Knowing the European Parliament, some minor symbolic thing will be changed, it will be hailed by bought off parliamentarians as a major victory, and it will be passed.
The European Parliament cannot change anything about ACTA. Either it passes it ("gives ascent"), or it rejects it.
For now I'll continue to assume that using an API without explicit premission from the owner is theft but will keep my ear to the ground for more news on this incredible oversight.
Theft, really?! What happens when a poor programmer cannot feed their children? They die. Of starvation.
Murder is the word you are looking for, cold-blooded premeditated murder .
If that dance or play has not been fixed in some medium, then copyright does not apply.
That is incorrect, see Article 2 of the Berne Convention. A simple example: if I come up with a poem and recite it, and you hear it and start using it in performances, you infringe on my copyright. Copyright protects the creative work itself, not a medium it has been fixed in.
But if I see you do a trick, work out how it happened and then do the trick myself, then this is no more copyright infringement [..]
That's probably true. The point in this case was however not just that the guy figured out how the trick worked, but he basically copied the entire act.
A theatre play also falls under copyright, regardless of whether it involves spoken words or not. Changing minor details does not change that, just like changing the names in the Harry Potter stories would not be sufficient.
There is no exact definition of when something stops being a derivative work and becomes a new/independent work. The reason is, as you sort of touched upon, that it is simply not really possible to write a strict definition for something like that. As a result, either both authors come to an agreement, or a judge decides after their and expert witness testimony.
Being from Belgium, I can confirm that you are right to a certain extent. But at the same time, there is in general quite little love for the US (or US army) left today. My generation (I'm 33) was brought up with all the wonderful stories about how the US protected us from the evil USSR and how they were the beacon of freedom in the world. That image has disappeared almost completely over the last 15-20 years or so and neither my parents' nor my generation is generally a big fan anymore of the US these days...
It doesn't mean that we're not thankful for what the US (and UK, and others) did in WWII, but those were decisions of the people in charge back than. I think that abstract or unconditional loyalty to a nation is silly or even dangerous, because while past actions and traditions obviously have some effect on current and future behaviour, I believe that the most important factor that determines behaviour is the people that are in charge.
Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.
Thank you both. Now I don't have to post. The letter was not threatening in any way and is complying with litigation, which is basically what one would want.
It must be great to be in the astroturf business with the Stratfor situations and now this! (btw: anyone else noticed that Stratfor is almost an anagram of astroturf?)
2) The inventor builds an encryption product out of the invention. BigCorp Inc. reverses the code of the encryption program, and next version of their OS has encryption by modular exponentiation. The inventor gets a email saying "thanks for all the fish". Or a job offer, if lucky.
What happens now if you you publish an encryption product based on that algorithm:
If the product supports network encryption, BigCorps 1, 2 and 3 sue you because they have patents on "network encryption"
if the product just encrypts files, Big Corp 7 and Big Corp 8 will sue you (and Big Corp 9 if it's a symmetric key algorithm --so not modular exponentiation-- and you add support for using the encryption in zip files).
Now, those are results from just a quick google search, and obviously not all of those patents will be infringed by every implementation. However, how many small software have the resources to figure out which patents exist, whether or not they infringe on those patents (nobody likes being served with an injunction that prevents them from selling the software they designed and wrote all by themselves) and how to rewrite their software so that they won't on any currently filed patent, or patent that may be filed up to a year from now (grace period).
Indeed, good luck. I'll take my chances that someone else will reverse engineer what I did and try to duplicate my work, rather than that I have to watch out that nothing I did may have been patented within the last 17 years by at least one company.
What the GP meant is not that the distinction should be "is the abstract process carried out using electrons or chemical reactions". What he (presumably) meant, was "does the novelty lie in the abstract process, or does it lie in the physical process". Figuring out an energy-efficient way to split water into oxygen and hydrogen obviously can be represented via abstract formulas, the but the novelty does not lie in the maths but in the physical insight.
Conversely, an algorithm that performs a quicker FFT is an innovation in mathematics rather than in physics, even if when calculating that formula using a CPU uses less electricity. I.e., the fact that any kind of mathematics can be calculated using physical means (including our brains), should not suddenly render it patentable. The innovation is not a new understanding about how electrons work. And no, generally implementing that same innovation in hardware would/should/is not be patentable either (the innovation is not in how to build hardware). That why they came up with the integrated circuit layout design protection (although it's not very popular due to it being way narrower than a patent, and of course it's always more fun/interesting to have broad exclusion rights instead of narrow ones).
In general, this kind of philosophical discussion does not lead anywhere though. The easiest way to demonstrate why software patents don't work is to simply look at the negative effects of how they work in practice.
I see what you mean about not being able to patent or copyright the CONCEPT behind a game, though, if you mean concept as in "general class of gameplay." There are many first person shooters implementing the concept, but each has a copyright-protected style of gameplay specific to each game.
"Style of gameplay" is not a copyrightable entity, at least not in the sense that I understand that term (which may differ from your definition). The graphics of a game are copyrightable, the music is copyrightable, and the story can be copyrightable if it is sufficiently creative (only "creative works" are copyrightable, but there is no objective lower boundary for what constitutes a creative work because that simply cannot be objectively defined). Style of gameplay or rules for games are however not copyrightable. And that's a good thing overall.
I don't understand how your post is an answer to what I wrote. Whether Facebook is built on PHP or ASP.NET doesn't really matter in this context. The APIs this article is talking about are the APIs used by Facebook games such as Farmville that enable them to integrate with Facebook profiles, friends and whatnot. Or the APIs that people can (could) use to create mashups based on Google maps.
That's also why I mentioned that these open APIs (open in the sense that third parties can use them) are not guaranteed to stay available, and hence do nothing to address one of the main drivers behind open source development (fighting vendor lock-in and planned obsolecense).
Yeah, sure. Just like the fact that I, like most people, don't donate 10% of my income to the FSF or some other open-source project hinders it. So what?
If you want to judge others from a particular ideological position (concealing code is unethical), you should state that clearly rather than impugn others indirectly.
It's a bit silly to answer the above to an article that ends with
Open APIs are the new open source, except they require less geeky access to lines of code, and more programmatic interaction with software services. As an added bonus, open APIs don't come with the baggage of licensing fundamentalists.
And of course, the main issue the fact that these open api's are very much "here today, gone tomorrow", which is also one of the driving force behind open source development (to reduce a third party's ability to take away features or to make it impossible to keep using some program on newer systems by refusing to update it in case of incompatibilities).
No, I don't. Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds from year to year, thus making further evolution impossible.
In the off-chance that some GM plants manage to produce offspring, the farmer involved (intentionally or no) sued and the crops destroyed.
Indeed, lawyers are way more effective as terminators. And many GM seed producers do require you to buy new seeds every year and forbid you to keep part of the harvested seeds to plant them again the next year.
The same can be said about pickpocketing, burglary and almost any other kind of crime. As long as technical measures can help with partially or temporarily alleviating the problems without causing disproportional side effects or requiring disproportionately large investments (i.e., not TSA nonsense vs terrorism, but more like door locks vs breaking and entering), I don't see what the problem is with developing and deploying them.
Small correction: I thought "venal" was derived from "venom" (as in venomous or poisoned), but apparently it's related to bribery. I don't think ESR is bribed, so I should have replaced that word from his original text with another one.
It's bad bunch of drivel, alright. It's a terrible flamebait — awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, superficially pandering to the populist notion that pretty much everything a government does by definition must be evil.
Buit I can't help noticing that a lot of people critical about ESR's latest outings are the same people who've been cheerfully referring to other texts by him over the past decade — Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Magic Cauldron, you name it — and I have to wonder.
Don't these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
It's bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday who were all about allegedly benign and intelligent analysis on open source economics by ESR are suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious comments that has been captured by a venal and shortsighted view about society.
Yeah, no shit? How....how do they avoid noticing that in reality nothing is black and white, and that in fact almost everyone and every organisation/institution says and does both intelligent and stupid things? And that in case of large organisations, it may even depend on whose actually in charge about something, or the topic it is about?
(before replying, please read the parent's citation)
in Belgium the Flemish (regional) government currently has to pay a lot of money every year to companies and people whose cars were damaged due to badly maintained roads
- just another stupid thing that government does. Clearly this is stupid and wasteful, for gov't to pay for private transport, to fix private cars/trucks. That's really dumb. You should really get rid of that stupid government (like all other nations of-course).
Also I wonder how many more 'damaged' trucks and cars appeared all of a sudden when the program started.
It's not a program. It's court orders. And the root cause of this is that they prefer a balanced budget over fixing the roads, because for now paying those judgements is cheaper than fixing the roads. They are basically "saving" until they can afford to fix the roads without incurring debt.
I bet there are many times more 'damaged' cars now, I am sure there is all sorts of corruption going on too.
Just imagine what kind of a stupid subsidy to mechanics and dealerships and parts manufacturers this is - everybody now will just bring in their truck and car to replace any wear and tear with government subsidized parts.
I wonder how many mechanics just take the money and split it with the truck/car owners, where in fact there is no damage.
Do you see how stupid and wrong it is for government to put money into this? Same thing with everything it puts money into. It creates false demand where none existed and where private sector wasn't providing this extra demand, clearly there was no need for it.
I mainly see that you have a very rich imagination.
What you seem to miss is that the evil big bad government is simply one of the ways to do that
- it's the worst way of doing it, because it has nothing to do with real demand.
Of course it has to do with real demand. In a region like Flanders you'd in fact be hard pressed to build roads when there is no demand, because we simply don't have the space. We're way too densely populated for that.
There is no shortage of companies who can build up your roads,
Of course not, they are in fact hired by the government. The government itself has no road building equipment or personnel, save possibly for small fix-up jobs.
and if a community wants one that doesn't exist, all it has to do is raise bonds and hire a company itself. If there is a business case for it, it can be built no problem, it's done all the time.
That's exactly what I discussed in my previous post.
Democracy and governments did not appear out of thin air.
- democracy is a terrible system, that's why US has a republic, but it's been cracked.
The US has a representative democracy. Republic or not is unrelated to whether or not you have a democracy.
Governments are evil by design
You appear to have incurred quite a few traumas.
but simply saying that per definition pooling money via the government for public investments is basically "money that instead should have been invested in businesses or by businesses, and now hurts businesses because they don't have it" is ignoring reality.
- well, there is no 'pooling' of anything. There are no taxes allocated to any of it and none of it is backed by any production.
It's all debt, it's all counterfeiting and it's all theft.
I can assure you that the income tax I pay to the government is backed by my production. And that while I do not agree with all of the ways it is spent, I do agree with how large parts of it are spent.
The real business takes care of its infrastructure, but when you are left without any real business due to your government policies, t
Infrastructure is only meaningful in any way if it can make the people more productive. Clearly productivity has nothing to do with the jobs programs that government is involved in. Any infrastructure projects that gov't does (all those roads, etc.), those are just money sinks if they are not demanded by the actual business requirement, and there is no business requirement at this point in US or Europe.
I can't speak for other countries, but at least in Belgium the Flemish (regional) government currently has to pay a lot of money every year to companies and people whose cars were damaged due to badly maintained roads. Fixing vehicles, whether or not the government pays for it, is a perfect example of a broken windows economy. Fixing roads is the proper approach, and businesses most certainly are not interested in paying more for transportation because trucks get damaged all the time.
When there is a real demand and real capital investment infrastructure gets build, because it is necessary to increase efficiencies and productivity.
What you seem to miss is that the evil big bad government is simply one of the ways to do that. If you have 50 small companies in a region that could profit from having a new/better/wider road constructed to that region, then you will need some kind of committee or coordination to get that project going. You can create an ad hoc committee every time that's required, or permanent business societies specialised in road construction & maintenance all over the country, or you can delegate that to a nationwide road construction entity with branches everywhere.
Even if you keep it down to the small ad hoc committees, those things will get politicised. Businesses are not necessarily averse to politicisation. In fact, the larger they are, the more they often like it (count the number of lobbyists). You can get alternative political systems that are possibly even more tightly controlled by business interests than they are now, but they won't go away. Power concentration will remain at least as big a problem, and the same goes for corruption, pork etc. The only thing you'd change is that accountability would become completely limited to shareholders and boards of directors, rather than that the public at large also still has a say (I know it's fairly limited in the US due to the way the two party system works, but it still does exist -- just look how the requirements for public debates across the republican candidates are killing them due to public opinion reactions to their errors).
Democracy and governments did not appear out of thin air. And replacing them again with industrials and other wealthy organisations/individuals that can pay for infrastructure works, is pretty much exactly the kind of governments we had in Europe during the 19th century (and even part of the 20th century). And believe you me, corruption, inefficient spending, abuse etc were rampant.
Gov't does not need to build it, if the environment is conducive to production, those things are built. US is broke and so are many other European nations, there is no money and there is no reason to do these projects except to continue providing the government with reasons for further spending
Of course there are such projects, but it is naive to think all such government spending is like that. Just like it is naive to think that the market will somehow always optimally allocate funds where they are required (even if you limit requirements to "the economy"). Again: you can argue that things would go more efficient without a government (but again, I very much doubt that), but simply saying that per definition pooling money via the government for public investments is basically "money that instead should have been invested in businesses or by businesses, and now hurts businesses because they don't have it" is ignoring reality.
As a side note any taxes also destroy investment capital and prevent economy from growing for the same reason - this stuff is not used for meaningful production, only to subsidize consumption one way or another.
I'd argue that various kinds of public infrastructure (depending on where you live, this can include parts of transportation, power, communications, education, health care) are quite fundamental to be able to have any production at all.
You can of course be of the opinion that leaving all of that up to the private market would be more efficient (based on what I've seen, I'd disagree with that), but saying that any taxes by definition only subsidize consumption is several bridges too far, as far as I'm concerned.
You seem to forget the part where more than half of the US population may want to migrate to Canada. Northern Canada may become more habitable, but many other places will become way less habitable. And it's unlikely to be a zero-sum game, even if you discount the costs of moving billions of people and their infrastructure all over the world from one place to another.
Well you just removed yourself from the discussion of knowing what the hell you are talking about.
The ruling is not quite as broad as I would have liked, since it only pertains to filtering 'which applies indiscriminately to all its customers; exclusively at its expense; and for an unlimited period."
That seems like a perfectly adequate compromise position.
It's not a compromise. The court simply ruled on the question it was asked, which is in fact all it could rule about. See also the FAQ by European Digital Rights (EDRI).
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing the European Parliament, some minor symbolic thing will be changed, it will be hailed by bought off parliamentarians as a major victory, and it will be passed.
The European Parliament cannot change anything about ACTA. Either it passes it ("gives ascent"), or it rejects it.
For now I'll continue to assume that using an API without explicit premission from the owner is theft but will keep my ear to the ground for more news on this incredible oversight.
Theft, really?! What happens when a poor programmer cannot feed their children? They die. Of starvation.
Murder is the word you are looking for, cold-blooded premeditated murder .
If that dance or play has not been fixed in some medium, then copyright does not apply.
That is incorrect, see Article 2 of the Berne Convention. A simple example: if I come up with a poem and recite it, and you hear it and start using it in performances, you infringe on my copyright. Copyright protects the creative work itself, not a medium it has been fixed in.
But if I see you do a trick, work out how it happened and then do the trick myself, then this is no more copyright infringement [..]
That's probably true. The point in this case was however not just that the guy figured out how the trick worked, but he basically copied the entire act.
A theatre play also falls under copyright, regardless of whether it involves spoken words or not. Changing minor details does not change that, just like changing the names in the Harry Potter stories would not be sufficient.
There is no exact definition of when something stops being a derivative work and becomes a new/independent work. The reason is, as you sort of touched upon, that it is simply not really possible to write a strict definition for something like that. As a result, either both authors come to an agreement, or a judge decides after their and expert witness testimony.
Being from Belgium, I can confirm that you are right to a certain extent. But at the same time, there is in general quite little love for the US (or US army) left today. My generation (I'm 33) was brought up with all the wonderful stories about how the US protected us from the evil USSR and how they were the beacon of freedom in the world. That image has disappeared almost completely over the last 15-20 years or so and neither my parents' nor my generation is generally a big fan anymore of the US these days...
It doesn't mean that we're not thankful for what the US (and UK, and others) did in WWII, but those were decisions of the people in charge back than. I think that abstract or unconditional loyalty to a nation is silly or even dangerous, because while past actions and traditions obviously have some effect on current and future behaviour, I believe that the most important factor that determines behaviour is the people that are in charge.
Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.
I guess that's simply a chip without an integrated GPU. Here's a picture of a Sandy Bridge Core i7 with GPU.
Thank you both. Now I don't have to post. The letter was not threatening in any way and is complying with litigation, which is basically what one would want.
It must be great to be in the astroturf business with the Stratfor situations and now this! (btw: anyone else noticed that Stratfor is almost an anagram of astroturf?)
What are the alternatives?
2) The inventor builds an encryption product out of the invention. BigCorp Inc. reverses the code of the encryption program, and next version of their OS has encryption by modular exponentiation. The inventor gets a email saying "thanks for all the fish". Or a job offer, if lucky.
What happens now if you you publish an encryption product based on that algorithm:
if the product supports file system encryption, BigCorp 4, BigCorp 5, Big Corp 6 or Big Corp 7 sue you depending on how you implemented it
Now, those are results from just a quick google search, and obviously not all of those patents will be infringed by every implementation. However, how many small software have the resources to figure out which patents exist, whether or not they infringe on those patents (nobody likes being served with an injunction that prevents them from selling the software they designed and wrote all by themselves) and how to rewrite their software so that they won't on any currently filed patent, or patent that may be filed up to a year from now (grace period).
Indeed, good luck. I'll take my chances that someone else will reverse engineer what I did and try to duplicate my work, rather than that I have to watch out that nothing I did may have been patented within the last 17 years by at least one company.
What the GP meant is not that the distinction should be "is the abstract process carried out using electrons or chemical reactions". What he (presumably) meant, was "does the novelty lie in the abstract process, or does it lie in the physical process". Figuring out an energy-efficient way to split water into oxygen and hydrogen obviously can be represented via abstract formulas, the but the novelty does not lie in the maths but in the physical insight.
Conversely, an algorithm that performs a quicker FFT is an innovation in mathematics rather than in physics, even if when calculating that formula using a CPU uses less electricity. I.e., the fact that any kind of mathematics can be calculated using physical means (including our brains), should not suddenly render it patentable. The innovation is not a new understanding about how electrons work. And no, generally implementing that same innovation in hardware would/should/is not be patentable either (the innovation is not in how to build hardware). That why they came up with the integrated circuit layout design protection (although it's not very popular due to it being way narrower than a patent, and of course it's always more fun/interesting to have broad exclusion rights instead of narrow ones).
In general, this kind of philosophical discussion does not lead anywhere though. The easiest way to demonstrate why software patents don't work is to simply look at the negative effects of how they work in practice.
I see what you mean about not being able to patent or copyright the CONCEPT behind a game, though, if you mean concept as in "general class of gameplay." There are many first person shooters implementing the concept, but each has a copyright-protected style of gameplay specific to each game.
"Style of gameplay" is not a copyrightable entity, at least not in the sense that I understand that term (which may differ from your definition). The graphics of a game are copyrightable, the music is copyrightable, and the story can be copyrightable if it is sufficiently creative (only "creative works" are copyrightable, but there is no objective lower boundary for what constitutes a creative work because that simply cannot be objectively defined). Style of gameplay or rules for games are however not copyrightable. And that's a good thing overall.
I don't understand how your post is an answer to what I wrote. Whether Facebook is built on PHP or ASP.NET doesn't really matter in this context. The APIs this article is talking about are the APIs used by Facebook games such as Farmville that enable them to integrate with Facebook profiles, friends and whatnot. Or the APIs that people can (could) use to create mashups based on Google maps.
That's also why I mentioned that these open APIs (open in the sense that third parties can use them) are not guaranteed to stay available, and hence do nothing to address one of the main drivers behind open source development (fighting vendor lock-in and planned obsolecense).
"hindering open source development"?
Yeah, sure. Just like the fact that I, like most people, don't donate 10% of my income to the FSF or some other open-source project hinders it. So what?
If you want to judge others from a particular ideological position (concealing code is unethical), you should state that clearly rather than impugn others indirectly.
It's a bit silly to answer the above to an article that ends with
Open APIs are the new open source, except they require less geeky access to lines of code, and more programmatic interaction with software services. As an added bonus, open APIs don't come with the baggage of licensing fundamentalists.
And of course, the main issue the fact that these open api's are very much "here today, gone tomorrow", which is also one of the driving force behind open source development (to reduce a third party's ability to take away features or to make it impossible to keep using some program on newer systems by refusing to update it in case of incompatibilities).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-rxe9Ayb8c
No, I don't. Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds from year to year, thus making further evolution impossible.
Afaik, these so-called terminator genes were never used in commercially available seeds.
In the off-chance that some GM plants manage to produce offspring, the farmer involved (intentionally or no) sued and the crops destroyed.
Indeed, lawyers are way more effective as terminators. And many GM seed producers do require you to buy new seeds every year and forbid you to keep part of the harvested seeds to plant them again the next year.
The same can be said about pickpocketing, burglary and almost any other kind of crime. As long as technical measures can help with partially or temporarily alleviating the problems without causing disproportional side effects or requiring disproportionately large investments (i.e., not TSA nonsense vs terrorism, but more like door locks vs breaking and entering), I don't see what the problem is with developing and deploying them.
Small correction: I thought "venal" was derived from "venom" (as in venomous or poisoned), but apparently it's related to bribery. I don't think ESR is bribed, so I should have replaced that word from his original text with another one.
ESR on SOPA opponents:
It's bad bunch of drivel, alright. It's a terrible flamebait — awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, superficially pandering to the populist notion that pretty much everything a government does by definition must be evil.
Buit I can't help noticing that a lot of people critical about ESR's latest outings are the same people who've been cheerfully referring to other texts by him over the past decade — Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Magic Cauldron, you name it — and I have to wonder.
Don't these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
It's bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday who were all about allegedly benign and intelligent analysis on open source economics by ESR are suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious comments that has been captured by a venal and shortsighted view about society.
Yeah, no shit? How....how do they avoid noticing that in reality nothing is black and white, and that in fact almost everyone and every organisation/institution says and does both intelligent and stupid things? And that in case of large organisations, it may even depend on whose actually in charge about something, or the topic it is about?
(before replying, please read the parent's citation)
Use 8.8.8.8 as your DNS server - works nicely with thepiratebay.org (I just tested)
At least until Google gives UMG access to its DNS server
I have evaluated independent studies on fraking. Nothing to see here.
Stop letting people tell you what to think.
Says the guy telling people what to think.
in Belgium the Flemish (regional) government currently has to pay a lot of money every year to companies and people whose cars were damaged due to badly maintained roads
- just another stupid thing that government does. Clearly this is stupid and wasteful, for gov't to pay for private transport, to fix private cars/trucks. That's really dumb. You should really get rid of that stupid government (like all other nations of-course).
Also I wonder how many more 'damaged' trucks and cars appeared all of a sudden when the program started.
It's not a program. It's court orders. And the root cause of this is that they prefer a balanced budget over fixing the roads, because for now paying those judgements is cheaper than fixing the roads. They are basically "saving" until they can afford to fix the roads without incurring debt.
I bet there are many times more 'damaged' cars now, I am sure there is all sorts of corruption going on too.
Just imagine what kind of a stupid subsidy to mechanics and dealerships and parts manufacturers this is - everybody now will just bring in their truck and car to replace any wear and tear with government subsidized parts.
I wonder how many mechanics just take the money and split it with the truck/car owners, where in fact there is no damage.
Do you see how stupid and wrong it is for government to put money into this? Same thing with everything it puts money into. It creates false demand where none existed and where private sector wasn't providing this extra demand, clearly there was no need for it.
I mainly see that you have a very rich imagination.
What you seem to miss is that the evil big bad government is simply one of the ways to do that
- it's the worst way of doing it, because it has nothing to do with real demand.
Of course it has to do with real demand. In a region like Flanders you'd in fact be hard pressed to build roads when there is no demand, because we simply don't have the space. We're way too densely populated for that.
There is no shortage of companies who can build up your roads,
Of course not, they are in fact hired by the government. The government itself has no road building equipment or personnel, save possibly for small fix-up jobs.
and if a community wants one that doesn't exist, all it has to do is raise bonds and hire a company itself. If there is a business case for it, it can be built no problem, it's done all the time.
That's exactly what I discussed in my previous post.
Democracy and governments did not appear out of thin air.
- democracy is a terrible system, that's why US has a republic, but it's been cracked.
The US has a representative democracy. Republic or not is unrelated to whether or not you have a democracy.
Governments are evil by design
You appear to have incurred quite a few traumas.
but simply saying that per definition pooling money via the government for public investments is basically "money that instead should have been invested in businesses or by businesses, and now hurts businesses because they don't have it" is ignoring reality.
- well, there is no 'pooling' of anything. There are no taxes allocated to any of it and none of it is backed by any production.
It's all debt, it's all counterfeiting and it's all theft.
I can assure you that the income tax I pay to the government is backed by my production. And that while I do not agree with all of the ways it is spent, I do agree with how large parts of it are spent.
The real business takes care of its infrastructure, but when you are left without any real business due to your government policies, t
Infrastructure is only meaningful in any way if it can make the people more productive. Clearly productivity has nothing to do with the jobs programs that government is involved in. Any infrastructure projects that gov't does (all those roads, etc.), those are just money sinks if they are not demanded by the actual business requirement, and there is no business requirement at this point in US or Europe.
I can't speak for other countries, but at least in Belgium the Flemish (regional) government currently has to pay a lot of money every year to companies and people whose cars were damaged due to badly maintained roads. Fixing vehicles, whether or not the government pays for it, is a perfect example of a broken windows economy. Fixing roads is the proper approach, and businesses most certainly are not interested in paying more for transportation because trucks get damaged all the time.
When there is a real demand and real capital investment infrastructure gets build, because it is necessary to increase efficiencies and productivity.
What you seem to miss is that the evil big bad government is simply one of the ways to do that. If you have 50 small companies in a region that could profit from having a new/better/wider road constructed to that region, then you will need some kind of committee or coordination to get that project going. You can create an ad hoc committee every time that's required, or permanent business societies specialised in road construction & maintenance all over the country, or you can delegate that to a nationwide road construction entity with branches everywhere.
Even if you keep it down to the small ad hoc committees, those things will get politicised. Businesses are not necessarily averse to politicisation. In fact, the larger they are, the more they often like it (count the number of lobbyists). You can get alternative political systems that are possibly even more tightly controlled by business interests than they are now, but they won't go away. Power concentration will remain at least as big a problem, and the same goes for corruption, pork etc. The only thing you'd change is that accountability would become completely limited to shareholders and boards of directors, rather than that the public at large also still has a say (I know it's fairly limited in the US due to the way the two party system works, but it still does exist -- just look how the requirements for public debates across the republican candidates are killing them due to public opinion reactions to their errors).
Democracy and governments did not appear out of thin air. And replacing them again with industrials and other wealthy organisations/individuals that can pay for infrastructure works, is pretty much exactly the kind of governments we had in Europe during the 19th century (and even part of the 20th century). And believe you me, corruption, inefficient spending, abuse etc were rampant.
Gov't does not need to build it, if the environment is conducive to production, those things are built. US is broke and so are many other European nations, there is no money and there is no reason to do these projects except to continue providing the government with reasons for further spending
Of course there are such projects, but it is naive to think all such government spending is like that. Just like it is naive to think that the market will somehow always optimally allocate funds where they are required (even if you limit requirements to "the economy"). Again: you can argue that things would go more efficient without a government (but again, I very much doubt that), but simply saying that per definition pooling money via the government for public investments is basically "money that instead should have been invested in businesses or by businesses, and now hurts businesses because they don't have it" is ignoring reality.
As a side note any taxes also destroy investment capital and prevent economy from growing for the same reason - this stuff is not used for meaningful production, only to subsidize consumption one way or another.
I'd argue that various kinds of public infrastructure (depending on where you live, this can include parts of transportation, power, communications, education, health care) are quite fundamental to be able to have any production at all.
You can of course be of the opinion that leaving all of that up to the private market would be more efficient (based on what I've seen, I'd disagree with that), but saying that any taxes by definition only subsidize consumption is several bridges too far, as far as I'm concerned.
You seem to forget the part where more than half of the US population may want to migrate to Canada. Northern Canada may become more habitable, but many other places will become way less habitable. And it's unlikely to be a zero-sum game, even if you discount the costs of moving billions of people and their infrastructure all over the world from one place to another.
Well you just removed yourself from the discussion of knowing what the hell you are talking about.
Hear, hear...
Will they also play music on them?
The ruling is not quite as broad as I would have liked, since it only pertains to filtering 'which applies indiscriminately to all its customers; exclusively at its expense; and for an unlimited period."
That seems like a perfectly adequate compromise position.
It's not a compromise. The court simply ruled on the question it was asked, which is in fact all it could rule about. See also the FAQ by European Digital Rights (EDRI).