One of the nice things about being an old ring knocker (I graduated from the Naval Academy almost 30 years ago) is that you can have a pretty useful set of highly placed friends. Some of them gave me enough information to confirm what I suspected. I cannot think of any way to say this gently - Dr. Jaczko was *wrong*. It is possible someone in his staff provided bad information, but it should not be all that difficult to see the problem with some simple, back of the envelop calculations.

I would think a guy with a PhD could do the math in his head - or at least enough of the math to ask for a verification of the analysis. I would expect someone who is in charge of a large, technically competent organization would double and triple check numbers and statements before going in front of C-Span cameras and a congressional committee and making statements and recommendations that distract the entire world from a real and growing food, water and shelter crisis.

If you look around what's really happening in our world today, there's an inescapable pattern that curiously emerges: Much of what's going on is simply unsustainable. It can't go on for much longer, in other words. And it must collapse due to the laws of economics or physics. Here, I've put together a collection of twelve systems that are utterly unsustainable on our planet. Each of these twelve is scheduled for some sort of collapse or shut down in the coming years. They range from economics to medicine, population and the environment. And interestingly, the collapse of just one of these twelve would have devastating consequences across human civilization. What happens when two, three or ten of these things collapse?

A copyright lasting many decades actually makes all the works with short lived commercial value disappear faster. It also limits the benefits of those very few works which are still profitable many years after their publication to people who were not their creators, be they music company stock holders who didn't create anything, or descendants who weren't even alive when the work was created.

Consequently, the most important action, maybe the only really necessary one to put an end to copyright abuses, the one which would make all the other proposal in this document happen almost automatically, is to reduce copyright duration, worldwide and as soon as possible, to five or ten years from the moment a work is published.

Such a measure would still reward fairly those who deserve it the most, that is the actual creators: in almost all cases there would be no significant financial loss for them. At the same time, reducing copyright duration would cancel all long term dangers.

After World War II, the military industrial complex became another key component in the twisted road to police state practices, based on the premise of permanent war making, with a cold war arms race, the sending of troops, and the establishment of military bases across the globe. This is another defining feature of a police state: a nation placed in an ongoing state of mobilization to prepare and fight wars throughout the globe. Police states, incorporate war-making into normalized state functions. Permanent war making translates into the global subversion of democracy. Supplementing the military in undermining democracy overseas, the CIA was one of many federal agencies during the second half of the twentieth century that was carrying out an essentially antidemocratic mission in the name of national security.

And this, of course, has been the point all along:

the WikiLeaks disclosures *are* significant precisely because they expose government deceit, wrongdoing and brutality, but the damage to innocent people has been deliberately and wildly exaggerated -- fabricated -- by the very people whose misconduct has been revealed.

There *is* harm from the WikiLeaks documents, but it's to wrongdoers in power, which is why they are so desperate to malign and then destroy the group.

But, then, how is Facebook so profitable?

Are they lying?

No.

They are growing.

More and more people sign up to Facebook, and more and more businesses hear about how many people are on Facebook.

It seems like a huge opportunity.

TV shows and award-winning movies are made about Facebook.

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Eventually, though, and this might take a long time, but it is finite, everyone will have tried Facebook ads and know that they are useless. Eventually, after 10 million businesses have invested $1000 each, and Facebook has earned $10 billion in revenue in total, then they will have run out of new customers and their revenue will dry up.

A useless product is never sustainable.

I wish I could short Facebook.

The object of the game, for any one of these ultimately temporary social networks, is to create the illusion that it is different, permanent, invincible and too big to fail. And to be sure, Facebook has gone about as far as any of them has at creating that illusion.

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Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. (Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.)

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

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Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

The short answer is that OpenID is the worst possible "solution" I have ever seen in my entire life to a problem that most people don't really have.

That's what's "wrong" with it.

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OpenID is not flawed in some minor product way that requires just a few tweaks, it is so massively flawed (perhaps in its very conception) that anyone in their right mind would immediately know that it could never possibly be successful, the very notion that there's merely "something wrong" with it is a Joseph Goebbels -"Big Lie"-style question wherein the nerds who came up with it have somehow been brainwashed into thinking that it could somehow ever be a viable thing that real people would want to adopt.

Samtidigt tas reklam- och prenumerationsfinansierade tjänster som Spotify emot varmt i den massmediala debatten, då de dels avspeglar en svensk nationell stolthet som industrination, dels målas upp som en sorts universsallösning på "fildelningseländet". Men man bör minnas att Spotify har ett relativt begränsat utbud, som knappast kan sägas gynna mer perifera, okända artister, samt att tjänsten ger väldigt blygsamma inkomster för de medverkande upphovsmännen.

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Vad medielandskapet behöver är tjänster som bättre syftar till att lyfta fram det mindre kända. Sverige behöver en tydligare formulerad kulturpolitik som tar dessa nya förutsättningar i beaktande, och inriktar stödet mot att lyfta fram det som skapas i periferin, snarare än att gynna existerande oligopolliknande formationer såsom Bonniersfären, SF och Spotify.