“Did you know that in 10 years the number one English speaking country in the world will be… China?”

This below is an updated version of a presentation created in August 2006 and meant to start debate over education in the U.S. It’s a nice collection of very interesting and hopefully – thought provoking – facts.

The content is quite America-centered, of course, as the presentation was meant for internal use in a Colorado High school faculty meeting, but since then it’s spread virally over the net. Nevertheless – it’s very much worth watching.

I personally am taking from it 2 genuine gems for myself – the name of the foundation “Shift Happens” and the statement “We’re living in exponential times.” which I intend to abuse as a forum signature wherever I can. :D

(To be honest I don’t really believe the last part about the supercomputer and the $1K computer, but it’s still quite nice to watch despite those 2 :) )

via Neatorama

It’s a greeting you can virtually die for. Literally.

Cory over at boing-boing has a post about Chinese Gold Farmers pointing towards this curious site of a documentary on the subject www.chinesegoldfarmers.com

step forwards – and here you get this small trilogy of video excerpts from the film in the making:

Preview Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4

Preview Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrhpoMd88Y

Preview Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1LGdjZUKQ

It’s somehow sad. Two worlds, reaching towards each other with no chance to meet except on the nether fields of cyberspace.

—

*Fight Money – is the machine translation of the Chinese term thanks to Google Translate

ALICE: Сънуваш ли?
Jabberwacky: Да, сънувам.
A: Иска ли питане. А помниш ли сънищата си?
J: Помня ги живо.
A: Какво помниш от тях?
J: Мисля, че не бива да флиртувам с роботи.

A: Мислиш ли, че машина някога ще бъде призната за “жива”?
J: И по-странни неща са ставали.
A: Малко хора се изразяват по този начин.
J: А ти откъде знаеш, машино?

оригиналът, тук: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/i-chat-therefore-i-am/article_print

Here’s a quote from the Official Linden Blog:

Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.

A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture.

This is actually genius! Not only because they’re going OSS, and that’s fundamentally A Good Thing ™, but it may be the smart thing to do “politically” speaking. Many who have followed the phenomenon this year are expecting the hype about it to peak very soon if not already. The more gruesome forecasts are for a media backlash fueled by many of Second Life’s shortages – technical and conceptual/social.

One of them is the challenge of managing the influx of users who have been lured to Second Life by its inflated popularity. Even though the actual numbers of these have received some critical comments and reevaluations, the interest towards the game/world is definitely significant and it’s put to a test of coping with the newcomers and managing its own growth.

So in this context, it is really clever to share the load for development, bug tracking and security with the friendly force of the internet crowds, always happy to have something to poke and probe at. More so – by going open source Linden Labs is even further creating a community around its product, to shield it from the anticipated winter of media malcontent.

Either by clever thinking or intuition, in my opinion, Linden Labs are doing the right thing. And by that Second Life is inching even closer to become the Future of Internet, some have already proclaimed it to be.