Any computable function f on one variable x has a program. That function is a program of size p. The input x also has a data size d. BB(p+d) >= f(x), by definition, for all f and x. If you think you might have a (function, input) pair (and corresponding (program, data) pair) for which this is not true, see the previous sentence.
No, because f is assumed to be computable from the start, which BB is not (otherwise it could be used as a subroutine in a program that solves the halting problem).
It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research. AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly.
Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion.
The funding model is an integral part of the story.
That sounds plausible, but is not how it is told in The Idea Factory, where the authors explain that both AT&T (running the phone system) and Western Electric (manufacturing equipment for the phone system) had separate research divisions even before this. They then discovered that they were duplicating a lot of research, so they set up one entity to perform research for both the harder and the softer sides of the communication system.
Citation needed. What I'm seeing: No evidence of a legal requirement to spend a % of revenue on research: There was no line-item mandate in the consent decree forcing AT&T to invest a specific percentage into Bell Labs. The support for research was strategic and reputational: AT&T used Bell Labs to fend off antitrust pressure and maintain regulatory goodwill.
The baby bells actually took with them part of Bell Labs, renamed to Bellcore, that survived for another decade or so. I interned there whilst doing my MSc, it was still a great place for a while, with serious research.
my folks worked at at&t when all that happened and so that narrative arc was a big part of my upbringing. my timeline/details is probably off and I can't ask them because they passed away but from what you say here I can totally see what you mean, it totally tracks with the dramas and discussions that they brought home from work every night.
They are a zero-trust networking solution that also traverses IPv4 NATs. Zero-trust networking is a layer above the IP layer. In an IPv6 Internet their capital costs go down, and their product remains valuable for their paying customers. (Free accounts mostly use it for NAT traversal, businesses for the zero-trust encryption.)
Their CEO has been working with (and supporting) v6 for decades both at the executive level (now) and also as an extremely capable software engineer that I personally met with a few times while we were both engineers at Google doing network measurement.
Countries can tell companies what the maps of their countries should look like and what things should be called.
For example, Google shows different info about the Kashmir region depending on whether you are in Pakistan or India or external to both, because of how the Indian and Pakistani governments define the borders and names of the region. If the US government changes a thing's name, then Google will change that thing's name within the US. Google mostly doesn't choose names, it uses externally-supplied mostly-governmental name databases. Governments have the power to name their own regions.
I don't want Google to choose what things are called, so I think they are doing the right thing here, and the USG is doing the dumb thing.
When I worked at HERE Maps this was a pretty standard thing to do. Countries have official named in multiple languages. Borders are seen differently by different governments. A map is anything but static.
And the chaos of translation. It is fun to consider whether somewhere like Johannesburg should be called Johannesburg or Johnscity or YHWHisMercifulFortifiedPlace or what in English. The standard is obviously to keep the local term and pronunciation, but then apply that logic to languages with different scripts and nothing really makes sense in a satisfying way because mapmakers can't avoid some amount of translation. It is a muddle of conventions.
There is no chaos there. When you label something on a map, you never translate any of the names. What you do, is use the exonyms which already exist. That is, local names which may have been literally translated at some point, or might simply have changed to align with local orthography and pronunciation, and which have become common place and accepted.
Like encyclopaedia, most reliable real-world maps document what it is, not what the author thinks it should be (obviously this is a possible use of maps; see China's nine-dash-line bullshit). So you wouldn't be making your own translations. At most, you would transliterate names in scripts not readily understood by your target audience.
I don't want Google naming things, but I don't want a President naming them either. My preference is for things to be named by the people who live there/use the thing, but failing that at least I would want my mapping software to present the fact that there are multiple names/borders and let me pick which I want to view.
The president was given this power by the people. Crowd sourcing this is a particularly bad idea as countries already have working institutions that map and name things.
One alternative would be for Congress to create more barriers for name changes.
The president is taking this issue as a power grab. He does not have rights to name things. There is a geological naming board appointed by cabinet heads. The executive order instructs his newly appointed department heads to purge their geological naming boards of any members who may not agree to these names. This is not something that has happened before, and not by design.
Is "gets to rename any geographical feature in the general vicinity of the country on a whim" a usual power of the US President? I genuinely don't know the legalities around this, but given that, I would bet that most people who voted for Trump also didn't think they were giving him that power. (Whether they would have chosen to do so is a separate question.)
Do electors of any politician ever understand the full extent of their candidate's powers? They vote on people under the assumption that the person is the best choice (not necessarily a "good" choice) for the job given the system already in place.
Answering your question: yes, the executive branch can change geographical names in the US. Obama did that too with Mt Mckinley. This power extends solely to the names as accepted by the United States. If Mexico wants to change the gulf's name to "Gulf of the Aztecs" or "Gulf of qetwyetwdhxysysheussg", it can do that too.
SHOULD they do it? Now that's a different question.
>Countries can tell companies what the maps of their countries should look like and what things should be called.
Not in America. The First Amendment means private entities, individual or organization, are free to draw maps and name things however they like and the government may not tell them what to do. The government can decide how it does its own maps, and society at large can decide whether they wish to use a different product or not.
>I don't want Google to choose what things are called
Tough shit. Google may choose for a variety of reasons to go along with what the USG decides is the naming, and in this case it has, but they can't be compelled by force to do so. And other private entities can choose differently should they wish. And of course everyone is entitled to comment or criticize it, and then comment and criticize the comments and criticism in turn, and make use and spending choices accordingly and so on. That's the vibrant market of ideas we're founded on.
NB: The Treynor Curve is named after Ben Treynor and his ideas. Ben Treynor's name changed to Ben Sloss a few years back, and Ben Sloss is one of the authors of this article.
The Qmodem program, brought home on some random 3.5 inch floppy, allowed me to connect to local BBSes and started my journey into networking computers. Now I have a PhD in CS and I spent more than a decade deeply caring about the Internet, networks, and network research. Without the start given by those BBSes, my path could have been very different! I am very sorry for your loss, and I hope the fact that he made a random teen's life better is some comfort.
> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed.
[citation needed] because I think this is extremely false.
It is easy to underestimate the pain caused by having all the pre-euro currencies and pre-EU tax laws (yes there was the Schengen zone and EEC, but the EU uniformity helps a lot) and pre-EU borders.
Source: me, who is a middle-aged American founding a tech startup in the EU and visited Europe many times before the EU existed.
I think it is getting better year after year, in small steps. For example, B2B taxation within the EU (by use of the reverse-charge mechanism) has become quite easy in recent years. Of course, depending on the product, diverse local rules may apply.
EU Single market is a massive improvement, but it's not yet really single market like in the States (although there can be a bit of legislation/tax barriers between states there as well, depending on your location and line of work).
Also, it's hard to understate just how open the US is. For me, an European living in the EU, it's as easy, or easier (larger wallets, single language) to sell (digital/online products/services) to Americans. For digital goods, might as well skip the EU.
Uber, has to do all sorts of gymnastics to make rides work across different EU countries. And still they are routinely asked to stop serving in a country for some reason or another.
Amazon. It took them years to launch across EU, they went country by country and didn’t launch across EU at once.
The current EU laws (especially tax laws) aren't helpful for businesses. If you want to do business in every EU country you basically have to register a business in each of them.
Sure, you can sell goods for €10.000 - €20.000 to another EU country without much trouble, beyond that you need to setup a business in each country, sometimes you even need employees or at least an office in a country to be able to do so. I worked for a company that shipped to a number of EU countries, from an EU country. It has taken them 15 years to expand from shipping to three countries to nine. Every time they want to enter a "new market" it is years of planning and insane fees or doing business in a supposed "single market".
The current situation is better than before the EU, but it's by no means good. Certainly no where as good as a Nebraska company wanting to sell their product in New Mexico. EU business will never grow to the size of American companies if they cannot bootstrap themself in a true single EU market. An American business immediately have a potential customer base of 350 million consumer, an EU business have at most 80 million if they start in Germany and will have to add an insane bureaucracy if they want to expand.
EDIT: My information is out of date: In 2021 a solution was introduced where you can pay your VAT locally, and the tax authority in your own country will handle the transfer of VAT to the other EU countries.
There are still some taxes (e.g. taxes on tobacco or alcohol) you may need to handle for each country, and to do some you may need to be a registered business.
This is just straight up not true. You need a legal body in a country if you want to hire someone on payroll there, you most definitely do not need one just to sell your goods and services, that's the entire point of the single market. It sounds like you've misunderstood a second hand recollection of someone else's struggles?
> You need a legal body in a country if you want to hire someone on payroll there
Even this is not strictly true. One can often just register a foreign company with the local tax agency for a direct hire. The most frequent scenario is that a foreign hire comes through their own legal entity, as a hired contractor. Now, the sad part of that statement is that often a hire comes as a hired contractor not because of cross-border taxation, but because of tax management reasons. In some EU countries, high value employees cost three euros in taxes for every two euros paid after taxes. A lot of people prefer to set up a corporation that allows them to better manage that majority of their income that goes to the tax office.
That's not employing someone in a different country though, that's contracting. And it's the same arrangement you can use to hire someone in the US from the EU.
No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.
...whereas that of New Hampshire is 'Live free or die'
Incidentally, NH licence plates are stamped out by prison inmates.
Now THAT is cruel and unusual punishment, right there!
Edit: For those not well versed in NH plates, the state motto is embossed on each and every number plate. (This may be the case for every US state, for all I know)
On the subject of bullet holes in 1% of the thing, NH also has way laxer gun laws than Texas. (Or at least had laxer laws 5 years ago, I suppose Texas probably has loosened gun laws in recent years)
No permit for carrying, no duty to inform, no "no guns" signs for buildings that carry any legal weight beyond trespass. NH allows guns in bars, Texas does not. NH you can still protest with guns, which is rare in most states after the 1960s era civil rights protests with guns. Texas nominally prohibits carrying guns for 5 yrs after a violent offense, NH does not. Etc etc.
Yeah, Texas has been all hat no cattle for a long time re: guns. Still looser restrictions than California though.
If you want real ‘wild west’ living, the closest you’ll come is Nevada (except for Clark County), Wyoming (except for Jackson), and Alaska (except for Anchorage). A few other places too.
> This may be the case for every US state, for all I know
Nope. What the jurisdictions choose to write on plates varies, often for a fee you can have something different, either of your choice (within limits) or from some limited selection.
Famously DC has plates quipping about the "Taxation Without Representation" which was notionally the reason the United States wanted independence. The District of Columbia of course does pay federal taxes but does not receive proper democratic representation in exchange, exactly the situation the colonists complained of and with exactly the same retort offered in response†.
[This is a very small hypocrisy compared to say declaring that "All men shall be free" and continuing to literally enslave some of them for example]
† The Congress insists, just like the Westminster Parliament, that these tax payers are represented, but virtually, with the entire institution actually somehow representing their interests. If this strikes you as poppycock for Westminster, it should feel no different closer to home.
It seems to me that it makes a great deal of sense for the seat of the federal government to be located in a federal district independent of any state’s control. It also would not make sense for that federal district to be represented as a state — that would end up being a circular dependency, since the federal government is created by the states, and it doesn’t make sense for the federal district to participate in creating and sustaining itself.
Those who choose to live within the federal district have a privilege others in the United States do not have: direct physical interaction with and influence over the individuals composing the federal government. It makes sense to me that the privilege is balanced with a lack of representation in the Senate and House. Note that they do have representation in the Electoral College.
It also makes sense to me to retrocede the majority of the current federal district back to the state of Maryland.
