Christopher Hitchens has cancer. The sad fact is that the probability of his survival for more than five years is in the region of five percent, assuming reports are correct. Many Christians have as a result pulled out and dusted off Pascal's Wager or asked if Atheism will sustain him. Well no. Not believing in a god won't help him. Either will not believing in unicorns or fairies.

Ten years ago I was promoting a mechanism of transmitting standard invoices. I had realized that having a standard for invoices would enable more efficient business transactions much like SMTP has enabled global communication. Despite there being various attempts at such standards we have not seen widespread adoption in the banking and supplier community. The failure of standardization is exemplified in the following video which ironically shows how open source can mitigate the issue through products like Mule.

Today I became aware of a email by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) that claimed "... the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Create Commons have never lobbied for the elimination of copyright. Not even Richard Stallman believes there is no place for copyright. These organisations do however believe there should be a balance, and that content creators should have the right to license as they choose.

At one point I taught Java to a class of adults who had no experience with computer programming. It was a disaster. While Java may be a powerful and popular language it is most certainly not a good language for teaching. So what language should be used?