"Land" isn't that unusual of a name. According to the U.S. Census, it was the 1704th most common last name in the USA in 2010 (the most recent census for which they have tabulated the data), with about 21,000 people having that name. It was about as common as Zhu, Irvin, Gagnon, Spivey, Patino, Marrero, Hager, or Lanier.

It doesn't sound that common, but last names have a very long tailed distribution in the US. The Census-provided list includes every name with at least 100 people, and it has more than 162,000 names. Even that list only covers about 90% of the population; nearly 10% of people in the US share their last name with fewer than 100 others.

FWIW, how cool is it that this kind of information is available to anyone who chooses to visit the Census web site? Honestly, this is probably only the second coolest name website maintained by the U.S. Government. The Social Security baby name website provides far more granular information and with better presentation.

The problem with binding arbitration isn't the process; it's the disparity in power. If Roku wants to agree with its network provider that they'll settle contract disputes through binding arbitration, that's fine. What's not fine is Roku telling their customers that they're unilaterally changing to binding arbitration and the customer has no say in the matter. "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." is a sign that the deal is not agreed to through fair negotiation.

In the old days it was something like two weeks per year of service, to a maximum of six months. The other aspect that affected where I worked was that the state required 90 days notice prior to layoffs of some size or greater. (Forget the threshold) So they'd lay people off immediately and they would be on the payroll but not working for 90 days. Then the severance kicked in.

I manged to survive the layoffs at IBM, then was sold to Global Foundries in 2015 with 5000 friends and a bunch of real estate.

In the old days when there was a decent severance package, volunteering for layoff was a good way to retire with a bonus. Other than a few specific times there wasn't a formal way to do so, but there was an informal path. Way back when I was on vacation over the layoff. When I came back someone I enjoyed talking with was gone. I found out he had been laid off and left with a smile on his face. (He was quite a bit older than me.)

You don't necessarily need to. Plenty of cars are networked, so you just need to hack them, and they often have miserable computer security. There was even a famous hack that allowed someone to take over a car's computer systems through their wireless tire pressure sensors.

Many people think they're capable of outsmarting the law. I think computer programmers can be especially prone to it, since they're used to coming up with creative solutions to rules-based problems. They don't realize two things:

1) They aren't the first people to try this stuff. The legal system has encountered lots of clever scofflaws, and it has been tweaked to account for their tricks.

2) The law is more flexible than computers are, because it's run by humans. There are plenty of legal rules that include flexibility because they know they'll be interpreted by judges, not machines. The whole concept of Common Law is allowing judges to make up new laws by analogy to old ones if existing law doesn't cover their case.

That's the general concept of device testing, but it's more complicated in practice. The FDA has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and they've seen all kinds of mistakes in the testing process that they'll want to avoid. To do that, they'll ask some more questions, such as:

• How did you decide on the number of people in your study?
• How long will the study last, and why did you decide on that study length?
• How do you make sure the people in your study are representative of diabetes patients as a group and aren't a self-selected sub-population that behaves differently?
• How are you making sure the diary is complete and accurate? What do you do if it isn't?
• What happens if some people drop out of the study?
• How will you use the data you have to determine the accuracy of your device?

These are all kinds of questions you need to answer before you start your study in order to make sure the results are meaningful. There are some additional things you'll want to do, too, like look for sub-groups within the study where the device is especially inaccurate. If you find a sub-group like that, you'll either need to figure out how to fix your device or make sure that sub-group doesn't get it.

The FDA will also want you to take a bunch of extra steps beyond the initial testing. For example, software updates will have to be tested to make sure they don't screw things up and make the results unreliable. You'll probably have to test the device's longevity to make sure it doesn't start producing erroneous results as it gets old, or at least provide some way to figure out when it's stopped working right so it can be replaced. You'll also need strict QC and tracking procedures so if you ever produce a batch of defective devices they can be identified and pulled from the market.

There's an old saying in the field that safety regulations are written in blood, and it's completely true in this case. These regulations aren't there because the FDA likes to be difficult. They're there because inadequately tested devices had undetected problems that made people get sick and die. A bad medical device can actually be worse than nothing at all if it fools people into thinking everything is fine when it isn't.

Here's that first sentence with them...

They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

On Jan 1 2020 a new IMO (International Maratime Organization) regulation went into effect. The shipping industry drastically lowered the sulfur content of its fuels and the SOx content of ship exhaust plumes dropped by about 77%. (Other aspects of the fuel change also reduced some particulate pollution, too.)

The COVID sequestration also reduced shipping (and cloud-seeding exhaust from it), along with aircraft contrails and upper-atmosphere dust, and dust-generating industrial processes and transportation activity, which (like volcanic dust) also reflect sunlight over the ocean and lower temperatures.

I've seen claims that the reduction in ship exhaust plumes, alone, are enough to account for ALL the sea temperature rise since 2020, and that with the low-sulfur fuel in continued use the bulk of that excess heating will continue even as activity ramps up post-COVID.

There absolutely is a supply shortage. You can estimate the housing demand by dividing the population by the average family size and compare that to the actual housing supply. Here in California, the supply is short of demand by 2-3 million homes. We need a massive amount of home building to get back in balance. It simply isn't possible to meet demand within our existing metropolitan areas without completely revamping our zoning system.

New cities aren't a real solution because they would be so far away from the jobs that the commutes would be impractical. We are already fitting those people into our existing cities; we're just doing a really bad job of it. People are cramming multiple families into homes that aren't built for it, or they're winding up homeless and living on the street because they can't afford rent. We should just acknowledge we need to build more houses and get rid of the legal obstacles to doing it.

That's not to say that zoning is the only problem, but it's the main problem. Most of the other problems people focus on, like short-term rentals and private equity buying up houses, are problems because housing supply is so short. If we had enough houses, short term rentals would be a local quality of life issue rather than something competing with people who need homes. Similarly, private equity is capitalizing on the housing shortage because it drives up rent. If we had enough housing, rent would come down and private equity would look elsewhere. Deal with that big problem, and the little problems mostly go away.

This technology will only improve, and ultimately, it is the only way to actually have reasonable commutes in cities, where vehicles can speed up or slow down at intersections without having one side stop.

No, not at all. A city where the cars never stop at intersections but only slow down is one that is inimical to actual human beings. Engineering our cities to be better and better for cars makes them worse and worse for every other means of transportation: pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit, delivery vehicles, etc. That's what gets people so angry about robotaxis: they focus on moving cars to the exclusion of everything else that needs to move around a city.

We- or we in the USA, at least- need to completely rethink the way we design our transportation system. We've spent the past century trying to build and rebuild cities for the benefit of cars, and the results are awful. We devote as much space in our cities to moving and storing cars as we do to housing people and businesses, and cars are still an inefficient way of moving people around. Meanwhile, our cities are absolute garbage for anyone who tries to move around without a car.

We need to reorient our transportation infrastructure to moving people and goods rather than cars. In some places- small towns and rural areas- cars will still be extremely important, but in larger cities we need to work harder at making transportation that's compatible with high density: more walking, bicycling, and public transit, and more attempts to reduce the need for long-distance travel by putting everyday necessities, like stores and other businesses, close enough to where people live that they don't need to drive to handle the daily necessities of life.

We are likely nowhere near the true Kolmogorov complexity. Note the restriction on running time/space. The Kolmogorov complexity is defined without regard for running time and, in all likelihood, that's going to use some algorithm that's hugely super exponential (with large constant) in time and space.

More importantly, tritium has problems as a fuel for a commercial reactor because it's not a naturally occurring isotope. It has to be generated, usually by bombarding lithium with neutrons. The only economic source of those neutrons is a nuclear reactor. Currently we do this with fission reactors, where tritium production is a minor byproduct. You can produce some tritium from a fusion reactor, but I can't see how you can get even close to one tritium per fusion reaction in any real-world design.

The net result is that it just isn't practical to use D-T fusion as the main energy source because we can't have enough tritium for that to work. We need excess energy from a reactor that uses primarily deuterium (of which there is plenty to fuel everything for millions of years) for fusion to be a practical power source for the whole world.