The church (Galileo's main sponsor) was surely wrong to place Galileo under house arrest, but it's a myth that Galileo was tortured, and his treatment (apart from house arrest) was never vile - in fact he was permitted to continue to publish while under house arrest.

Galileo was charged with teaching heliocentrism when he had promised not to do so. He didn't help himself by deliberating insulting the pope, his sponsor, and by claiming in court that his Dialogue on the Two World Systems did not advocate heliocentrism when it clearly did.

Prostitution is rarely a victimless crime.

I'm not convinced that a 17 year old who goes around shooting & robbing people doesn't deserve a tough sentence. But a 17 year old certainly isn't an adult either. I don't know what the solution is. Have you any better suggestions based on your experience?

But anyway congratulations on making something of yourself after such a poor start, and good luck for the future.

Or they just want people who love what they do.

You've got to be kidding. You read the book & you don't know what Fermat's last theorem is?? How is that possible?

Your hosting company must offer 24x 7 telephone support. If they do not, go elsewhere.

They must offer full access via SSH. Obviously PHP, MySQL, unlimited email accounts and as much bandwith as possible is also required.

I'd also recommend you register your domain names with a registrar unrelated to your hosting provider, so you can quickly and easily swap hosts.

I use godaddy for domain names, and liquidweb for hosting. Both are large enough not to disappear overnight, and are very responsive to queries.

Which is why most folks don't own Ferraris, and most Ferrari owners have some pretty questionable behaviour in their past. You don't get that kind of money without doing something pretty slimey for a living, like being a bank executive or otherwise participating in the amoral circus that is the American financial system.

Or you could be a successful athlete, business owner, doctor, dentist, .... and not all bankers are immoral y'know.

Sounds like envy to me. In my experience of knowing quite a few rich people, they are no different to anyone else in their morals. Perhaps you're thinking of Russian oligarchs or the mafia.

You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future.

And furthermore, you cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in one tiny part of the universe is any indication that it will hold anywhere else in the 99.999999999% (and more) of the remainder of the universe.

What, with a user id > 500,000? Where were you in the 1990's? :)

The reason why 110V is safer is that V = IR. Given the resistance of the human body as a constant, then with half the voltage, you receive half the current through your body. It is the current that kills you rather than the voltage. Of course, if you dramatically lower your resistance by being dripping wet, it probably won't matter if you have 110V or 220V.

I don't know about glory, but for me IT for the last 18 years has involved getting paid lots of money for stuff I'd mostly do for free if I could. Sure, there's been the odd banal job or two, but I've tended to move on from those quite quickly - even if some of them were very well paid.

I find it hard to imagine what else I'd do.

Yes, it's popular, and yes, you must be out of the loop.

Post any technical question and you'll normally get a number of very useful replies within 24 hours.

Trying to ram one's morality down the throats of others is generally regarded as poor form.

Ramming your morality down people's throats is a little extreme, but if you have a personal conviction that something in society is wrong, why shouldn't you do your best to spread that conviction around?

Was William Wilberforce wrong to strongly oppose slavery in the British Empire, when most people thought he was a loony and virtually everyone in the empire thought slavery was fine?

So how did you get a userid less than 1,000,000 anyway?

I shudder to think that even now there may be slashdot users who were born after I started reading it ...

Just as a matter of interest, Adam Laurie is brother to Ben Laurie, one of the main OpenSSL developers (and now working for Google). If he's anything like Ben (who I worked with years ago), he's a very smart guy indeed. He certainly knows what he is doing re security.