La Seconde Vie, Das Zweite Leben

Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.

To say nothing of Second Life. And here are some juicy ones (as an Excel workbook, alas, but it opens perfectly well in OpenOffice.org.). Here's one in particular I found significant:

Active % of residents in the top 100 countries

United States 31.19%
France 12.73%
Germany 10.46%
United Kingdom 8.09%
Netherlands 6.55%
Spain 3.83%

That is, Europeans already outnumber Americans in Second Life (and I'm sure that Europeans will soon be outnumbered by those from the rest of the world soon).

The Euston Manifesto

After the right espousing open source and related open goodness yesterday, today we have the left. More specifically, we have something called The Euston Manifesto (via Compromiso Social por la Ciencia). This may sound a bit like an Ealing Comedy, but it includes the following rather surprising paragraph:

14) Open source.
As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries.