) He actually took the time to respond to my email, and was quite gracious. His reply:

In the Bakery Algorithm, process i must wait until a certain condition holds for each other process. The order in which it checks for the different other processes does not matter. So, the algorithm can be parallelized in the manner you suggest.

The only time I was more thrilled on a topic like this was when Dr. Knuth replied to mail I sent him regarding a particular algorithm in Volume 4 of TAOCP. I actually received a hand written reply. Well, he hand wrote notes on a printed copy of the email I had sent to his TAOCP feedback address. Dr. Knuth also encourages me to let all my friends know how much I like TAOCP. So, consider yourself informed: I think Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series is worth its weight in gold, and if you consider yourself a computer scientist or computer engineer, you should consider getting yourself a copy, and investing the time to at least skim it. (Let's face it, to truly understand everything in there would require as much time as Don put into writing it.)

I just checked it now on my end and it seems to be fine. Maybe it was just a transient failure?

$ host eztv.it
eztv.it has address 162.159.244.249
eztv.it has address 162.159.243.249
eztv.it has IPv6 address 2400:cb00:2048:1::a29f:f3f9
eztv.it has IPv6 address 2400:cb00:2048:1::a29f:f4f9
eztv.it mail is handled by 10 ezmail.es.
$ grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 8.8.4.4
nameserver 8.8.8.8

For one, more plants would just spring up. Even if part of the buyout was "you may never go into coal again," someone else may. The economic structure of energy is why coal is still king, and buying out the current players won't change that.

For two, the cost of shutting that industry down does not cover the cost of starting new energy industries to replace it. Or were we just going to go without 37% of our electricity?

For three, coal works efficiently and predictably at far smaller scale than most energy technologies. Many of the locations coal services today cannot be practically services by other generation methods.

Don't try this at in a University of Texas parking lot. They'll fine you for it. When it happened to me, it was something like $35. "Improper Method of Parking," or some such bunkum. Oh, and Texas requires front plates, so you've already lost that aspect anyway.

I wonder if that was what was up with a truck I saw a few months back, with a huge ol' camera on the side. It was just a boring black pickup truck, and just one camera on the driver's side.

I've seen the Google Car, and it was much smaller, painted rather obviously, and had cameras facing multiple directions.

You do know that in Modern times the first decriminilazation of homosexual activity was en-acted under Napolean, in 1811?

Why, yes. I even said that, in my comment, though I named the country instead of the leader. Search my comment for France.

You spelled his name wrong, you got the wrong leader, and you got the year wrong. It was during the French Revolution, not under Napoleon; it was in 1791, not 1811; it was the Constituent Assembly, in replacing the penal code, not by a single leader. .

NOTHING with regards to human rights started in the US.

Lol okay :) .

You are so fucking ignorant you make Fox News seem informed.

Says the guy who tried to make a correction to a comment that already contained what he wanted to say, and in a single factual claim made three fundamental errors.

I mean you at least got which country it was right, at least.

This isn't Reddit. Generally slashdotters are expected to hold better behavior than this.

Which is not at all what the article is saying. It's saying that solitary confinement is being used on many more people than those "some folks." You're not making an argument any more than me saying, "Well, some folks should be killed, so why would we care how many folks are being killed?"