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And what about open rich web media initiative..?

Oh sure, but we'd have to come up with a name like... I dunno.... Open Media Now!.

And we'd probably also want to come up with some goals like:

• furthering the creation of an open media infrastructure.
• improving upon both the functionality of, and access to, open media solutions.
• promoting an infrastructure that enables the creation, the streaming, and the viewing of digital content (using free software) in a legally conforming way.

And then we'd have to find someone to lead us.

I like the idea, but as you can see there are just too many hurdles to make this happen right now. I guess we'll have to continue along with the proprietary solutions for now...

How do you poll ANY "percentage of the population" without some central authority.

There's no authority compelling people to participate in the ongoing political primaries, yet many do so.

2.) Who executes the will of the "maximum possible percentage of the population"? Surely if someone commits a crime/tort, they will resist punishment.

Somebody in the community volunteers to do it. See for example the notion of "Shanti Sena" in the "Rainbow Family".

Of course, phrasing the issue as "punishment" is 99% of the problem. The issue is resolving conflicts, defending the innocent, getting restitution to people harmed, and helping people with problems not do stupid shit. Punishment - causing someone to suffer to balance out some imaginary scale of pain - is pointless.

3) You are an Anarchist, who believes in a set of principles(rules) made by a group of people, which is by definition a "politic", which an Anarchist BY DEFINITION cannot believe in.

Anarchy means "no rulers". It doesn't mean "no rules" - a group of anarchists can certainly come up with a voluntary code that its members agree to abide by.

However, with the exception of carpooling, he acknowledges he is hard-pressed to find instances where sustained sharing of valuable things is prevalent in the world outside information technology. For most goods and services, sharing will remain the exception not the rule. But Mr Benkler has identified an intriguing alternative.

5000 years ago you could wander off to unoccupied land and start growing things. Or you could try your hand and hunting and gathering. You could live off the land.

You still can.

Ever been in a National Forest? While setting up permanent structures/dwellings is illegal (assuming they can find you in those thousands of acres), it is perfectly OK to wander about this public property, setting up tents or lean-tos, or cave-hopping, living off the land. Just like you want to, right? Or was that a bluff?

I did it myself for 18 months before going to college. Sometimes hooking up with the Rainbows (see link above), sometimes on my own or with friends, sometimes with wierdos I met in the forest. I met dozens of people who live totally off-the-grid, in the wilderness, on their own. It absolutely can be done, but it's tough, and you need to be as clueful about living in wilderness as people were 5000 years ago (at least the ones that survived), and you need to be ready work hard, live rough, and die much earlier (around 50 or so, if you're lucky). My guess is anyone clueful enough to survive on their own in the wilderness would consider it pansy-ass easy to survive in modern society. Do you know how much a good panhandler can make in a night?

In fact, that's so much harder to do than leeching off of society that very few people do it, but still some do. Remember Kasczinski?

Please, stop your whiny bullshit. If you don't want to play society's game, don't. Get the hell out of town and look at all that amazingly huge unoccupied, un-developed land that you could live on for generations without running into anyone else. I assume you're in America (though other places such as Australia and Africa are even easier, since homesteading is still available and it's legal to build permanent structures in thier national parks).

Just because your life is easy doesn't mean everyone's is. Ever known anyone trying to get by, working two minimum-wage jobs to try and pay the rent and feed the kids? I'm sure they find life so easy.

Boo-fucking-hoo. Yes, myself. Get over it whiner. It can be done. I suggest you start by logging off of slashdot, turning off the computer, and getting to work. If you meant someone besides you, you are welcome to pay extra taxes and/or support some charity to help out as much as you like. Just don't try to force everyone else to do even more than they do.

Is this like an off-road camping video, filmed from inside a rollicking uber-SUV with good old boys hooting and hollering?

Because I live in a small town in northern california and I have seen two movies made by people I actually met, one was a 15 minute docu on the Freshwater Treesitters (10 miles away) for a video production class and the other was an off-road series from a guy's camping expeditions. One was made by a 20 year old "hippy" eco-nut student who lives off SSI/Welfare/Student Loans and smokes pot all day. The other is made by a 25 year-old returning student who drinks copious amounts of coffee and cigarettes and works part time installing "4x4" accessories at a local tire shop on weekends.

At various points in both movies I was unexpectadly laughing. In the documentary the interviewer asks 2-3 questions of which the best by far is, "How many trees are kids sitting on up here?", to which the glassy eyed classic dirty hippy says, "5, we used to have 23 but kids left and they cut them down." For a brief moment behind them in broad daylight we see 3-4 people passing a glass pipe around, and than alarmingly the camera is suddenly pointing shakingly up a huge tree where people are making "tribal" sounds at each other, this continues for 5 minutes or so. Imagine nothing but unintelligable yelps, screams, and coyote calls punctuated with the sound of the wind rushing across the surface of the mic making weird dysphonic shrill noises.

Various english inquries can be heard eventually ; about someone having a vial, if someone's mother had called back, and heard behind the interviewer (someone else is with him asking questions), "Yeah I can't wait to go to a protest and be in a riot." The docu ends almost at this point. The kid got an A- for his project, he wants to do documentaries around the country for "Rainbow Gatherings". Perhaps his incoherent style of film making is proper to synthesize the various cognitive deficiencies broguht about by the typical excess of drugs I have heard and seen circulating in my brief contact with this new hippy culture.

The other guy goes to school undecided and knows adobe premiere far better than me and he just got it like 3-4 months ago. Digitizing all his tapes took 2 days and he has now consolidated them to 3 DVDs which he has sent to the people who went out there with him, and sent censored versions of all of them to his parents.

One of these is trying to be different really really hard and failing. He gets about 2-3 chicks a month with the movie I think, he does not listen to anyone else talk about his movie. This is a town of 10k he will run out of flesh quick methinks.

The other is doing what he knows and people are encouraging him by commenting to him honestly and making sometimes a friend in the process. I've never been camping, this guy is going to take me on one of his jaunts around the woods this summer.

Here is the point, you can make anything that can be done in media appealing to a point where people actually go out to find more about whatever intrigues them about the piece. Witness the increase in various wiccan books when teenager wiccan movies are cued up in lineup. We need more scientists and such to make engaging media of all kinds if we are to expect the bar to be raised beyond sex and violence.

Does that make anyone else think of a gay pride parade slogan?

My plan so far (funds permitting), is to get a full-size schoolbus (deisel, for the hope of eventually using some kind of bio-mass), a teepee, and a bunch of laptops. Equip everything with 802.11a adapters, and put my pc in the bus with a big antena on the roof, another big antena on the teepee, and bring a few spares. When we get there, we contact as many locals as we can, looking for a feed, and if we bring spare 802.11a equipment to use, I doubt any gathering is more than 10 miles or so from a connection of some kind? Anyway, even if it wouldn't work everywhere, we could probably pull it off at least at nationals (the big one, in July).

After a few seasons, maybe the rainbow geeks could organize some sort of grand open-source project? Especially with all the time we'll have on our hands during long stints at gatherings. ;)

Cheers, Joshua

"www.rainbowLinux.org"

"www.rainbowLinux.org"