Carmelo Cutajar's letter "Ample Proof of God" (The Times, 6th Feb) reminded me of an anecdote by that inimitable author, Douglas Adams. He compared this idea to some water that wakes up one day and finds itself as a puddle on the ground. As it examines the hole it finds itself in, it is
amazed - the hole fits the water staggeringly well! So well in fact that it seems designed to fit the water. It must have been created by an intelligent designer explicitly for that water to be in.

Similarly, we look at the world around us and it seems amazingly perfect for us - the right temperature, the right atmosphere to breathe, the right duration of day and night, the right plants to eat. It seems so perfect that we might get the feeling that it was made for
us.

It's actually the other way round. Just as it was the water that conformed to the hole in the ground, we find our planet so perfect because life has been evolving for billions of years to survive within the conditions provided by the earth. If earth's gravity had been more, or less, then we would have evolved to live and move around in it. If the entire earth had been hotter we might have evolved better cooling systems and a resistance to skin cancer, whereas if the earth
were colder we might even today still be sporting a thick shaggy fur coat.

We have only just begun to detect the presence of planets outside our solar system, so we have as yet no way of knowing how common or rare our type of planet is. For all we know, earth-like planets might be quite common indeed. Even if only one in a million planets would suit
human life, that still means billions of such planets. Also, since the only type of life we know about is that found on earth, we have no idea what planetary conditions would allow the development of life in its broadest sense. We've already had to alter our perception of
"life-sustaining conditions" since we've found life that can exist at extremely high temperatures, a toxic environment and bone-crushing pressure near underwater volcano vents, and below freezing in the Antarctic. Other forms of life might exist in conditions far beyond
what we consider suitable.

Sorry to disappoint, but this is not proof of any deity.

One ought to ask oneself - if there is a God who is so anxious for people to believe in him, and given the doubts that exist (including other religions claiming that theirs is the one true god), wouldn't it be much easier for that god to simply settle the matter once and for
all and give final, undeniable proof of who is right? Surely an omnipotent being can do that.

The Dawn of Christianity

Like any other story, what you believe of the story below is up to you. If it were a film it would probably be described as "based on a true story". Enjoy.

Once upon a time there was a young man named Saul. Saul lived in Tarsus, in the Greek part of the Roman Empire, in modern day Turkey. It was a harbour city which saw a variety of beliefs and religions arriving with its ships and sailors. Mixing with the beliefs of his native homeland he saw Mithraism from Persia, Judaism from Palestine, the official and unofficial Roman gods and many others. Saul however chose the beliefs of the Jews, converting to Judaism as a young adult. He was a very ambitious and single-minded person and once in, he devoted himself to learning all he could.

The Jewish community in Tarsus was small however, and concerned itself more with daily life than religious scholarship. Saul soon absorbed all that he could learn from this small group of Jews, and decided to take the next step – go to Jerusalem, the centre of the world as far as Judaism is concerned.

Saul arrived in Jerusalem having already become the most knowledgeable person in religious matters in his hometown, and fully expecting to be welcomed as a scholar in Jerusalem. His disappointment must have been traumatic. He soon discovered that being the top scholar among a small community of not-particularly-religious Jews did not quite match up to people who had dedicated their entire lives to the topic in Jerusalem. Far from being a top scholar, he found himself at the bottom of the ladder of religious scholarship. The children were more advanced than he was.

Not only that, but he discovered that in Jerusalem, Judaism was divided. There were the Pharisees, who opposed Roman rule and believed in a coming messiah who would defeat them, take the throne and bring Judea back under Jewish rule. There were the Sadducees, fewer in number than the Pharisees but who had aligned themselves with Rome and supported their presence. In return, the Romans had given them the high priesthood and other positions of authority. There were other sects, like the Essenes, but the power struggle in Jerusalem was between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

Saul found himself in Jerusalem, and not only was he not welcomed as a scholar, he found he did not even qualify to join in either of the two main schools of Judaism – those of Hillel and Shammai, both Pharisee. Saul turned from them to the other side. The Sadducees had control of the high priesthood and the Temple. They walked hand in hand with the Roman authorities. And they needed men for their army. One of the tasks of the high priest was to assist the Romans in apprehending troublemakers, and in Roman eyes, anybody trying to oust them and establish a monarchy in their stead was clearly a troublemaker. The Sadducees, who rejected the concept of a messiah and supported Roman governorship, agreed – especially since the Romans were the source of all their power. The high priest therefore maintained a small force of soldiers to round up any such troublemakers, arrest them and bring them before him. If he was satisfied that these people were indeed troublemakers, he’d send them off to the Romans for sentencing. This was not the Grand Sanhedrin, in which the Pharisees outnumbered the Sadducees, which met in the temple and which had the power to execute people it found guilty. This was a sanhedrin (court) composed only of Sadducees, which met in the high priest’s private quarters and could only hand over suspects to the Romans.

It was this small army that Saul joined. It was the only entity with religious connotations he was accepted in. He probably told himself that the people he was acting against were religious heretics, not political dissidents. Still, it was the best he could do, and it was linked to the high priest. They acted as his personal army, bodyguards and occasional assassins where the need arose.

It was probably while working within this army that he came into contact with the Nazirites. This was one of many messianic movements, each with their own ideas and their own messiah. Being Pharisees at least by viewpoint, they believed in the resurrection of the dead – another thing the Sadducees denied – and that the messiah would have to be a Nazirite, having performed the Nazirite vow.

The Nazirites, or Nazarenes, looked to a Biblical figure as the model for their messiah. They followed a story about a woman who did not believe she could be pregnant, who was visited by an angel who told her that she was pregnant and would bear a son, who would be consecrated to God from before birth, who would become a leader of the people and who would be their saviour. The angel later appeared to her husband to confirm this story. This saviour was indeed born and became a leader, before he was betrayed by one whom he loved, yet with his death he saved his people.

The man’s name was Samson. The new Nazarene movement was expecting a similar miracle of some kind. They firmly believed in a messiah, and some years back one particular member seemed to be the one. Many of them still believed he was the one, despite the fact that he had been captured and executed by the Romans. After all hadn’t Samson saved his people with his own death? That, together with the Pharisee belief in resurrection, meant they would not yet lose hope that Jesus might have been the promised saviour.

Saul would some familiarise himself with their beliefs as he tried to uncover their identities and bring them to the high priest’s court. Yet here were a few things that struck a chord. This man was the son of God. This was a title derived from Psalms 2, in which David metaphorically becomes God’s son, and God becomes to him as a father. The title “son of God” had been used in reference to kings of David’s lineage ever since. But Saul was familiar with another kind of son of god. The kind that was produced when the old Greek deities mated with human girls and women. Real, physical sons of the gods like Hercules.

In secret, Saul started learning more about this group – from the members themselves. He saw in them a devotion and fanaticism that isn’t found in your regular churchgoer. They had new ideas, fantastic ideas and were open to new ones. In such a group, he could get the kind of acceptance that the proud and snobbish scholars would never give him. Little by little, Saul realised that this group was the kind of group he wanted to join.

There was one problem. They were the enemy, and he was a member of a group aligned to the Roman empire. One does not hand one’s resignation to Rome and join the enemy ranks. There was one hope – leave Rome.

There was one advantage to being where he was – Damascus was at the time not under Roman rule, and indeed many political enemies of Rome had taken the road to Damascus rather than face Roman justice.

His Nazarene contacts would have been cautious about admitting a member of their arch-enemy’s thugs among their ranks, but he seemed genuine, so arrangements were made. They would not give him names or addresses, but if he could get himself outside the gates of Damascus, there he would be met by people who would explain the rest of the plan.

The idea was well thought out. Saul told his superiors that he was had found out about some anti-Roman agitators in Damascus and he wanted to carry out an assassination. They agreed – they couldn’t just march in with their soldiers but if one Jew assassinates another Jew, their hands would be clean.

Saul rode to Damascus with one or two companions, and there – as agreed – he met his guides. They advised him to change his name and adopt a disguise, and gave him his address. Thus, it was Saul, soldier of the high priest and servant of Rome, who arrived before the gates of Damascus, but it was Paul, a blind beggar, who knocked on the door of his host.

Paul’s host, Ananias, let his house be used as an interim headquarters for the group. Members who were on the run from the high priest or the Romans could stay there for a few days until they found accommodation, and the group could have meetings there. This was to be Paul’s undoing. His work in the high priest’s army was what had sent some of them into exile in the first place, and it was only a matter of time before one of them recognised him and Paul’s sojourn in Damascus was over. Making a hasty exit, he headed back to Jerusalem under cover of darkness and hid with the Nazarenes while they debated what to do with him. He could not stay in Damascus and in Jerusalem he’d be arrested as a deserter. Frankly, Paul was more of a liability than an asset to their cause. It was Paul himself who came up with a solution. He could take their message to the Jews living outside Judea as well as gentiles who were sympathetic to them. They could thus gather more support, collect more money and Paul would be too far away to embarrass them if caught – or so they thought. They happily agreed to this, and Paul set off on his personal mission – he had achieved his ambition to become an important personality within his chosen faith. He was, as he described himself, an apostle to the gentiles.

And so off he went. His knowledge of many different belief systems stood him in good stead. He could speak a language that they understood – of gods who mate with humans and produce offspring, of gods who die to bring salvation and rebirth, of sacrifices of blood. He knew that some topics were unpopular – very few adult men would look fondly on the idea of circumcision, so that went out the window. Pork and other foods forbidden to Jews were very popular, so Paul started to take decisions about these and other matters. The rules, he decided, had been changed. No longer were people bound by these rules in the new movement. Jesus had put an end to that – his death had brought about a new covenant.

It would have taken time for this news to reach the group in Jerusalem. On the one hand, communication was slow. Even for an emperor it took weeks to get a message to the far flung corners of the empire. Other people would have to wait for someone who was travelling in the right direction, ensure that it is someone that you can trust with potentially compromising letters, and who were prepared to take the risk of being found carrying them, and then they would take a week or more to get there. The reply would take a similarly difficult route back. The other reason was simple: the messianic movements were concerned primarily with the political rule of Judea, and Jerusalem in particular. The Greek and Roman regions simply did not concern them much, except maybe for fund-raising. It was only when they started receiving letters of complaint that they realised that Paul was running amok in their name. Twice they recalled him to Jerusalem. The first time, Paul managed to convince them that he was only preaching to gentiles that they did not have to be circumcised or give up their favourite foods. Following some debate, they allowed this to continue, unaware that Paul was not too careful about distinguishing Jews and non-Jews when preaching. The second time round things were more serious. Paul was on his way back to Jerusalem and must have felt that things were not so good this time. In his hand was a bag of money collected from the various synagogues and communities as contributions to the Nazarenes. This was a good time to purchase an insurance policy, in the form of a Roman citizenship. In those days, a Roman citizenship provided many practical advantages, and the Romans knew a good business opportunity when they saw it – so they created a system whereby the richest people in their empire could buy those advantages, thus making a good income while protecting the most valuable people within their empire.

Paul arrived in Jerusalem and there faced the council of the Nazarenes. They knew now that he was teaching Jews and non-Jews alike, that the laws of the Jewish scriptures no longer applied. The Torah was obsolete, replaced by Paul’s own teachings. Paul had written that he himself was no longer bound by the laws. This went completely contrary to the Nazarenes’ views – they were Jews through and through, and considered the laws as still binding. Nobody – not the messiah nor the priests nor anyone else could declare them void.

They decided that Paul would be made to go to the temple. There, in full view of the public, he had to participate in a particular ritual that would show all the witnesses that he was an observing Jew as well as supporting the Nazirite vows, as he accompanied members who were completing their own vows. If he had been teaching against this, this would embarrass him and show contriteness. If he hadn’t, it might serve to set at rest the minds of those who were angered by what they saw as the Nazarenes’ representative undermining Judaism.

Paul set off with his companions towards the Temple. Luckily, enough years had passed that he did not have to worry about the high priest. He was followed by those whom he had angered with his teachings, eager to see him humiliated. As the crowd gathered and started to get rowdy, the local Roman guards turned up to keep the situation under control. Recognising an opportunity and possible fearing for his safety, Paul finally took out his secret weapon.

Paul was a Roman citizen! The Nazarenes would have been horrified. They were an organisation dedicated to bringing down the Roman empire – or at least expelling it from their homeland – and they had among them an actual Roman citizen! It was like a modern-day synagogue discovering that their cantor was a secret Nazi. The breach was now beyond irreparable.

Paul took advantage of his Roman citizenship to make his getaway. He didn’t want to hang about in Jerusalem until someone remembered Saul the soldier. Besides, his frequent travels and letter writing had built up a large if widespread community who now looked to him as their teacher and leader. He didn’t need the Nazarenes any more. He was the top dog now.

Paul would continue his travels, establishing the new beliefs and gathering more followers. The Nazarenes continued to ignore everything that was happening outside Judea. The followers of Paul – even after Paul’s own death – started gathering the stories that surrounded Jesus’ life, compiling them into chronological accounts and frequently filling in the blanks, especially wherever they found what they considered to be a messianic prophecy. Not only that but any hint that Jesus was against Rome was expunged. For the new faith to spread within the Roman empire, the Romans had to be the good guys. The Jews on the other hand had already dismissed Jesus as a candidate for messiah and were positively appalled at the idea that he was God himself. So, let them take the blame. Thus Jesus was transformed from a devoted Jew who saw himself as the means for Judea to gain its independence from Rome, to a Greco-Roman style god whose death would save the world, and in whose death the Romans were only unwitting patsies. In time, Jerusalem would face numerous revolts, organised by other would-be messiahs, ending in the destruction of Jerusalem. The Nazarenes themselves fled into Egypt and disappeared. Paul’s new movement, now known as Christianity, kept its head low and flourished, until finally the emperor Constantine declared it the official religion of Rome, and his successor Theodosius made it mandatory. Why wouldn’t they? It preached to slaves that they should obey their masters, and wives to be submissive to their husbands. That suited the Romans just fine.

Of course, you can’t just order someone to believe in a new god and they all happily obey. They can’t openly refuse – not if they want to retain all their anatomy anyway. So, if they were worshipping a goddess, they simply said she was Mary, mother of god. If they were participating in the joyful festivities of Saturnalia in December, they change that to Christ-mas instead, retaining everything but the name. And if they were participating in the blood-and-flesh celebrations of Mithras, they switched that to a Christian setting. Over generations, the lines became blurred even for the participants even as the assimilation of traditions continued over centuries and millennia. The god of love became Saint Valentine. The winter spirits that rewarded and punished were merged into one Santa Claus, who gives presents or turns them into coal. The evil deities found in Zoroastrianism and many other religions were linked with the angel Satan, who had an unpleasant task in Judaism but still was acting for God. Now he was his arch-nemesis.

Years after the Nazarenes disappeared into Egypt, a group reappeared saying they were their descendants and accusing Paul of manipulation and corrupting the message of Jesus. By this time however the Christians reigned supreme, and did not take kindly at all to similar accusations. The dominant group of Christianity had already suppressed all the others they had branded as heretics, and the newly emerged Nazarenes, or Ebionites as they were derisively called, were wiped out, leaving only Saul’s Christians, who lived happily ever after.

Losing religion or gaining psychological freedom?

The letter below was sent to The Times but was edited prior to publishing. Here is the unedited version:

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Oh dear, I feel a bit guilty writing this letter - a bit like telling a child that Father Christmas is not real. Still, Jacqueline Calleja's letter in The Times of 25 July merits some corrections.

The most glaring and often-repeated falsehood is that Europe owes its roots and identity to Christianity. Europe has existed since long before Christianity started, and owes its identity mainly to the presence of the Mediterranean separating it from North Africa, which affected the spread of the Greek and Roman influences, and formed a barrier to a greater mixing of cultural influences. Although Christianity has been a major influence in Europe for over 1500 years, that influence has not been too positive. Consider that, 200 years before the birth of Jesus, in Greece, Erastothenes had accurately calculated the diameter of the earth, the angle of tilt of its axis, and invented the leap day after calculating the exact length of a year. By comparison in 1600 the Catholic church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for saying there were other worlds besides our own, and in 1633 sentenced Galileo Galilei to house arrest for life, for the heresy of claiming that the earth orbits the sun. It was only in 1992 that the church finally conceded that Galileo had been right all along. From the achievements of the Greek and Roman worlds, Europe was dragged into the dark ages. We went through the crusades and the inquisitions thanks to the church. Did you know that the Holy Inquisition remained until 1908? After that it had its name changed - it is now called the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. It was headed by a certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger until he got a big promotion.

Many might object that these acts are all in the past, and the church of today is totally different. Then again, when one hears a Cardinal of the church telling people in Africa not to use condoms, when 1 in 5 people of the region are HIV positive, one has to wonder - has it really changed? He told them that condoms have small holes through which the AIDS virus can pass. How many lives were lost thanks to Cardinal Trujillo's words? Some priests in Africa were even telling their congregations that condoms are laced with the AIDS virus. Throughout all this the Vatican remained silent.

I am not at all surprised at Ms. Calleja's statement that "the Church is witnessing a wondrous growth" in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. In both of these regions there is severe poverty, and a lack of educational facilities, medical facilities and so on. The inhabitants are faced with a terrible choice - adopt Christianity and get education for their kids and food and medical care for the whole family, or stay with your own religion and starve. The objective of missionaries is to use material items like food as the carrot with which to bring in converts. Of course, in their eyes the latter is the greater benefit, but it's good to keep in mind the reason why Christianity is growing so much in these regions. I'm not saying that the missionaries there actually refuse to provide material needs to non-Christians, but if you place your kids in a school run by Christians every day, getting a mix of academic tuition and religious indoctrination, they will be converted. Of course there are also some cases when they do refuse, such as in the tsunami-struck village of Samanthapettai, where a group of nuns insisted that the starving locals convert to Christianity before getting food and water - and when these devout Hindus refused to convert, packed up and left. Obviously this was an unusual and extreme case, but I wonder how many Christians are aware of how their contributions are used when they give generously to such causes.

It is not surprising that Christianity is in decline in the better-educated regions of the world. There was a time when gods were used as an explanation for phenomena that we could not otherwise explain. We had gods of thunder and lightning, of storms, volcanoes, of the sun and so on. We are a curious species, always seeking to understand everything around us - a trait that fuelled our intellectual progress. As science grew and started bringing us better and more accurate answers, these ancient deities were discarded, their carcases littering the road to knowledge. Eventually, deities started needing more explanations than they provide. We don't need them to provide answers, we don't need them to provide food or resources, the moral leadership of their self-appointed ministers has been questionable at best. So what's left to justify belief? A fear of retribution perhaps? It appears that even that story is not convincing many any more.

25% against DISCUSSION on divorce?

At the time of writing, almost a quarter of all respondents to an online poll on The Times voted no to the question "Do you feel the time has come for Malta to discuss the introduction of divorce?". Holy beeep! 24.5% don't want it discussed! Makes you wonder whether the question should have been "Do you feel the time has come to start thinking about the concept of entertaining the possibility of eventually starting to consider a discussion about divorce".

Meanwhile, the bishop of Gozo chimed in, adding his view that Christians should not be held back from expressing their views about "a monogamous and indissoluble marriage". Here's a thought Bish, why not find out what those Christians think rather than telling them what to say? Most of us know of a few cases where that indissoluble marriage turned out to be not so indissoluble after all.

Divorce is one of the main issues in which the church keeps repeating its mantras, about how it will undermine society, weaken the family and so on. Of course one has to wonder just how healthy our divorce-free society is. "Oh yeah my mom is married... but not to the man she's with".

Divorce does not break up families, nor does it dissolve marriages. It is the recognition that a marriage has already ceased to exist. It's not happily married couples who get divorced. It's the couple who are already living apart, often with new partners, and whose love for one another has either been quenched, or sometimes turned into bitterness. To call a couple in such a situation "married" is absurd.

In fact it is not divorce that renders marriage meaningless, it is the absence of divorce. It's better, and more meaningful, to accept and admit that a marriage has failed, than either to pretend that it's still valid, or (in the case of annulment) to pretend that it never happened. These anomalies are based on the flawed assumption that marriage is forever. Certainly, couples getting married should - and do - try to make it work forever, but good intentions are not always enough. Sometimes they break apart despite the good intentions on both sides, and sometimes the good intentions become one-sided with time. This is certainly an unfortunate situation, and it's a good thing for society to try to examine the causes and do what it can to prevent couples from getting to this stage. Eventually however, some will still get to a point when there is no way to stay together. When the only thing left of a marriage is a piece of paper in the public registry, it's time to call a spade a spade and accept that the marriage is over.

Divorce needs to be introduced, and care needs to be taken not to repeat the mistakes of other places. Nobody is calling for a Hollywood-style situation where you can get married in the morning and divorced in the afternoon. Neither should we go for the situation in which a divorce requires one of the couple to sue the other for wrongdoing, which inevitably leads all divorces to become bitter legal battles with hatred on both sides. Hence the need for a discussion and a well planned introduction.

Divorce has been available in most countries around the world, and statistics exist to show where the rate is highest. Not surprisingly, the US tops that list. Italy in the meantime remains closer to the bottom - and personally I think that Maltese society and personalities are much closer to Italian than Las Vegas.

Recipe for Success

The announcement by the Ministry responsible for IT that it is actively seeking open-source solutions came as a surprise, albeit a very welcome one. It signals a shift from our government being bound to and dependent almost exclusively on one supplier, to a more open IT scene, and one which is based on some very healthy practices of openness and competition. It's no secret that the Government's policies in IT will propagate across the private sector, as well as MCAST and the University.

Open source products have already been used by the government, both internally by Government IT workers, as well as in projects delivered by third-party suppliers. Unfortunately this was not a policy, but rather something that just happened, and even kept somewhat under wraps. Its use is much more comprehensive – and open – in the private sector.

Open source software has long since shed its initial image of hobbyist products. Now, industry heavyweights like Oracle, IBM and Sun have put their weight behind open source. Even Microsoft, often seen as the arch-enemy of open source, changed tack and has already released a variety of products under an open source license. Open source software is used by banks, hospitals, stock exchanges, military, and is even happily running up in the International Space Station.

A great analogy for software production is cooking. The source code for a software product is its recipe. The product itself is the finished cake. With "normal", closed-source software you get the finished cake. It tastes great, and presumably it's well-made.

Open source delivers each cake together with its recipe and a lifetime supply of all the ingredients and equipment needed to make it yourself. Not only can you have your cake and eat it, but you can alter it too. Maybe you want to make a low-fat version, or with no peanuts. You can. Cuisine would be boring indeed if everyone who had created a recipe could prohibit anyone from creating any variations of it.

This openness delivers a long list of advantages. Cost is one of them. Open source software leaves the user free to negotiate the best terms with a supplier. One can simply download or share that software (legally) without paying a cent – which is a perfectly good option for a tech-savvy kid who prefers to learn by doing. On the other hand a company or government agency will want the peace of mind of having a formal support contract in place. Even here, open source means that the entity in question can choose between different suppliers, negotiating the terms that suit it best. The government could negotiate a lower rate based on the fact that it has its own IT experts in MITTS who can handle most internal support. This kind of negotiation is only possible because the government has more than one supplier to choose from.

In education, open source software is particularly attractive. A training facility can choose the software it wants, and then supply each student with a free, legal copy of all the software being used in the classes. A beginners' course in the use of office software could supply each student with a free copy of OpenOffice.org. If on the other hand they conduct all their training using Microsoft Office, apart from the school's own costs, for a student to buy Microsoft Office (home & student edition) costs close to €100 each, going up to almost €450 for the full edition. The costs for IT students can be much higher, and if the trainee is not a full-time student, academic prices generally do not apply.

Not only can IT students be given a CD containing all the software they will use, they can actually look under the hood of that software, learning from the experience of thousands of highly skilled IT professionals worldwide, looking into real-world projects with teams of anything from a few to hundreds of developers.

One of the serious concerns about Maltese IT courses is that many of them are almost exclusively based on Microsoft technologies. When job offers start coming out of SmartCity, not all of them will be seeking Microsoft skills. Most will want students with diverse skills. The student who has hands-on experience in Linux as well as Windows, mySql as well as SQL Server, PHP and Java as well as .NET will be much better placed than being one of the thousands who all know Windows, SQL Server and .NET, and only those. Open source allows students to gain as much experience and knowledge as their talents allow, rather than being held back by cost.

An extremely important aspect of open source is that it allows that software to be modified legally and without needing anyone's authorisation. While most users will not particularly care about changing the source code themselves, to an entity like the government, that freedom is very important. The government may well be Malta's biggest economic entity, but on a global scale it's a small fish. If the Maltese government's needs run counter to the interests of a major supplier, it's unlikely that the supplier will go against their own interests. With open source, the government retains a level of independence from the supplier. It could continue using a product that the supplier does not consider sufficiently profitable. It can pool its resources with other countries to maintain a product that it needs, or could outsource support for an important product to the private sector.

Open source software frequently coexists quite happily with commercial software, and indeed there are still many areas where the best products available are not the open-source ones. This is why another vital policy for the government is to insist on open standards. These are computer standards that allow different products to exchange data and work together in a heterogeneous environment. The reason you can send email using Thunderbird and receive it in Outlook Express or Google Mail is that there is a set of open standard for emails. Nowadays there is also ODF as a standard for the exchange of word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Web Services allow web applications written on different platforms to be work together and share data easily. The ZIP file has become a ubiquitous standard for exchanging compressed archives. MP3 files allow music to be used on devices as diverse as computers, portable players and car stereos. It is important that the government insists on such open, free standards for the storage, retrieval and exchange of its data.

This new announcement could be the beginning of an important new phase in the Maltese IT scene and augurs well for the future.

Your private life on your ID card

The news that the new ID cards will contain sensitive personal medical information is a very nasty prospect. Why on earth should I have such private and sensitive data on a card that has to be produced in a variety of situations and can easily be lost? Why should the bank have access to my health information? If I go to see an eye doctor, why should he have my banking details?

Keep in mind that every encryption technology has limitations, but these cards will be there for a long time and cannot be replaced overnight. All it takes is for a simple secret code to be leaked or stolen, and all of a sudden your local video rental store can know your bank accounts, your visits to the GP or sexual health clinic, your card transactions and who knows what else. And once the ID cards are used in every general practitioner's clinic, in all hospitals, in all bank branches and so on, it becomes only a matter of time before one of the keys is secretly stolen. You won't know it happened. Your card will be read like it is normally read, but it gives up far more information than you'd be willing to divulge if you knew about it.

I would expect that the powers that be have plans for some good security in place, but in the report I linked there are no mentions of what these might be, or whether people will even have the right to NOT have their medical information on the card. Does this mean, for instance, that our constitutional right to vote will become conditional on having our medical information on the ID card?

The ID card is a document that we are legally obliged to posses. It should therefore have nothing on it beyond the absolute minimum of information required to identify the individual - which is what the ID card is for anyway.

I think it's high time that we started being more aware and concerned about the importance of defending our privacy. In a world where a 500Gb hard disk costs less than €100, you could store all the personal details of every person in Malta for a few cents each. There are companies to whom this would be a useful asset - they might want to market their new herbal remedies to anyone who visited a dermatological clinic in the past year, or invite people with a low bank balance to take out a no-questions-asked loan and mortgage from their online bank. They are ready to pay good money to posses a slice of the private life of everyone in the country. The new ID cards could be exactly what they're looking for.

We need to defend our privacy if we want to remain in control of who to trust with our personal details.

The Cinema Experience

I remember that when I was a young boy, going to the cinema was an exhilarating experience. TV in those days was a black-and-white affair with one Maltese station and a handful of Italian ones. Video recorders had still not made their début. Going to the cinema was a family treat. We could see feature films in full colour and in much better clarity than the grainy TV we had at home.

Fast forward to the present day and the home TV situation has improved dramatically. We've got stereo colour TVs at an entry level, and if you really like your home entertainment you can get flat TVs with crisp pictures, surround sound systems and even home projectors so you can enjoy the images in a large format. DVDs and a large number of video rental stores provide your choice of movie, at a time of your convenience, with all the comforts of your home. Oh, and microwave popcorn of course.

Yet compared to all these impressive changes that have taken place in the home entertainment field, cinemas have barely moved ahead for all these years. Probably the biggest improvements locally have been the cleanliness of the venue and banning smoking indoors. That's all? In over 30 years? Cinema owners as well as the production companies are complaining about the constantly dropping sales from cinemas, blaming it on everything and everyone but themselves. When was the last bit of really impressive innovation taking place in a cinema? Where has the cinema experience gone? Where are the queues of people standing in actual awe of what they are about to experience?

Going to a cinema, especially for a family, is an expensive undertaking. First one has to travel to the cinema and hopefully park somewhere reasonably near to the theatre. Then, apart from the cost of the tickets themselves, one has to buy drinks and snacks from the exorbitantly-priced "bar" - which only sells salty, thirst-provoking snacks or sweets. Once inside, one often has to deal with the rest of the audience, and there are few things as annoying as having someone running a continuous commentary on the film to a companion just behind your right ear. Except perhaps trying to catch the actors' words through the rustling crisp packets, ringing mobile phones, and people getting up to take a leak or coming in after the movie has started. Why would anyone want to pay through the nose for that?

If the cinema is to remain a profitable business, new ways need to be found to once again make the cinema experience something to look forward to. There have been a few attempts to do this, like 3D films, but these tend to be relatively short, documentary-style films. When will we be able to see something like the Lord of the Rings in full 3D with shaking ground, or projections on the front, side and above to fully immerse oneself in the experience? Or maybe some new-fangled environmental cinema where you can actually feel the heat of the desert sun or the cold of the Antarctic tundra. Now that would be something to look forward to. If cinemas do not try to recapture the experience that they lost, they are a dying breed.