Slashdot Mirror

So far, the Rails Girls have groups in cities ranging from Warsaw to Wellington, with U.S. gatherings in Washington D.C., Charlotte NC, San Francisco CA, and... let's make it easy: Here's a map. OMG! They're everywhere! Actually, mostly Europe, being as they started in Finland, same as the Leningrad Cowboys and a popular computer operating system. But they're spreading like mad. Would you believe the reason one of the two founders originally got interested in Ruby on Rails was because she wanted to make a fan page for American politician Al Gore? Our interviewee, Magda (from Rails Girls Warsaw), swears this is true. She also tells us about their upcoming Washington D.C. workshop on June 13th, 2013, in conjunction with the June 14-15 RubyNation event. Sounds like fun, doesn't it. Maybe you need more of this kind of fun where you live, eh? If there isn't a Rails Girls group near you, maybe you should start one and help more women and girls get into programming. This is the Rails Girls' goal. Any particular ages? Not really. And their workshops are all free of charge: "You just need to be excited!"

joeflies writes "In a previous Slashdot article, hackers worked to preserve content for the Steubenville rape case. The two football players charged received juvenile detention sentences of one and two years. One of the hackers, on the other hand, faces 10 years in prison."

angry tapir writes "I recently had a chance to interview Richard Bartle — the creator of MUD, considered the grandfather of modern massively multiplayer online games. MUD had a text-based interface, but despite that, its design was hugely influential on modern MMOs."

aarondubrow writes "For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software, with mixed results. Enabled by supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas researchers are using new methods to more accurately represent language so computers can interpret it. Recently, they were awarded a grant from DARPA to combine distributional representation of word meanings with Markov logic networks to better capture the human understanding of language."

An anonymous reader writes "In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir."

An anonymous reader writes "In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir."

Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a case going back and forth in U.S. courts right now about whether a defendant can be ordered to decrypt his own hard drives when they may incriminate him. "A Wisconsin defendant in a criminal child-pornography case recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid giving the FBI the password to decrypt his hard drive. At the risk of alienating fellow civil-libertarians, I admit I've never seen the particular value of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. So I pose this logical puzzle: come up with a specific, precisely defined scenario, where the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Wisconsin computer scientist Jeffrey Feldman was arrested on child pornography charges and ordered to give his hard drive decryption password to the FBI. He refused, claiming a Fifth Amendment right to refuse to hand over his password. A magistrate agreed with Feldman, then later changed his mind, but then on June 4th a judge blocked the order demanding that Feldman decrypt the hard drive.

So I will give up some civil libertarian cred and admit that, compared to, say, the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment, I've never seen what's so great about the Fifth Amendment "right against self-incrimination" -- not just as it applies to computer passwords, but in general. (Hereinafter I'm just going to refer to the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent as the "Fifth Amendment", even though there are other rights encapsulated in the Fifth Amendment, such as the right against double jeopardy.) I'm not debating the legal technicalities of the judges' decisions, since they take the "right against self-incrimination" as a given; I'm questioning the value of that "right" in itself.

Before you read any further, this is a pseudo-contest in which I'm soliciting answers in the form of a specific, precisely defined scenario in which you think that the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference (i.e. that the outcome in a world with the Fifth Amendment, is better than the outcome in a world without the Fifth Amendment, even if you hold all other assumptions constant). If you disagree with everything I say, then the way to show that is to post a scenario that follows all the rules of the contest.

Now, obviously, I am not saying that the police ought to be able to beat information out of you. (The right not to be tortured by the police exists separately from the right to remain silent -- more on that later.) But the "right against self-incrimination" says two things that never made sense to me. The first is that you can refuse to answer a point-blank question asking whether you committed a crime, even if the question elicits no other information that ought to remain private. The second is that if you refuse to answer, a court cannot even consider that as a factor in determining the likelihood of guilt. The first seems dubious as a moral principle; the second actually departs from reality, for no good reason that I can see.

Take first the "right" to refuse to answer. Now, I agree that if the government asks you, say, "What books are you reading these days?", the correct answer is "None of your damn business." Nobody else has the right to know what's on your reading list. However, if a murder is committed, pretty much everyone agrees that it is the state's legitimate business (that is, everyone's business) whether you committed the murder or not. What's the philosophical argument that you shouldn't have to answer "Yes" or "No" if the police ask if you committed the murder?

Compare that to the collateral damage caused by, for example, a search warrant. If you accept that the police have a "right" to know whether your house contains a bloody knife used in a recent murder, then a search could turn up the knife, but there's always the risk that a search of an innocent person's house would penalize them by exposing their private information and belongings. By contrast, the direct question "Did you do it?" is like a "search" that targets only the evidence that is relevant to the case, and nothing else. A physical analogy might be the police scanning a neighborhood with a Geiger counter that detects only illegal weapons-grade plutonium; I'd be kind of OK with that. (Actually, being asked a question is even less invasive, since you don't have the option of refusing the search or the Geiger counter, but you have the option of refusing to answer a question and facing the consequences.)

Now, you shouldn't have to answer questions that are none of anyone else's business; if your alibi for the night of the murder is that you were at a somewhere you're embarrassed to mention, you should be allowed to say, "I didn't commit the murder, but I would prefer not to tell you where I was." But Fifth Amendment absolutists would say that you don't even have to answer the question of whether you committed the murder at all. That, to me, seems absurd. Isn't society entitled to know whether you committed the murder or not?

Perhaps people's discomfort with this reasoning stems from a feeling that the government has no right to interfere with your life at all, unless you've been convicted of a crime. But, rightly or wrongly, the police are empowered to make arrests, search people's houses with a warrant, chase after people feeling the scene of a crime, and take other actions even against people who haven't been convicted of anything. Law enforcement wouldn't be able to function at all without most of these powers, and while those powers can be and have been grossly abused, the solution is to limit those powers, not abolish them entirely. (That might be an argument for giving people the right to remain silent when questioned or arrested by the police, but still empowering judges to issue warrants requiring a defendant to answer a question, even if the answer could be "self-incriminating".) Compared to the possibility of getting arrested or having your house searched, the possibility of simply being required to have the exchange -- "You were walking away from the apartment after the murder, did you do it?" "No" -- seems like a pretty minor inconvenience. (Yes, if the police keep badgering and harassing me with the same questions, or if courts refuse to believe me and try to railroad me anyway, then that's a problem, but it's a separate problem -- we'll get to that in a second.)

Moving on to the second implication, which is that courts cannot weigh your silence in determining the likelihood of your guilt. This goes against the common sense that you would use in your everyday life. If you had two roommates, you knew one of them stole your laptop, you asked both where they were at the time, and one of them immediately told you where they were (giving a story that their friends could corroborate), and other refused even to answer "Yes" or "No" to the question of whether they stole it, what would you think? I'm not saying that a person's silence should ever be considered proof of guilt, but the likelihood of guilt is a probability question, which can be assessed using multiple factors, each of which individually might not be enough to prove guilt by itself. Is the second roommate's silence relevant to your estimation of their guilt? Of course it is. If you would use that factor in your own reasoning, why shouldn't a court? (And in fact, your silence can be considered relevant in a civil lawsuit, just not in a criminal case.)

Now, there are times when the government's evidentiary standards should deviate from common sense. For example, if you find evidence of an affair by snooping in your spouse's email, you may feel guilty about snooping, but you're certainly not going to forget what you found, just because the "evidence" was obtained improperly. The state, on the other hand, is mandated to "forget" any evidence that's obtained in violation of a defendant's rights (for example, if the police break in and search a residence without a warrant) -- that evidence cannot be used in a trial. However, in that case the bar on improperly obtained evidence serves a clear purpose -- it removes any incentive for the police to obtain evidence by breaking and entering. There's no obvious similar reason why a person's refusal to answer a question shouldn't be considered relevant to the likelihood of their guilt.

For these two reasons, I can't think of a precisely defined scenario in which the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference, i.e. the outcome in the case where the Fifth Amendment does exist, is better than the outcome in a hypothetical world where the Fifth Amendment does not exist, if you hold all other assumptions constant.

My own high school civics teacher gave the example of an overzealous prosecutor determined to convict an innocent defendant of murder, as an example of the importance of the Fifth Amendment. I asked why, even without Fifth Amendment rights, the defendant couldn't just say that they were innocent. "Aha!" said the teacher, mimicking the evil tone of a corrupt prosecutor, "We know you're lying, now we'll convict you of murder and for lying to the court!"

This was the first of many "scenarios" that I've heard supposedly illustrating the benefits of the Fifth Amendment, that didn't hold up under scrutiny. For the government to convict you of lying about not committing the murder, they would also have to convict you of the murder, and if they can convict you of murder, then you're already screwed anyway, regardless of whether they also convict you of lying about being innocent. Now, obviously we should stop corrupt prosecutors from being able to railroad people, but that's a separate problem. The right to remain silent doesn't do you much good if the government is going to forge enough "evidence" (or ignore the lack of evidence) to convict you of murder anyway.

So what I'm looking for (email me below, and also post in comments) is a precisely defined scenario that meets all of the following criteria:

1. The outcome in the world where we do have the Fifth Amendment, is clearly different from the outcome in a hypothetical world where the Fifth Amendment does not exist, even while holding all other assumptions constant. (So the "corrupt overzealous prosecutor" scenario fails that test, because if you assume the government can convict an innocent person of murder without regard for facts or evidence, they can do that even if you refuse to testify.)

2. The outcome in the "Fifth Amendment" world is better than the outcome in the "no Fifth Amendment" world. We can be very permissive about what is considered "better", but there are some limits -- one person, for example, gave me an example of a guilty person who used the Fifth Amendment to avoid giving testimony that might contradict evidence that is discovered later. I pointed out that giving a guilty person a chance to avoid tripping himself up was hardly a good thing, to which he replied, "Oh... right."

3. The "benefit" can't be something that benefits all suspects equally, whether they're innocent, guilty of violating a just law, or guilty of violating an unjust law. Several people have brought up to me the example of the McCarthy hearings, when those being questioned cited the Fifth Amendment as the basis for refusing to answer red-hunt questions.

   Now, most people today remember the McCarthy hearings as an example of grotesque government overreach, and anything that hampers enforcement of an unjust law would be viewed positively in that light. The problem with this defense of the Fifth Amendment is that if it hampers all law enforcement efforts equally, then you might as well just roll a dice every time a suspect is arrested, and let them go if it comes up a 6. Clearly, this is a "limit on government power", which would benefit suspects who are innocent, as well as benefiting people who are guilty of violating an unjust law (however you define that). But since it would "help" all other criminal defendants, too, most people would consider it a silly idea. A defense of the Fifth Amendment along those lines would have to show how it disproportionately benefits people who are innocent, or who have violated an unjust law. (Your argument could depend on what you consider an "unjust law", but you would have to at least make the argument.)

4. The "benefit" can't be something that exists separately from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. I've had it suggested to me that without the Fifth Amendment, the police would just beat people into confessing. But of course the right not to be beaten by the police is separate from the right to remain silent.

   The easiest way to see this is to consider cases where the Fifth Amendment right to silence does not apply. For example, if the government grants you immunity, then your answers cannot incriminate you, but since nothing you say will incriminate you, the government can then force you to answer the question or go to jail for contempt of court. (There is actually no literal "right to remain silent"; it's a "right against self-incrimination". So take away the possibility of self-incrimination, and you have to talk.) This is a controversial exception, but it's useful for this discussion because it demonstrates that certain rights exist separately from the right against self-incrimination. Obviously, even if the government grants you immunity so that you have to answer questions or go to jail, they still can't torture you for information.

   Similarly, someone suggested that without the Fifth Amendment, the police could just keep on questioning you as a means of detaining you without making an arrest. But, separately from the Fifth Amendment right to silence, there are limits (albeit fuzzy ones) on how long the police can detain you if they don't arrest you. (And then once you're arrested, limits on how long they can hold you without charging you.) As Flex Your Rights (with multiple lawyers on their board) says, "If you choose to challenge a detention, your lawyer will have to argue that police kept you longer than necessary under the circumstances." That's an important curb on police power, and that could be apply if the police keep asking you repetitive or irrelevant questions just as a means of holding you without arresting you.

   So again, even if the government grants you immunity so that you have to answer, they still can't keep asking you the same questions as a means of detaining you indefinitely. That means that right exists separately from the right against self-incrimination.

5. If the argument has major implications for the competency of the courts generally, then address those implications. This is not really a "pass/fail" criterion, because implications can be open-ended.

   I'm thinking in particular of the following argument: Without the Fifth Amendment, the police might adopt a strategy of arresting a suspect and asking him questions in such a way to make him flustered and contradict himself, even if he's innocent. That testimony might then be used to convict him.

   Now, this scenario passes criterion #1 above (with the Fifth Amendment, suspects can clam up and avoid this trap). It also obviously passes criterion #2 - innocent suspects remaining free is better than innocent suspects going to jail. I do think it might fail criterion #3 -- if innocent suspects become flustered and contradict themselves, that should happen at least as often for guilty suspects, too, who are after all lying.

   But there's actually a bigger problem here. It's well known that innocent people can become flustered and contradict themselves under prolonged grilling. If the police, judges, and juries, are so incompetent at evaluating evidence that they would convict you because you contradicted yourself while being questioned about a murder, then that is the real problem -- that the state simply cannot evaluate evidence competently. By giving people a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent under questioning, you've just applied a band-aid by exempting one type of evidence from being used to railroad an innocent person. You haven't solved the competency problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, the Prosecutor's fallacy, compromised physical evidence, untrustworthy witnesses, and a host of other potential sources of error.

   So yes, this is a logically consistent defense of the Fifth Amendment -- but realize that it implies we're living under a criminal justice system that can't find its ass with both hands, and perhaps that's the larger problem that should be addressed.

So. I'm interested in whether there is a precisely defined scenario that passes all of the criteria above. You can email me at Bennett at peacefire dot org and put "Fifth Amendment" in the subject line, and also post your suggestion in the comments.

Since I might not be by my computer when the story runs, I'm deputizing our readers to call out FAIL codes for certain responses that are missing obvious points. If the poster is being a dick, then be a dick when calling FAIL codes on them; if the person is participating constructively in the discussion and at least trying to solve the posed problem, then still use the FAIL codes if they apply, but try not to be a dick. Your arsenal:

• FAIL0 -- not specifying a scenario. This does not apply to informative comments; someone might have something useful to say even if it's not an answer to the challenge posed by the article. However if someone starts spouting off trashing the whole article and thinking that they have negated its conclusion, then unless they actually specify a scenario, call them out with a FAIL0. "If you ever bothered to read your American history, you would understand that the Fifth Amendment was adopted as an important bulwark agai--" FAIL0. "Bennett never went to law school so he clearly isn't qual--" FAIL0. "This article has so many errors that I scarcely know where to--" FAIL0. You need to pose a scenario or you haven't answered the question.

  Also, anything with "Go and read... [some third-party source]" without specifying a scenario is a FAIL0. It doesn't take more than a few sentences to summarize a scenario.

• FAIL1 -- not explaining how the scenario gives different outcomes depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. (I keep hearing the example of the police beating a suspect to extract a confession; like I said, the right against torture whether you have the Fifth Amendment right to silence or not.)

  Or suppose you assume the police would lie and say, "We never laid a hand on him, but he signed the confession anyway." Well, even in a world with the Fifth Amendment, clearly if the police are going to beat you into submission and lie about it, they can still just beat you into submission and say, "He voluntarily waived his Fifth Amendment rights without us touching him, and confessed." For that matter, if the police are willing to lie, they can lie about your confession even if you don't confess at all. In either case, it's not clear that the Fifth Amendment would affect the outcome if you hold all other assumptions constant about whether the police are willing to lie, how much the suspect can hold out under coercion, etc.

• FAIL2 -- not explaining why the outcome in the Fifth Amendment case is better. (So no, "It gives a guilty person time to come up with an alibi.")

• FAIL3 -- the alleged "benefits" of the Fifth Amendment apply equally to the innocent and guilty, or disproportionately favor the guilty. Yes, it's harder for the state to get a conviction if you're allowed to remain silent and no inferences can be made from that, and yes, that will benefit some innocent people who refuse to speak to the government as a matter of deeply held principle, but it's going to benefit guilty people at least as often who just don't want to be caught in a lie. As I said, if you want to benefit all criminal defendants equally, you could just roll a dice and acquit whenever it comes up a 6. In terms of helping the innocent vs. helping the guilty, the right to silence scores even worse than that, since it disproportionately benefits the guilty (who might make a mistake while coming up with an alibi).

• FAIL4 -- confusing a different "right" that is separate from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. An easy test is that if you still have certain rights even when your right against self-incrimination does not apply because you've been granted immunity, then those rights must exist separately. (e.g. the right not to be tortured, and the right not to be held indefinitely without a trial.)

In addition, feel free to call out SUPERFAIL for any comments along the lines of:

• "This article has so many false premises that I scarcely know where to begin. I would have cited at least one example to support my point, but I was masturbating to the sound of my own superbly polished writing skills and I just came all over the keyboard."
• "Dammit Bennett! I am a [Supreme Court justice / federal prosecutor / law professor / frequent TiVo'er of Law And Order: Mattress Tag Removal] and you are writing about things you know nothing about! There is a reason we don't do things the way you're suggesting! In fact there's a very good reason we don't do things that way, and I'm going to tell you what it is: It's because that's not the way we do things."
• "I read as far as the second syllable of the fourth word and then stopped reading. The problem must be with the article, because the problem couldn't possibly be with my oh hey look a cloud."

So perhaps someone will email me a scenario illustrating the benefits of the Fifth Amendment that I haven't considered here. At least, I hope so. It would be disturbing to think that we've built a whole legal edifice in the United States (and many other countries) on a "right" that has no rational basis.

Unfortunately, even if such a rational defense of the Fifth Amendment does exist, I still believe that many of the defenses of the Fifth Amendment that people have been giving me, are flawed, for the reasons listed above. (If people ever thought about it for one minute, wouldn't they realize that the right not to be tortured by the police is logically distinct from the right to refuse to answer a question about whether you committed a crime?) If large numbers of people believe the Fifth Amendment is sacred without ever thinking about whether it makes sense, that's a broader problem. What other cherished beliefs that we hold, that we don't think carefully about?

Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a case going back and forth in U.S. courts right now about whether a defendant can be ordered to decrypt his own hard drives when they may incriminate him. "A Wisconsin defendant in a criminal child-pornography case recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid giving the FBI the password to decrypt his hard drive. At the risk of alienating fellow civil-libertarians, I admit I've never seen the particular value of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. So I pose this logical puzzle: come up with a specific, precisely defined scenario, where the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Wisconsin computer scientist Jeffrey Feldman was arrested on child pornography charges and ordered to give his hard drive decryption password to the FBI. He refused, claiming a Fifth Amendment right to refuse to hand over his password. A magistrate agreed with Feldman, then later changed his mind, but then on June 4th a judge blocked the order demanding that Feldman decrypt the hard drive.

So I will give up some civil libertarian cred and admit that, compared to, say, the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment, I've never seen what's so great about the Fifth Amendment "right against self-incrimination" -- not just as it applies to computer passwords, but in general. (Hereinafter I'm just going to refer to the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent as the "Fifth Amendment", even though there are other rights encapsulated in the Fifth Amendment, such as the right against double jeopardy.) I'm not debating the legal technicalities of the judges' decisions, since they take the "right against self-incrimination" as a given; I'm questioning the value of that "right" in itself.

Before you read any further, this is a pseudo-contest in which I'm soliciting answers in the form of a specific, precisely defined scenario in which you think that the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference (i.e. that the outcome in a world with the Fifth Amendment, is better than the outcome in a world without the Fifth Amendment, even if you hold all other assumptions constant). If you disagree with everything I say, then the way to show that is to post a scenario that follows all the rules of the contest.

Now, obviously, I am not saying that the police ought to be able to beat information out of you. (The right not to be tortured by the police exists separately from the right to remain silent -- more on that later.) But the "right against self-incrimination" says two things that never made sense to me. The first is that you can refuse to answer a point-blank question asking whether you committed a crime, even if the question elicits no other information that ought to remain private. The second is that if you refuse to answer, a court cannot even consider that as a factor in determining the likelihood of guilt. The first seems dubious as a moral principle; the second actually departs from reality, for no good reason that I can see.

Take first the "right" to refuse to answer. Now, I agree that if the government asks you, say, "What books are you reading these days?", the correct answer is "None of your damn business." Nobody else has the right to know what's on your reading list. However, if a murder is committed, pretty much everyone agrees that it is the state's legitimate business (that is, everyone's business) whether you committed the murder or not. What's the philosophical argument that you shouldn't have to answer "Yes" or "No" if the police ask if you committed the murder?

Compare that to the collateral damage caused by, for example, a search warrant. If you accept that the police have a "right" to know whether your house contains a bloody knife used in a recent murder, then a search could turn up the knife, but there's always the risk that a search of an innocent person's house would penalize them by exposing their private information and belongings. By contrast, the direct question "Did you do it?" is like a "search" that targets only the evidence that is relevant to the case, and nothing else. A physical analogy might be the police scanning a neighborhood with a Geiger counter that detects only illegal weapons-grade plutonium; I'd be kind of OK with that. (Actually, being asked a question is even less invasive, since you don't have the option of refusing the search or the Geiger counter, but you have the option of refusing to answer a question and facing the consequences.)

Now, you shouldn't have to answer questions that are none of anyone else's business; if your alibi for the night of the murder is that you were at a somewhere you're embarrassed to mention, you should be allowed to say, "I didn't commit the murder, but I would prefer not to tell you where I was." But Fifth Amendment absolutists would say that you don't even have to answer the question of whether you committed the murder at all. That, to me, seems absurd. Isn't society entitled to know whether you committed the murder or not?

Perhaps people's discomfort with this reasoning stems from a feeling that the government has no right to interfere with your life at all, unless you've been convicted of a crime. But, rightly or wrongly, the police are empowered to make arrests, search people's houses with a warrant, chase after people feeling the scene of a crime, and take other actions even against people who haven't been convicted of anything. Law enforcement wouldn't be able to function at all without most of these powers, and while those powers can be and have been grossly abused, the solution is to limit those powers, not abolish them entirely. (That might be an argument for giving people the right to remain silent when questioned or arrested by the police, but still empowering judges to issue warrants requiring a defendant to answer a question, even if the answer could be "self-incriminating".) Compared to the possibility of getting arrested or having your house searched, the possibility of simply being required to have the exchange -- "You were walking away from the apartment after the murder, did you do it?" "No" -- seems like a pretty minor inconvenience. (Yes, if the police keep badgering and harassing me with the same questions, or if courts refuse to believe me and try to railroad me anyway, then that's a problem, but it's a separate problem -- we'll get to that in a second.)

Moving on to the second implication, which is that courts cannot weigh your silence in determining the likelihood of your guilt. This goes against the common sense that you would use in your everyday life. If you had two roommates, you knew one of them stole your laptop, you asked both where they were at the time, and one of them immediately told you where they were (giving a story that their friends could corroborate), and other refused even to answer "Yes" or "No" to the question of whether they stole it, what would you think? I'm not saying that a person's silence should ever be considered proof of guilt, but the likelihood of guilt is a probability question, which can be assessed using multiple factors, each of which individually might not be enough to prove guilt by itself. Is the second roommate's silence relevant to your estimation of their guilt? Of course it is. If you would use that factor in your own reasoning, why shouldn't a court? (And in fact, your silence can be considered relevant in a civil lawsuit, just not in a criminal case.)

Now, there are times when the government's evidentiary standards should deviate from common sense. For example, if you find evidence of an affair by snooping in your spouse's email, you may feel guilty about snooping, but you're certainly not going to forget what you found, just because the "evidence" was obtained improperly. The state, on the other hand, is mandated to "forget" any evidence that's obtained in violation of a defendant's rights (for example, if the police break in and search a residence without a warrant) -- that evidence cannot be used in a trial. However, in that case the bar on improperly obtained evidence serves a clear purpose -- it removes any incentive for the police to obtain evidence by breaking and entering. There's no obvious similar reason why a person's refusal to answer a question shouldn't be considered relevant to the likelihood of their guilt.

For these two reasons, I can't think of a precisely defined scenario in which the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference, i.e. the outcome in the case where the Fifth Amendment does exist, is better than the outcome in a hypothetical world where the Fifth Amendment does not exist, if you hold all other assumptions constant.

My own high school civics teacher gave the example of an overzealous prosecutor determined to convict an innocent defendant of murder, as an example of the importance of the Fifth Amendment. I asked why, even without Fifth Amendment rights, the defendant couldn't just say that they were innocent. "Aha!" said the teacher, mimicking the evil tone of a corrupt prosecutor, "We know you're lying, now we'll convict you of murder and for lying to the court!"

This was the first of many "scenarios" that I've heard supposedly illustrating the benefits of the Fifth Amendment, that didn't hold up under scrutiny. For the government to convict you of lying about not committing the murder, they would also have to convict you of the murder, and if they can convict you of murder, then you're already screwed anyway, regardless of whether they also convict you of lying about being innocent. Now, obviously we should stop corrupt prosecutors from being able to railroad people, but that's a separate problem. The right to remain silent doesn't do you much good if the government is going to forge enough "evidence" (or ignore the lack of evidence) to convict you of murder anyway.

So what I'm looking for (email me below, and also post in comments) is a precisely defined scenario that meets all of the following criteria:

1. The outcome in the world where we do have the Fifth Amendment, is clearly different from the outcome in a hypothetical world where the Fifth Amendment does not exist, even while holding all other assumptions constant. (So the "corrupt overzealous prosecutor" scenario fails that test, because if you assume the government can convict an innocent person of murder without regard for facts or evidence, they can do that even if you refuse to testify.)

2. The outcome in the "Fifth Amendment" world is better than the outcome in the "no Fifth Amendment" world. We can be very permissive about what is considered "better", but there are some limits -- one person, for example, gave me an example of a guilty person who used the Fifth Amendment to avoid giving testimony that might contradict evidence that is discovered later. I pointed out that giving a guilty person a chance to avoid tripping himself up was hardly a good thing, to which he replied, "Oh... right."

3. The "benefit" can't be something that benefits all suspects equally, whether they're innocent, guilty of violating a just law, or guilty of violating an unjust law. Several people have brought up to me the example of the McCarthy hearings, when those being questioned cited the Fifth Amendment as the basis for refusing to answer red-hunt questions.

   Now, most people today remember the McCarthy hearings as an example of grotesque government overreach, and anything that hampers enforcement of an unjust law would be viewed positively in that light. The problem with this defense of the Fifth Amendment is that if it hampers all law enforcement efforts equally, then you might as well just roll a dice every time a suspect is arrested, and let them go if it comes up a 6. Clearly, this is a "limit on government power", which would benefit suspects who are innocent, as well as benefiting people who are guilty of violating an unjust law (however you define that). But since it would "help" all other criminal defendants, too, most people would consider it a silly idea. A defense of the Fifth Amendment along those lines would have to show how it disproportionately benefits people who are innocent, or who have violated an unjust law. (Your argument could depend on what you consider an "unjust law", but you would have to at least make the argument.)

4. The "benefit" can't be something that exists separately from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. I've had it suggested to me that without the Fifth Amendment, the police would just beat people into confessing. But of course the right not to be beaten by the police is separate from the right to remain silent.

   The easiest way to see this is to consider cases where the Fifth Amendment right to silence does not apply. For example, if the government grants you immunity, then your answers cannot incriminate you, but since nothing you say will incriminate you, the government can then force you to answer the question or go to jail for contempt of court. (There is actually no literal "right to remain silent"; it's a "right against self-incrimination". So take away the possibility of self-incrimination, and you have to talk.) This is a controversial exception, but it's useful for this discussion because it demonstrates that certain rights exist separately from the right against self-incrimination. Obviously, even if the government grants you immunity so that you have to answer questions or go to jail, they still can't torture you for information.

   Similarly, someone suggested that without the Fifth Amendment, the police could just keep on questioning you as a means of detaining you without making an arrest. But, separately from the Fifth Amendment right to silence, there are limits (albeit fuzzy ones) on how long the police can detain you if they don't arrest you. (And then once you're arrested, limits on how long they can hold you without charging you.) As Flex Your Rights (with multiple lawyers on their board) says, "If you choose to challenge a detention, your lawyer will have to argue that police kept you longer than necessary under the circumstances." That's an important curb on police power, and that could be apply if the police keep asking you repetitive or irrelevant questions just as a means of holding you without arresting you.

   So again, even if the government grants you immunity so that you have to answer, they still can't keep asking you the same questions as a means of detaining you indefinitely. That means that right exists separately from the right against self-incrimination.

5. If the argument has major implications for the competency of the courts generally, then address those implications. This is not really a "pass/fail" criterion, because implications can be open-ended.

   I'm thinking in particular of the following argument: Without the Fifth Amendment, the police might adopt a strategy of arresting a suspect and asking him questions in such a way to make him flustered and contradict himself, even if he's innocent. That testimony might then be used to convict him.

   Now, this scenario passes criterion #1 above (with the Fifth Amendment, suspects can clam up and avoid this trap). It also obviously passes criterion #2 - innocent suspects remaining free is better than innocent suspects going to jail. I do think it might fail criterion #3 -- if innocent suspects become flustered and contradict themselves, that should happen at least as often for guilty suspects, too, who are after all lying.

   But there's actually a bigger problem here. It's well known that innocent people can become flustered and contradict themselves under prolonged grilling. If the police, judges, and juries, are so incompetent at evaluating evidence that they would convict you because you contradicted yourself while being questioned about a murder, then that is the real problem -- that the state simply cannot evaluate evidence competently. By giving people a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent under questioning, you've just applied a band-aid by exempting one type of evidence from being used to railroad an innocent person. You haven't solved the competency problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, the Prosecutor's fallacy, compromised physical evidence, untrustworthy witnesses, and a host of other potential sources of error.

   So yes, this is a logically consistent defense of the Fifth Amendment -- but realize that it implies we're living under a criminal justice system that can't find its ass with both hands, and perhaps that's the larger problem that should be addressed.

So. I'm interested in whether there is a precisely defined scenario that passes all of the criteria above. You can email me at Bennett at peacefire dot org and put "Fifth Amendment" in the subject line, and also post your suggestion in the comments.

Since I might not be by my computer when the story runs, I'm deputizing our readers to call out FAIL codes for certain responses that are missing obvious points. If the poster is being a dick, then be a dick when calling FAIL codes on them; if the person is participating constructively in the discussion and at least trying to solve the posed problem, then still use the FAIL codes if they apply, but try not to be a dick. Your arsenal:

• FAIL0 -- not specifying a scenario. This does not apply to informative comments; someone might have something useful to say even if it's not an answer to the challenge posed by the article. However if someone starts spouting off trashing the whole article and thinking that they have negated its conclusion, then unless they actually specify a scenario, call them out with a FAIL0. "If you ever bothered to read your American history, you would understand that the Fifth Amendment was adopted as an important bulwark agai--" FAIL0. "Bennett never went to law school so he clearly isn't qual--" FAIL0. "This article has so many errors that I scarcely know where to--" FAIL0. You need to pose a scenario or you haven't answered the question.

  Also, anything with "Go and read... [some third-party source]" without specifying a scenario is a FAIL0. It doesn't take more than a few sentences to summarize a scenario.

• FAIL1 -- not explaining how the scenario gives different outcomes depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. (I keep hearing the example of the police beating a suspect to extract a confession; like I said, the right against torture whether you have the Fifth Amendment right to silence or not.)

  Or suppose you assume the police would lie and say, "We never laid a hand on him, but he signed the confession anyway." Well, even in a world with the Fifth Amendment, clearly if the police are going to beat you into submission and lie about it, they can still just beat you into submission and say, "He voluntarily waived his Fifth Amendment rights without us touching him, and confessed." For that matter, if the police are willing to lie, they can lie about your confession even if you don't confess at all. In either case, it's not clear that the Fifth Amendment would affect the outcome if you hold all other assumptions constant about whether the police are willing to lie, how much the suspect can hold out under coercion, etc.

• FAIL2 -- not explaining why the outcome in the Fifth Amendment case is better. (So no, "It gives a guilty person time to come up with an alibi.")

• FAIL3 -- the alleged "benefits" of the Fifth Amendment apply equally to the innocent and guilty, or disproportionately favor the guilty. Yes, it's harder for the state to get a conviction if you're allowed to remain silent and no inferences can be made from that, and yes, that will benefit some innocent people who refuse to speak to the government as a matter of deeply held principle, but it's going to benefit guilty people at least as often who just don't want to be caught in a lie. As I said, if you want to benefit all criminal defendants equally, you could just roll a dice and acquit whenever it comes up a 6. In terms of helping the innocent vs. helping the guilty, the right to silence scores even worse than that, since it disproportionately benefits the guilty (who might make a mistake while coming up with an alibi).

• FAIL4 -- confusing a different "right" that is separate from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. An easy test is that if you still have certain rights even when your right against self-incrimination does not apply because you've been granted immunity, then those rights must exist separately. (e.g. the right not to be tortured, and the right not to be held indefinitely without a trial.)

In addition, feel free to call out SUPERFAIL for any comments along the lines of:

• "This article has so many false premises that I scarcely know where to begin. I would have cited at least one example to support my point, but I was masturbating to the sound of my own superbly polished writing skills and I just came all over the keyboard."
• "Dammit Bennett! I am a [Supreme Court justice / federal prosecutor / law professor / frequent TiVo'er of Law And Order: Mattress Tag Removal] and you are writing about things you know nothing about! There is a reason we don't do things the way you're suggesting! In fact there's a very good reason we don't do things that way, and I'm going to tell you what it is: It's because that's not the way we do things."
• "I read as far as the second syllable of the fourth word and then stopped reading. The problem must be with the article, because the problem couldn't possibly be with my oh hey look a cloud."

So perhaps someone will email me a scenario illustrating the benefits of the Fifth Amendment that I haven't considered here. At least, I hope so. It would be disturbing to think that we've built a whole legal edifice in the United States (and many other countries) on a "right" that has no rational basis.

Unfortunately, even if such a rational defense of the Fifth Amendment does exist, I still believe that many of the defenses of the Fifth Amendment that people have been giving me, are flawed, for the reasons listed above. (If people ever thought about it for one minute, wouldn't they realize that the right not to be tortured by the police is logically distinct from the right to refuse to answer a question about whether you committed a crime?) If large numbers of people believe the Fifth Amendment is sacred without ever thinking about whether it makes sense, that's a broader problem. What other cherished beliefs that we hold, that we don't think carefully about?

Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a case going back and forth in U.S. courts right now about whether a defendant can be ordered to decrypt his own hard drives when they may incriminate him. "A Wisconsin defendant in a criminal child-pornography case recently invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid giving the FBI the password to decrypt his hard drive. At the risk of alienating fellow civil-libertarians, I admit I've never seen the particular value of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. So I pose this logical puzzle: come up with a specific, precisely defined scenario, where the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Wisconsin computer scientist Jeffrey Feldman was arrested on child pornography charges and ordered to give his hard drive decryption password to the FBI. He refused, claiming a Fifth Amendment right to refuse to hand over his password. A magistrate agreed with Feldman, then later changed his mind, but then on June 4th a judge blocked the order demanding that Feldman decrypt the hard drive.

So I will give up some civil libertarian cred and admit that, compared to, say, the free speech guarantees in the First Amendment, I've never seen what's so great about the Fifth Amendment "right against self-incrimination" -- not just as it applies to computer passwords, but in general. (Hereinafter I'm just going to refer to the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent as the "Fifth Amendment", even though there are other rights encapsulated in the Fifth Amendment, such as the right against double jeopardy.) I'm not debating the legal technicalities of the judges' decisions, since they take the "right against self-incrimination" as a given; I'm questioning the value of that "right" in itself.

Before you read any further, this is a pseudo-contest in which I'm soliciting answers in the form of a specific, precisely defined scenario in which you think that the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference (i.e. that the outcome in a world with the Fifth Amendment, is better than the outcome in a world without the Fifth Amendment, even if you hold all other assumptions constant). If you disagree with everything I say, then the way to show that is to post a scenario that follows all the rules of the contest.

Now, obviously, I am not saying that the police ought to be able to beat information out of you. (The right not to be tortured by the police exists separately from the right to remain silent -- more on that later.) But the "right against self-incrimination" says two things that never made sense to me. The first is that you can refuse to answer a point-blank question asking whether you committed a crime, even if the question elicits no other information that ought to remain private. The second is that if you refuse to answer, a court cannot even consider that as a factor in determining the likelihood of guilt. The first seems dubious as a moral principle; the second actually departs from reality, for no good reason that I can see.

Take first the "right" to refuse to answer. Now, I agree that if the government asks you, say, "What books are you reading these days?", the correct answer is "None of your damn business." Nobody else has the right to know what's on your reading list. However, if a murder is committed, pretty much everyone agrees that it is the state's legitimate business (that is, everyone's business) whether you committed the murder or not. What's the philosophical argument that you shouldn't have to answer "Yes" or "No" if the police ask if you committed the murder?

Compare that to the collateral damage caused by, for example, a search warrant. If you accept that the police have a "right" to know whether your house contains a bloody knife used in a recent murder, then a search could turn up the knife, but there's always the risk that a search of an innocent person's house would penalize them by exposing their private information and belongings. By contrast, the direct question "Did you do it?" is like a "search" that targets only the evidence that is relevant to the case, and nothing else. A physical analogy might be the police scanning a neighborhood with a Geiger counter that detects only illegal weapons-grade plutonium; I'd be kind of OK with that. (Actually, being asked a question is even less invasive, since you don't have the option of refusing the search or the Geiger counter, but you have the option of refusing to answer a question and facing the consequences.)

Now, you shouldn't have to answer questions that are none of anyone else's business; if your alibi for the night of the murder is that you were at a somewhere you're embarrassed to mention, you should be allowed to say, "I didn't commit the murder, but I would prefer not to tell you where I was." But Fifth Amendment absolutists would say that you don't even have to answer the question of whether you committed the murder at all. That, to me, seems absurd. Isn't society entitled to know whether you committed the murder or not?

Perhaps people's discomfort with this reasoning stems from a feeling that the government has no right to interfere with your life at all, unless you've been convicted of a crime. But, rightly or wrongly, the police are empowered to make arrests, search people's houses with a warrant, chase after people feeling the scene of a crime, and take other actions even against people who haven't been convicted of anything. Law enforcement wouldn't be able to function at all without most of these powers, and while those powers can be and have been grossly abused, the solution is to limit those powers, not abolish them entirely. (That might be an argument for giving people the right to remain silent when questioned or arrested by the police, but still empowering judges to issue warrants requiring a defendant to answer a question, even if the answer could be "self-incriminating".) Compared to the possibility of getting arrested or having your house searched, the possibility of simply being required to have the exchange -- "You were walking away from the apartment after the murder, did you do it?" "No" -- seems like a pretty minor inconvenience. (Yes, if the police keep badgering and harassing me with the same questions, or if courts refuse to believe me and try to railroad me anyway, then that's a problem, but it's a separate problem -- we'll get to that in a second.)

Moving on to the second implication, which is that courts cannot weigh your silence in determining the likelihood of your guilt. This goes against the common sense that you would use in your everyday life. If you had two roommates, you knew one of them stole your laptop, you asked both where they were at the time, and one of them immediately told you where they were (giving a story that their friends could corroborate), and other refused even to answer "Yes" or "No" to the question of whether they stole it, what would you think? I'm not saying that a person's silence should ever be considered proof of guilt, but the likelihood of guilt is a probability question, which can be assessed using multiple factors, each of which individually might not be enough to prove guilt by itself. Is the second roommate's silence relevant to your estimation of their guilt? Of course it is. If you would use that factor in your own reasoning, why shouldn't a court? (And in fact, your silence can be considered relevant in a civil lawsuit, just not in a criminal case.)

Now, there are times when the government's evidentiary standards should deviate from common sense. For example, if you find evidence of an affair by snooping in your spouse's email, you may feel guilty about snooping, but you're certainly not going to forget what you found, just because the "evidence" was obtained improperly. The state, on the other hand, is mandated to "forget" any evidence that's obtained in violation of a defendant's rights (for example, if the police break in and search a residence without a warrant) -- that evidence cannot be used in a trial. However, in that case the bar on improperly obtained evidence serves a clear purpose -- it removes any incentive for the police to obtain evidence by breaking and entering. There's no obvious similar reason why a person's refusal to answer a question shouldn't be considered relevant to the likelihood of their guilt.

For these two reasons, I can't think of a precisely defined scenario in which the Fifth Amendment makes a positive difference, i.e. the outcome in the case where the Fifth Amendment does exist, is better than the outcome in a hypothetical world where the Fifth Amendment does not exist, if you hold all other assumptions constant.

My own high school civics teacher gave the example of an overzealous prosecutor determined to convict an innocent defendant of murder, as an example of the importance of the Fifth Amendment. I asked why, even without Fifth Amendment rights, the defendant couldn't just say that they were innocent. "Aha!" said the teacher, mimicking the evil tone of a corrupt prosecutor, "We know you're lying, now we'll convict you of murder and for lying to the court!"

This was the first of many "scenarios" that I've heard supposedly illustrating the benefits of the Fifth Amendment, that didn't hold up under scrutiny. For the government to convict you of lying about not committing the murder, they would also have to convict you of the murder, and if they can convict you of murder, then you're already screwed anyway, regardless of whether they also convict you of lying about being innocent. Now, obviously we should stop corrupt prosecutors from being able to railroad people, but that's a separate problem. The right to remain silent doesn't do you much good if the government is going to forge enough "evidence" (or ignore the lack of evidence) to convict you of murder anyway.

So what I'm looking for (email me below, and also post in comments) is a precisely defined scenario that meets all of the following criteria:

1. The outcome in the world where we do have the Fifth Amendment, is clearly different from the outcome in a hypothetical world where the Fifth Amendment does not exist, even while holding all other assumptions constant. (So the "corrupt overzealous prosecutor" scenario fails that test, because if you assume the government can convict an innocent person of murder without regard for facts or evidence, they can do that even if you refuse to testify.)

2. The outcome in the "Fifth Amendment" world is better than the outcome in the "no Fifth Amendment" world. We can be very permissive about what is considered "better", but there are some limits -- one person, for example, gave me an example of a guilty person who used the Fifth Amendment to avoid giving testimony that might contradict evidence that is discovered later. I pointed out that giving a guilty person a chance to avoid tripping himself up was hardly a good thing, to which he replied, "Oh... right."

3. The "benefit" can't be something that benefits all suspects equally, whether they're innocent, guilty of violating a just law, or guilty of violating an unjust law. Several people have brought up to me the example of the McCarthy hearings, when those being questioned cited the Fifth Amendment as the basis for refusing to answer red-hunt questions.

   Now, most people today remember the McCarthy hearings as an example of grotesque government overreach, and anything that hampers enforcement of an unjust law would be viewed positively in that light. The problem with this defense of the Fifth Amendment is that if it hampers all law enforcement efforts equally, then you might as well just roll a dice every time a suspect is arrested, and let them go if it comes up a 6. Clearly, this is a "limit on government power", which would benefit suspects who are innocent, as well as benefiting people who are guilty of violating an unjust law (however you define that). But since it would "help" all other criminal defendants, too, most people would consider it a silly idea. A defense of the Fifth Amendment along those lines would have to show how it disproportionately benefits people who are innocent, or who have violated an unjust law. (Your argument could depend on what you consider an "unjust law", but you would have to at least make the argument.)

4. The "benefit" can't be something that exists separately from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. I've had it suggested to me that without the Fifth Amendment, the police would just beat people into confessing. But of course the right not to be beaten by the police is separate from the right to remain silent.

   The easiest way to see this is to consider cases where the Fifth Amendment right to silence does not apply. For example, if the government grants you immunity, then your answers cannot incriminate you, but since nothing you say will incriminate you, the government can then force you to answer the question or go to jail for contempt of court. (There is actually no literal "right to remain silent"; it's a "right against self-incrimination". So take away the possibility of self-incrimination, and you have to talk.) This is a controversial exception, but it's useful for this discussion because it demonstrates that certain rights exist separately from the right against self-incrimination. Obviously, even if the government grants you immunity so that you have to answer questions or go to jail, they still can't torture you for information.

   Similarly, someone suggested that without the Fifth Amendment, the police could just keep on questioning you as a means of detaining you without making an arrest. But, separately from the Fifth Amendment right to silence, there are limits (albeit fuzzy ones) on how long the police can detain you if they don't arrest you. (And then once you're arrested, limits on how long they can hold you without charging you.) As Flex Your Rights (with multiple lawyers on their board) says, "If you choose to challenge a detention, your lawyer will have to argue that police kept you longer than necessary under the circumstances." That's an important curb on police power, and that could be apply if the police keep asking you repetitive or irrelevant questions just as a means of holding you without arresting you.

   So again, even if the government grants you immunity so that you have to answer, they still can't keep asking you the same questions as a means of detaining you indefinitely. That means that right exists separately from the right against self-incrimination.

5. If the argument has major implications for the competency of the courts generally, then address those implications. This is not really a "pass/fail" criterion, because implications can be open-ended.

   I'm thinking in particular of the following argument: Without the Fifth Amendment, the police might adopt a strategy of arresting a suspect and asking him questions in such a way to make him flustered and contradict himself, even if he's innocent. That testimony might then be used to convict him.

   Now, this scenario passes criterion #1 above (with the Fifth Amendment, suspects can clam up and avoid this trap). It also obviously passes criterion #2 - innocent suspects remaining free is better than innocent suspects going to jail. I do think it might fail criterion #3 -- if innocent suspects become flustered and contradict themselves, that should happen at least as often for guilty suspects, too, who are after all lying.

   But there's actually a bigger problem here. It's well known that innocent people can become flustered and contradict themselves under prolonged grilling. If the police, judges, and juries, are so incompetent at evaluating evidence that they would convict you because you contradicted yourself while being questioned about a murder, then that is the real problem -- that the state simply cannot evaluate evidence competently. By giving people a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent under questioning, you've just applied a band-aid by exempting one type of evidence from being used to railroad an innocent person. You haven't solved the competency problem as it applies to circumstantial evidence, unreliable eyewitness testimony, the Prosecutor's fallacy, compromised physical evidence, untrustworthy witnesses, and a host of other potential sources of error.

   So yes, this is a logically consistent defense of the Fifth Amendment -- but realize that it implies we're living under a criminal justice system that can't find its ass with both hands, and perhaps that's the larger problem that should be addressed.

So. I'm interested in whether there is a precisely defined scenario that passes all of the criteria above. You can email me at Bennett at peacefire dot org and put "Fifth Amendment" in the subject line, and also post your suggestion in the comments.

Since I might not be by my computer when the story runs, I'm deputizing our readers to call out FAIL codes for certain responses that are missing obvious points. If the poster is being a dick, then be a dick when calling FAIL codes on them; if the person is participating constructively in the discussion and at least trying to solve the posed problem, then still use the FAIL codes if they apply, but try not to be a dick. Your arsenal:

• FAIL0 -- not specifying a scenario. This does not apply to informative comments; someone might have something useful to say even if it's not an answer to the challenge posed by the article. However if someone starts spouting off trashing the whole article and thinking that they have negated its conclusion, then unless they actually specify a scenario, call them out with a FAIL0. "If you ever bothered to read your American history, you would understand that the Fifth Amendment was adopted as an important bulwark agai--" FAIL0. "Bennett never went to law school so he clearly isn't qual--" FAIL0. "This article has so many errors that I scarcely know where to--" FAIL0. You need to pose a scenario or you haven't answered the question.

  Also, anything with "Go and read... [some third-party source]" without specifying a scenario is a FAIL0. It doesn't take more than a few sentences to summarize a scenario.

• FAIL1 -- not explaining how the scenario gives different outcomes depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. (I keep hearing the example of the police beating a suspect to extract a confession; like I said, the right against torture whether you have the Fifth Amendment right to silence or not.)

  Or suppose you assume the police would lie and say, "We never laid a hand on him, but he signed the confession anyway." Well, even in a world with the Fifth Amendment, clearly if the police are going to beat you into submission and lie about it, they can still just beat you into submission and say, "He voluntarily waived his Fifth Amendment rights without us touching him, and confessed." For that matter, if the police are willing to lie, they can lie about your confession even if you don't confess at all. In either case, it's not clear that the Fifth Amendment would affect the outcome if you hold all other assumptions constant about whether the police are willing to lie, how much the suspect can hold out under coercion, etc.

• FAIL2 -- not explaining why the outcome in the Fifth Amendment case is better. (So no, "It gives a guilty person time to come up with an alibi.")

• FAIL3 -- the alleged "benefits" of the Fifth Amendment apply equally to the innocent and guilty, or disproportionately favor the guilty. Yes, it's harder for the state to get a conviction if you're allowed to remain silent and no inferences can be made from that, and yes, that will benefit some innocent people who refuse to speak to the government as a matter of deeply held principle, but it's going to benefit guilty people at least as often who just don't want to be caught in a lie. As I said, if you want to benefit all criminal defendants equally, you could just roll a dice and acquit whenever it comes up a 6. In terms of helping the innocent vs. helping the guilty, the right to silence scores even worse than that, since it disproportionately benefits the guilty (who might make a mistake while coming up with an alibi).

• FAIL4 -- confusing a different "right" that is separate from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. An easy test is that if you still have certain rights even when your right against self-incrimination does not apply because you've been granted immunity, then those rights must exist separately. (e.g. the right not to be tortured, and the right not to be held indefinitely without a trial.)

In addition, feel free to call out SUPERFAIL for any comments along the lines of:

• "This article has so many false premises that I scarcely know where to begin. I would have cited at least one example to support my point, but I was masturbating to the sound of my own superbly polished writing skills and I just came all over the keyboard."
• "Dammit Bennett! I am a [Supreme Court justice / federal prosecutor / law professor / frequent TiVo'er of Law And Order: Mattress Tag Removal] and you are writing about things you know nothing about! There is a reason we don't do things the way you're suggesting! In fact there's a very good reason we don't do things that way, and I'm going to tell you what it is: It's because that's not the way we do things."
• "I read as far as the second syllable of the fourth word and then stopped reading. The problem must be with the article, because the problem couldn't possibly be with my oh hey look a cloud."

So perhaps someone will email me a scenario illustrating the benefits of the Fifth Amendment that I haven't considered here. At least, I hope so. It would be disturbing to think that we've built a whole legal edifice in the United States (and many other countries) on a "right" that has no rational basis.

Unfortunately, even if such a rational defense of the Fifth Amendment does exist, I still believe that many of the defenses of the Fifth Amendment that people have been giving me, are flawed, for the reasons listed above. (If people ever thought about it for one minute, wouldn't they realize that the right not to be tortured by the police is logically distinct from the right to refuse to answer a question about whether you committed a crime?) If large numbers of people believe the Fifth Amendment is sacred without ever thinking about whether it makes sense, that's a broader problem. What other cherished beliefs that we hold, that we don't think carefully about?

ColdWetDog writes "The LA Times has a quick article on a newly named giant lizard: 'An ancient plant eating lizard that looked like an iguana but was closer in size to a German shepherd has been named after Jim Morrison, the late troubled and charismatic lead singer of the Doors.The lizard's name was chosen by Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a hard-core Doors fan since college.' Hunter S. Thompson, who hallucinated presumably somewhat more carnivorous lounge lizards, was also considered for the honor."

ananyo writes "Electrical engineers have used lasers to create a cloak that can hide communications in a 'time hole', so that it seems as if they were never sent. The method is the first that can cloak data streams sent at the rapid rates typically seen in telecommunications systems. It opens the door to ultra-secure transmission schemes, and may also provide a way to better shield information from noise corruption (abstract). The researchers manipulated laser light in time to create regular periods with zero light intensity (a Talbot carpet) in which to hide data. Unfortunately, the current set up erases the data-adding event entirely from history. Though they are confident that future modifications will allow them, or others, to send secret messages successfully, the more immediate use of the technology will be to cut down crosstalk when multiple data streams share the same fibre." Also at Slash Datacenter.

Yesterday, Georgia Power announced that they successfully lifted the first part of the Vogtle Unit 3 containment vessel into place. From World Nuclear News: "The component — measuring almost 40 meters wide, 12 meters tall and weighing over 900 tons — was assembled on-site from pre-fabricated steel plates. The cradle for the containment vessel was put in place on the unit's nuclear island in April. The completed bottom head was raised by a heavy lift derrick and placed on the cradle on 1 June, Georgia Power announced." Georgia Power has a pretty cool gallery of high resolution construction photos (the bottom head is the background on my XBMC machine). Below the fold there is a video of the crane moving the bottom head into place.

theodp writes "Q. What do Chris Brown and Steve Ballmer have in common? A. They both want you to Beg for It. GeekWire reports that Microsoft is touting its new Chip In program, a crowdfunding platform that allows students to 'beg' for select Windows 8 PCs and tablets that they can't afford on their own. Blair Hanley Frank explains, 'Students go to the Chip In website and choose one of the 20 computers and tablets that have been pre-selected by Microsoft. Microsoft chips in 10% of the price right off the bat, and then students are given a link to a "giving page" to send out to anyone they think might give them money. Once their computer is fully funded, Microsoft ships it to them.' Hey, what could go wrong?"

ananyo writes "A toy quadcopter can be steered through an obstacle course by thought alone. The aircraft's pilot operates it remotely using a cap of electrodes to detect brainwaves that are translated into commands. Ultimately, the developers of the mind-controlled copter hope to adapt their technology for directing artificial robotic limbs and other medical devices." From the paper (PDF) abstract: "... we report a novel experiment of BCI controlling a robotic quadcopter in three-dimensional (3D) physical space using noninvasive scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) in human subjects. We then quantify the performance of this system using metrics suitable for asynchronous BCI. Lastly, we examine the impact that the operation of a real world device has on subjects’ control in comparison to a 2D virtual cursor task. Approach. ... Individual subjects were able to accurately acquire up to 90.5% of all valid targets presented while traveling at an average straight-line speed of 0.69 m s^(1)." This also appears to be the first time a Brain-Computer Interface was used to operate a flying device in 3D space. Also, there are several additional videos showing people operating the quadcopter.

New submitter knwny writes "Atul Chitnis, the man who popularized open software in India, died on 3rd June of intestinal cancer. As a technology mentor, writer and public speaker he promoted Linux and FOSS since the late 1980s through his association with various tech magazines and conferences. He introduced Linux to thousands of PC Quest magazine readers by convincing them to carry the first ever Linux distribution in India on its cover CD in 1996."

Alsee writes "Center of flaming controversy across the Internet and here on Slashdot for claiming to travel 'Directly Downwind Faster Than The Wind, Powered Only By The Wind, Steady State' (DDWFTTW), the Blackbird is now up for auction on Ebay. It has been certified by the North American Land Sailing Association and Guinness World Records to have reached 2.8 times wind speed directly downwind and was subsequently modded to also achieve more than double windspeed directly upwind. It has been the subject of an MIT physics paper and was included as a model problem in the International Physics Olympiad, yet many still argue it would violate the laws of physics. Let the bidding (and debate) commence!"

astroengine writes "In October 2014 and again February 2016 Proxima Centauri, the closest star system to our Solar System, will pass in front of two distant stars allowing astronomers a rare opportunity to use Einstein's General Relativity to potentially detect hidden exoplanets around the star system. As Proxima Centauri blocks the distant starlight from our perspective, the gravitational field will bend the distant light to create a microlensing event. The transient brightening can then be analyzed and the gravitational presence of any worlds may be revealed. The research, announced Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis, has been submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal."

sagecreek writes "You can judge this book, at least in part, by the lengthy tagline on its cover: 'Learn to make practical, unique, real-world sites that span a variety of industries and technologies with the world's most popular mobile development library.' jQuery might not be your favorite framework on the long, long list of JavaScript possibilities. But Shane Gliser unabashedly describes himself as a jQuery 'fanboy...if it's officially jQuery, I love it.' Gliser is an experienced mobile developer and blogger who operates Roughly Brilliant Digital Studios. He also has some background in mobile UX (user experience), and both qualities show in this smoothly written, well-illustrated, 234-page how-to book that focuses on jQuery Mobile, a 'touch-optimized' web framework for smartphones and tablets." Read below for the rest of sagecreek's review. Creating Mobile Apps With JQuery Mobile author Shane Gliser pages 234 pages publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer sagecreek ISBN 9781782160069 summary Takes the reader from mobile prototyping and creating templates to mobile development and creating versatile mobile sites, with a project in each chapter. Don't be surprised when you extract the book's code examples and related items from a ZIP file that is almost 100MB in size. Gliser covers a lot of ground, and he covers it well in his 10 chapters. And each chapter contains a project.

The first thing you don't do in Chapter 1, "Prototyping jQuery Mobile," is work at a computer. In the true spirit of UX, Gliser briefly has you work with a pen and some 3x5 note cards. (Remember those?) Your initial goal is to roughly sketch out some designs for a jQuery Mobile website for a new pizzeria. But why the ancient technology? "We are more willing to simply throw out a drawing that took less than 30 seconds to create," Gliser writes. And: "Actually sketching by hand uses a different part of the brain and unlocks our creative centers." Furthermore, those on your team who are not coders can contribute comments, suggestions, and corrections to the emerging design.

In Chapter 2, "A Mom-and-Pop Mobile Website," you step over to your computer with Chapter 1's paper prototype in hand. You start converting the sketched design "into an actual jQuery Mobile (jQM) site that acts responsively and looks unique." You also begin building "a configurable server-side PHP template," and you work with custom fonts, page curl effects using CSS, and other aspects of creating and optimizing a mobile site.

"Mobile is a very unforgiving environment," Gliser cautions, "and some of the tips in this section will make more difference than any of the 'best coding practices.'" Indeed, he wants you to be aware of optimization "at the beginning. You are going to do some awesome work and I don't want you or your stakeholders to think it's any less awesome, or slow, or anything else because you didn't know the tricks to squeeze the most performance out of your systems. It's never too early to impress people with the performance of your creations."

Chapter 3, "Analytics, Long forms, and Front-end Validation," moves beyond "dynamically link[ing] directly into the native GPS systems of iOS and Android." Instead, Gliser introduces how to work with Google static maps, Google Analytics, long and multi-page forms, and jQuery Validate. As for static maps, he says, "Remember to always approach things from the user's perspective. It's not always about doing the coolest thing we can." Indeed, a static map may be all the user needs to decide whether to drive to a business, such as a pizzeria, or just call for delivery. And, as for Google Analytics: "Every website should have analytics. If not, it's difficult to say how many people are hitting your site, if we're getting people through our conversion funnels, or what pages are causing people to leave our site."

Meanwhile, desktop users are familiar with (and frequently irritated by) long forms and multi-page forms. Lengthy forms can be real deal-breakers for users trying to negotiate them on mobile devices. The author presents some ways to shorten long forms and break them "into several pages using jQuery Mobile." And he emphasizes the importance of using the jQuery Validate plug-in to add validation to any page that has a form, so the user can see quickly and clearly that an entry has a problem.

The focus in Chapter 4, "QR Codes, Geolocation, Google Maps API, and HTML5 Video," is on handling concepts that can be "applied to any business that has multiple physical locations." Gliser uses a local movie theater chain as his development example. It is "considering throwing its hat into the mobile ring," so a site is created that makes use of QR codes, geolocation, Google Maps, and linking to YouTube movie previews. Then, he shows how to use embedded video to keep users on the movie chain's site rather than sending them off to YouTube.

In Chapter 5, the goal is "to create an aggregating news site based off social media." So the emphasis shifts to "Client-side Templating, JSON APIs, and HTML5 Web Storage." Notes Gliser: "Honestly, from a purely pragmatic perspective, I believe that the template is the perfect place for code. The more flexible, the better. JSON holds the data and the templates are used to transform it. To draw a parallel, XML is the data format and XSL templates are used to transform. Nobody whines about logic in XSL; so I don't see why it should be a problem in JS templates."

Next, he shows how to patch into Twitter's JSON API to get "the very latest set of trending topics" and "whittle down the response to only the part we want...and pass that array into JsRender for...well...rendering" in a manner that will be "a lot cleaner to read and maintain" than looping through JSON and using string concatenation to make the output.

Other topics in Chapter 5 include programmatically changing pages in jQuery Mobile, understanding how jQuery Mobile handles generated pages and Document Object Model (DOM) weight management, and working with RSS feeds. Gliser points out that there is still "a lot more information out there being fed by RSS feeds than by JSON feeds." The chapter concludes with looks at how to use HTML5 web storage (it's simple, yet it can get "especially tricky on mobile browsers"), and how to leverage the Google Feed API. Explains Gliser: "The Google Feeds (sic) API can be fed several options, but at its core, it's a way to specify an RSS or ATOM feed and get back a JSON representation."

Chapter 6 jumps into "the music scene. We're going to take the jQuery Mobile interface and turn it into a media player, artist showcase, and information hub that can be saved to people's home screens," Gliser writes. He proceeds to show how "ridiculously simple it can be to bring audio into your jQuery Mobile pages." And he explains how to use HTML5 manifest "and a few other meta tags" to save an app to the home screen. Furthermore, he discusses how to test mobile sites using "Google Chrome (since its WebKit) or IE9 (for the Windows Phone)" as browsers that are shrunken down to mobile size. "Naturally, this does not substitute for real testing," he cautions. "Always check your creations on real devices. That being said, the shrunken browser approach will usually get you 97.5 percent of the way there. Well...HTML5 Audio throws that operating model right out the window."

Since "mobile phones are quickly becoming our photo albums," Gliser's Chapter 7, "Fully Responsive Photography," begins with creating a basic gallery using Photoswipe. Then, in a section focused on "supporting the full range of device sizes," he shows how to start using responsive web design (RWD), "the concept of making a single page work for every device size." The issues, of course, range from image sizes and resolutions to text sizes and character counts per line, on screens as small as smart phones and tablets, or larger.

In Chapter 8, "Integrating jQuery Mobile into Existing Sites," three topics are key: (1) "Detecting mobile — server-side, client-side, and the combination of the two"; (2) "Mobilizing full site pages — the hard way"; and (3) Mobilizing full site pages — the easy way." Gliser avoids some potential "geek war" controversies over "browser sniffing versus feature detection" when detecting mobile devices. He zeroes in first on detection using WURFL for "server-side database-driven browser sniffing." He also shows how to do JavaScript-based browser sniffing, which he concedes may be "the worst possible way to detect mobile but it does have its virtues," especially if your budget is small and you want to exclude older devices that can't handle some new JavaScript templating. He also describes JavaScript-based feature detection using Modernizer, plus some other feature-detection methods.

As for mobilizing full-site pages "the hard way," he states that there is really "only one good reason: to keep the content on the same page so that the user doesn't have one page for mobile and one page for desktop. When emails and tweets and such are flying around, the user generally doesn't care if they're sending out the mobile view or the desktop view and they shouldn't." He focuses on how "it's pretty easy to tell what parts of a site would translate to mobile" and how to add data attributes to existing tags "to mobilize them. When jQuery's libraries are not present on the page, these attributes will simply sit there and cause no harm. Then you can use one of our many detection techniques to decide when to throw the jQM libraries in."

Mobilizing full-size pages "the easy way" involves, in his view, "nothing easier and cleaner than just creating a standalone jQuery Mobile page...and simply import the page we want with AJAX. We can then pull out the parts we want and leave the rest." His code samples show how to do this.

Chapter 9, "Content Management Systems and jQM" looks at the pros and cons of using three different content management systems (CMS) with jQuery Mobile: WordPress, Drupal, and Adobe Experience Manager. "The key to get up and running quickly with any CMS is, realizing which plugins and themes to use," Gliser writes. "For WordPress, I would not recommend a jQuery Mobile plugin. As I was experimenting for this chapter, it broke the admin interface and was, in general, a miserable experience. However, there are several jQuery Mobile themes that will serve you well. Some are free, some paid." He explains how to use mobile theme switchers.

Meanwhile, Drupal offers some standard plugins that provide contact forms, CAPTCHA, and custom database tables and forms, and enable you to "create full blown web apps, not just brochureware sites." But: "The biggest downside to Drupal is that it has a bit of a learning curve if yo want to tap its true power, Also, without some tuning, it can be a little slow and can really bloat your page's code," he says.

As for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Gliser merely introduces it as a "premier corporate CMS" and a "major CMS player that comes with complete jQuery Mobile examples." He doesn't show "how to install, configure, or code for AEM. That's a subject for several training manuals the size of this book." He adds: "If you work for a company that can afford AEM, you'll already be well-versed in the mobile implementation. The power this platform gives to content authors is astounding."

Chapter 10, the final chapter, is titled "Putting It All Together — Flood.FM." Using what you've learned in the book, including paper prototyping the interfaces, you create "a website where listeners will be greeted with music from local, independent bands across several genres and geographic regions."

Along the way, Gliser introduces Balsamiq, "a very popular UX tool for rapid prototyping." He discusses using Model-View-Controller (MVC), Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), and Model-View-Whatever (MV*) development structures with jQuery Mobile. He introduces how to work with the Web Audio API , and he illustrates how to prompt users to download the Flood.FM app to their home screens. He finishes up with brief discussions of accelerometers, cameras, "APIs on the horizon," plus "To app or not to app, that is the question" and whether you should compile an app or not. Finally, he shows PhoneGap Build, the "cloud-based build service for PhoneGap."

Shane Gliser's book does indeed cover a lot of ground, clearly and with good examples. If you truly demand that some nits must be picked, I can report that an occasional dash is missing or a comma sometimes shows up out of place, such as this example in Chapter 2: "A practice is only best until a new practice, [misplaced comma] comes along that is better." In the printed book's table of contents, there are style and spelling glitches in the heading for Chapter 3. "Analytics, long forms, and frontend validation" should be "Analytics, Long Forms, and Front-end Validation." And, in Chapter 5, Gliser refers to the "Google Feeds API" when it's actually "Google Feed API." But the term "Google Feeds API" commonly is misused by developers on Stack Overflow and other sites.

I am not a mobile developer. I am a tech writer, frequent book reviewer, and occasional coder. I have played with some of the code examples in this book, but I have not tried them all. So I can't say if there are code glitches. However, the book was reviewed before publication by at least four software professionals with impressive resumes.

Aside from occasional spots where the text needed tighter editing, this book is, in my view, well written and rich with information, examples, sources, and tips for working effectively with jQuery Mobile. I intend to put it to good use as I continue learning.

You can purchase Creating Mobile Apps with jQuery Mobile from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

ananyo writes "Researchers have shown for the first time that the act of mating induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes (epigenetic changes), affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behavior in prairie voles. Prairie voles have long been of interest to neuroscientists and endocrinologists who study the social behavior of animals, in part because this species forms monogamous pair bonds — essentially mating for life. The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans (abstract)."

An anonymous reader writes "Technology giant Apple is to begin its defence against charges by the US government that it tried to fix the prices of e-books. The iPad-maker is accused of working with publishers in 2009 to set prices in an effort to compete in the e-book market dominated by Amazon. Quotes from Steve Jobs' official biography have been cited as evidence in the case."

p00kiethebear writes "My father works for a large corporation that licenses ISDN lines (among a plethora of other services) including T1 and T3 technology. Surprisingly there are still large companies that use fifty year old T1 technology to handle their voice and data use. My father's 30 year career has been almost exclusively in helpdesk / troubleshooting T1 / ISDN technology and both he and I are worried about the future. Cable modems and DSL have replaced ISDN in most cases and it's now an archaic solution reserved for voice actors, tech support-terminal workers, large companies that need voice and video conferencing, and data and private users too far from the loop for DSL or Cable. My dad is still 15 years from retirement. Is twisted copper going the way of the dodo or is it here to stay for the foreseeable future?"

First time accepted submitter Dave Knott writes "The BBC has announced that Matt Smith will be leaving 'Doctor Who', after spending the last four seasons in the titular role of The Doctor. Smith will remain for the upcoming 50th anniversary special, where he will star alongside a majority of the other actors who have taken on the character, and will exit following the yearly Christmas episode. No actor has yet been cast as the twelfth incarnation of The Doctor, although there was a teaser involving John Hurt at the end of the most recent season of the show."

An anonymous reader writes "Pundits tell us that the world of console video gaming is in dire straits, but recent collections of console video games have sold on eBay for tens of thousands of dollars. There are still a lot of video game disks and cartridges out there, but is it worth your effort to try to complete your collection and sell it on eBay? If you're a potential buyer for a massive collection of video games, are they likely to appreciate over time, or is this a really bad investment? Market research company Terapeak runs some numbers and suggests that it depends on your goals, the size and quality of your collection, and the console you're focused on." There's a film crew hoping to bypass the uncertain hoarding phase, though, and just mine a landfill in New Mexico for the legendary hoard of dumped Atari inventory.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in the ancient days of 2009, Motorola Mobility earned considerable buzz with its Droid smartphone. Marketed as an iPhone alternative, the device featured a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a chunky black body that seemed positively Schwarzenegger-esque in comparison to its svelte Apple rival. But Motorola failed to translate that buzz into sustained momentum in the smartphone space. Instead, Samsung became the dominant Android smartphone manufacturer, battling toe-to-toe with Apple for market-share and profits. Even Google acquiring Motorola for the princely sum of $12.1 billion didn't really seem to alter the equation very much. Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside wants to change all that. In a May 29 talk at AllThingsD's D11 conference, he told the audience that Motorola has a 'hero phone' in the works, dubbed the Moto X—and that it's self-aware. 'It anticipates my needs,' he said, according to AllThingD's live blog of the event. But what does that actually mean? Thanks to embedded sensors, the phone knows when the user removes it from his or her pocket; in theory, that capability could serve broader applications, such as the phone recognizing where the user is located within a city and serving up content and applications accordingly. In fact, it sounds a bit like Google Now on steroids—or like the smartphone precursor to SkyNet, the supercomputer from the Terminator movies that's so intelligent, it decides that the world would be better off if it ruled over humanity."

snydeq writes "Brian Katz offers a simple take on the buzz around BYOD in business organizations these days: 'BYOD is only an issue because people refuse to realize that it's just about ownership — nothing more and nothing less.' A 'hidden issue' hiding in plain view, BYOD's ownership issue boils down to money and control. 'BYOD is pretty clear: It's bringing your own device. It isn't the company's device or your best friend's device. It's your device, and you own it. Because you own the device, you have certain rights to what is on the device and what you can do with the device. This is the crux of every issue that comes with BYOD programs.'"

Several readers sent word of a group of University of Alberta researchers, who were exploring the edge of the Teardrop Glacier in northern Canada when they noticed a 'greenish tint' coming out from underneath the glacier. It turned out to be a collection of bryophytes, which likely flourished there the last time the land in that area was exposed to sunlight before the Little Ice Age. They collected samples of plants estimated to be 400 years old, and the researchers were able to get them to sprout new growths in the lab (abstract). "The glaciers in the region have been receding at rates that have sharply accelerated since 2004, at about 3-4m per year. ... Bryophytes are different from the land plants that we know best, in that they do not have vascular tissue that helps pump fluids around different parts of the organism. They can survive being completely desiccated in long Arctic winters, returning to growth in warmer times, but Dr La Farge was surprised by an emergence of bryophytes that had been buried under ice for so long. 'When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind.'"

First time accepted submitter aravenwood writes "The New York Times and the Times of Israel report today that artificial intelligence and a network of 100 computers in a basement in Tel Aviv University are being used to match 320,000 fragments of documents dating as far back as the 9th century in an attempt to reassemble the original documents. Since the trove of documents from the Jewish community of Cairo was discovered in 1896 only about 4000 of them have been pieced together, and the hope is that the new technique, which involves taking photographs of the fragments and using image recognition and other algorithms to match the language, spacing, and handwriting style of the text along with the shape of the fragment to other fragments could revolutionize not only the study of this trove documents, which has been split up into 67 different collections around the world since its discovery, but also how humanities disciplines study documents like these. They expect to make 12 billion comparisons of different fragments before the project is completed — they have already performed 2.8 billion. Among the documents, some dating from 950, was the discovery of letters by Moses Maimonides and that Cairene Jews were involved in the import of flax, linen, and sheep cheese from Sicily."

davecb writes "Paul E. McKenney, one of the Linux RCU implementors, addresses the problem of synchronization using structured deferral on, what else, Mr Schrödinger's famous cat. Courtesy of deferral/procrastination, the cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. 'In this example, Schrödinger would like to construct an in-memory database to keep track of the animals in his zoo. Births would of course result in insertions into this database, while deaths would result in deletions. The database is also queried by those interested in the health and welfare of Schrödinger's animals. Schrödinger has numerous short-lived animals such as mice, resulting in high update rates. In addition, there is a surprising level of interest in the health of Schrödinger's cat, so much so that Schrödinger sometimes wonders whether his mice are responsible for most of these queries. Regardless of their source, the database must handle the large volume of cat-related queries without suffering from excessive levels of contention. Both accesses and updates are typically quite short, involving accessing or mutating an in-memory data structure, and therefore synchronization overhead cannot be ignored.'"

00_NOP writes "'Universal Credit' — the plan to consolidate all Britain's welfare payments into one — is the world's biggest 'agile' software development project. It is now close to collapse, the British government admitted yesterday. The failure, if and when it comes, could cost billions and have dire social consequences. 'Some steps have been taken to try to rescue the project. The back end – the benefits calculation – has reportedly been shifted to a "waterfall" development process – which offers some assurances that the government at least takes its fiduciary duties seriously as it should mean no code will be deployed that has not been finished. The front end – the bit used by humans – is still meant to be “agile” – which makes some sense, but where is the testing? Agile is supposed to be about openness between developer and client and we – the taxpayers – are the clients: why can’t we see what our money is paying for?'"

New submitter kwyjibo87 writes "The World Health Organization (WHO) publicly expressed dismay yesterday concerning news that intellectual property claims were hindering research on a deadly new emerging virus. Novel coronavirus (nCoV), a member of the same viral genus as the causative agent of SARS, has claimed the lives of 22 people (out of 44 reported infected) and left both researchers and health officials scrambling to develop effective diagnostic tests in addition to possible medications and vaccines against nCoV. Now, however, claims of intellectual property on the new virus are hindering research on nCoV according to the WHO, delaying advancements on tools to prevent further spread of the infection. Stories of intellectual property rights in science hindering advancements in research, particularly in clinical applications, are nothing new; the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments on the validity of patents on the BRCA1/2 genes and has yet to issue a decision. The issue of sharing scientific information in order to promote faster research on emerging pathogens is not limited to intellectual property — a recent article in the journal Nature highlighted a case where Chinese researchers risked having their research scooped after uploading viral sequences to a public database designed aid global scientific collaboration."

phrackthat writes "A UC Berkeley group, in a bid to drive down the costs of 3-D printing, has been focusing on more natural materials such as salt, wood, ceramics and concrete (the last two, while not naturally occurring, are made of naturally occurring components). The use of these materials create new avenues for architecture, such as printing buildings. Professor Ronald Rael, the head of the project, stated that these materials and the designs they enable will require new IP protections — 'This is going to require some IP protection for designs, so if you design architecture in the computer, you're protected, just as music and movies are.' I wonder if he's ever heard of design patents?"

photonic writes "The BBC is reporting on a possible collision between Ecuador's first satellite (a small cubesat) and debris from an upper stage of an old Russian rocket. If confirmed, this might be the third case in recent years, after a high-speed collision of an Iridium satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009 and a collision earlier this year between a Russian laser reflector (which can be tracked very accurately) and a tiny piece of a debris from a Chinese weather satellite that was destroyed in a missile test."

photonic writes "The BBC is reporting on a possible collision between Ecuador's first satellite (a small cubesat) and debris from an upper stage of an old Russian rocket. If confirmed, this might be the third case in recent years, after a high-speed collision of an Iridium satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009 and a collision earlier this year between a Russian laser reflector (which can be tracked very accurately) and a tiny piece of a debris from a Chinese weather satellite that was destroyed in a missile test."

photonic writes "The BBC is reporting on a possible collision between Ecuador's first satellite (a small cubesat) and debris from an upper stage of an old Russian rocket. If confirmed, this might be the third case in recent years, after a high-speed collision of an Iridium satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009 and a collision earlier this year between a Russian laser reflector (which can be tracked very accurately) and a tiny piece of a debris from a Chinese weather satellite that was destroyed in a missile test."

OpenShift, says Wikipedia, "is a cloud computing platform as a service product from Red Hat. A version for private cloud is named OpenShift Enterprise. The software that runs the service is open-sourced under the name OpenShift Origin, and is available on GitHub." This is a video interview in which Diane Mueller Explains OpenShift in depth. You may want to watch this OpenStack demo video as well.

Kiera Wilmot, the Florida high school student who was expelled from her school after an unauthorized science experiment was misperceived as a weapon (at least for purposes of arrest and charging), won't be going to jail. She will, though, be going to Space Camp, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign started by author and former NASA engineer Homer Hickham. All charges against her have been dropped.

In the past few days, several readers have submitted word of a paper published on Arxiv allegedly confirming the efficacy of Andrea Rossi's "E-Cat," a device Rossi says transmutes nickel into copper, producing cheap energy in the process. (Mentioned before on Slashdot.) Ethan Siegel of ScienceBlogs takes a skeptical look at the buzz surrounding this paper, and asks some seemingly obvious questions, pointing out various ways in which the cold-fusion / cheap-energy claims could be either confirmed or debunked. First time accepted submitter CdXiminez writes with a capsule of Siegel's points: "What would it take to convince a reasonable observer that you've got a controlled nuclear reaction going on here? Things not shown in the earlier report: Show that nuclear transmutation has in fact taken place; Start the device operating by whatever means you want, then disconnect all external power to it, and allow it to run; Place a gamma-ray detector around the device; Accurately monitor the power drawn from all sources to the device at all times, while also monitoring the energy output from the device at all times."

zrbyte writes "One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography — they are impossible to crack, even in principle. However, the ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have found a way around this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack. Their solution is based on a special kind of one-time pad that generates a random key through the complexity of its physical structure, namely shining a light through a diffusive glass plate."

Wired reports on a cluster of mini-satellites that will soon be launched into orbit that will assist U.S. special forces personnel during manhunts. "SOCOM is putting eight miniature communications satellites, each about the size of a water jug, on top of the Minotaur rocket that's getting ready to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. They’ll sit more than 300 miles above the earth and provide a new way for the beacons to call back to their masters." When special forces are able to tag their target, the target can be tracked and located through the use of satellites and cell towers, but coverage is poor in many areas of the world. The satellites going up in September will help to fill in some gaps. "This array of configurable 'cubesats' is designed to stay aloft for three years or more. Yes, it will serve as further research project. But 'operators are going to use it,' Richardson promised an industry conference in Tampa last week."

necro81 writes "Although its Tevatron particle accelerator has gone dark, Fermi Laboratory outside Chicago is still doing physics. A new experiment, called muon g-2 will investigate quantum mechanical behavior of the electron's heavier sibling: the muon. Fermi needs a large ring chamber to store the muons it produces and investigates, and it just so happens that Brookhaven National Laboratory outside NYC has one to spare. But how do you transport a delicate, 15-m diameter, 600-ton superconducting magnet halfway across the country? Very carefully."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Location is everything when choosing the site of a data center. Firms such as Microsoft and Google and Facebook spend a lot of time looking into the costs of land, power, regulation and taxes before placing their respective data centers in a particular place. Sometimes, that local tax bill comes into play in a big way. Just ask the National Security Agency which learned it faces a multimillion-dollar annual state tax on the power consumed by its new data center in Camp Williams, south of Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake Tribune obtained a series of email exchanges between the feds and the state, with the NSA protesting a $2.4 million tax on its annual power expenditure, pegged at about $40 million. Harvey Davis, director of installations and logistics for the NSA, sent a letter (subsequently quoted by the newspaper) to state officials that made the logistics argument: 'Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5bn construction at Camp Williams. HP325 [the new law] runs counter to what we expected.'" This would be the data center William Binney et al claim is logging almost all domestic communication.

Techmeology writes "In response to declining utility of CALEA mandated wiretapping backdoors due to more widespread use of cryptography, the FBI is considering a revamped version that would mandate wiretapping facilities in end users' computers and software. Critics have argued that this would be bad for security (PDF), as such systems must be more complex and thus harder to secure. CALEA has also enabled criminals to wiretap conversations by hacking the infrastructure used by the authorities. I wonder how this could ever be implemented in FOSS."

Blug_fred writes "For the second edition, today is the time to celebrate Culture Freedom Day. While not as popular as HFD or SFD, celebrating Free Culture involves finding Free Culture artists, inviting them to your place and having them perform, display or talk about what their creation(s). Of course you can always simply project a couple of Free Culture movies and launch a discussion about their business models. Either way you can find all the happening for today here on the map and we sincerely hope there will be something of interest near you."

J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek was wildly successful. It raked in hundreds of millions at the box office, and revitalized the Star Trek franchise, which had languished for 7 years without a new film and 4 years without a TV presence (after 18 consecutive years of new shows). It also did something no Trek movie had done before; it made Star Trek ‘cool’ in the public consciousness. Combined, those factors ensured Abrams would get another turn at the helm of a Trek movie, and sooner rather than later. With today's release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, that trend is very likely to continue. It's a movie with all the same strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor, and if it worked before, it'll work again. Read on for our review.

Spoiler level: minor. This review contains character and actor names and a couple references to scenes without going into their content.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Star Trek: Into Darkness is a very entertaining film, and you will probably enjoy it.

Into Darkness hits the ground running, quickly reintroducing the rebooted crew and the Enterprise in all its glory. The opening act reminds us of everything we like about the 2009 Star Trek; snappy dialog, direct references to important parts of the original TV show, and cinematography that shows off the power, grace, and majesty of a Federation starship. It also highlights many of the differences between classic Trek and Abrams Trek.

In Abrams Trek, everything is fast. Kirk runs fast, Spock talks fast, crewmembers are always scrambling about the bridge and engineering at top speed, and as soon as a decision is made, action is taken. Tension and conflict arises with immediacy, and is resolved at the same pace. In Abrams Trek, no screentime is wasted. If a section of dialog is a bit technobabbley or it’s just providing background, something shiny will appear to keep your eyes and your attention engaged. In Abrams Trek, the lens flare deserves its own billing. Oh my, the lens flare.

But the big question about the Abrams films, both in 2009 and 2013, is: are they Star Trek? It’s a complicated issue, but one that's worth answering to fans of the various Trek TV series. Let's start by answering a somewhat simpler question: are they sci-fi? Not really. They fit the Hollywood definition of sci-fi — after all, they're flying spaceships and talking to aliens — but of course sci-fi is more than that. It's about ideas; it's about taking some part of life and changing it, then seeing what happens as a result. That's why Leguin, Dick, and Vonnegut are celebrated as sci-fi writers alongside Bradbury, Asimov, and Niven.

Into Darkness and the 2009 Star Trek before it aren't about ideas. They're unrepentantly character-driven. They're space operas. Perhaps more importantly, they're action films. I say this not to be exclusionary, but so we can evaluate in the proper context: as a Trek-themed action movie, Into Darkness is fantastic.

But Trek isn't about action (space opera, sometimes — action, no). It has certainly incorporated action; Kirk didn't get the reputation for always having a torn shirt for nothing. But in the TV shows, the action was punctuation; it was the set-up to the plot, or a way to resolve it once a moral issue had been defeated. In Day of the Dove, we were constantly shown fight scenes, but their purpose was to show the exaggerated hatreds of the characters, and to set up the we-must-work-together ending. And let's be clear: Abrams Trek isn't the first time the movie franchise departed toward action, either. Star Trek 2, widely regarded as the best of the films, was certainly a space opera, and you could make the case that it's an action film. The last three Next Generation films tried to be action films and failed. Abrams Trek tries and succeeds.

So, is it Trek? Well, it doesn't pass the sci-fi test, but let's look at the characters. Christopher Pine's Kirk is an exaggeration of Shatner's Kirk. All the characteristics of Shatner's Kirk are present in Pine's Kirk, but magnified tremendously. On the TV show, Kirk had a reputation as a womanizer. In Abrams Trek, Kirk is shown waking up in bed with space-babes and hitting on almost every female he comes in contact with. A lot of times it's for comedic effect, and succeeds at being funny, but it also feels like a caricature. Zachary Quinto's Spock felt much more natural to me this time around, in some ways. He pulls off Vulcan stoicism well. The only downside is that his emotional control feels like a simple prop; he maintains his facade until the writers need to show how important some event is, then it breaks.

The other familiar crew members each get a brief moment in the spotlight, but the limitations of a two-hour movie prevent any significant depth. Bones exists to crack jokes and repeat his catchphrases. Chekov exists to run around looking overwhelmed. Scotty exists to solve whatever problem is keeping the plot from moving forward. Simon Pegg's Scotty is still jarring, to me. His role as comic relief doesn’t mesh well with my perception of Scotty. (People unfamiliar with the original series probably wouldn't notice, or care; he is funny.) Doohan's Scotty was funny sometimes, but not in such an intentional way. It seems odd to have that character cracking wise. Sulu's screentime is brief, but it's good.

The one character I truly lament is Uhura, though not because of any complaint with Saldana. She serves to highlight one huge difference between Abrams Trek and classic Trek: Abrams Trek is a guy-movie. The majority of Uhura's role in Into Darkness is to be Spock's love-interest. She has one brief moment of being her own person, showing her own strengths — and (very minor spoiler) she fails and has to be rescued by men. Aside from Uhura, there's only one other significant woman character in the film, and her main purpose is to be both eye-candy and a bargaining chip for the men. In fact, thinking back, I'm pretty sure Into Darkness fails the Bechdel test. It bothers me that this happens in a Star Trek film. One of Trek's driving principles is a future of equality; a future free of the sexism and racism and classism we deal with today. It's not always an easy thing to write into a story, especially one limited to two hours — but we should at least try.

But let's step back to the more mundane aspects of the film, for a moment. The visuals are absolutely stunning. The alien planets, outer space, and a futuristic Earth are all fascinating to see. More importantly, Abrams shows us the Enterprise as we've always wanted to see her. Whether it's tearing off into high warp, diving through the atmosphere of a planet, or having the hull torn open by phaser fire, the ship looks amazing. The inside looks amazing, too — engineering looks much more like the belly of an enormously complex spacecraft than ever before. The special effects budget was well spent. ...Mostly. Abrams is known for his use of lens flare, but rather than toning it back, it seems like he's doubling down on that reputation. There are also a few action sequences where camera shaking and flashes of light get a bit excessive. I get that moving the camera really fast around a completely CGI environment helps to mask the imperfections, but there are times where you'll know a whole lot is going on without being exactly sure what. I'd happily take a slightly-less-crazy chase scene if I can get a clear look at it.

The scoring is solid. Into Darkness takes its main theme from the 2009 movie, with a few improvements. It doesn't get in the way. The acting is generally fine, as well. The regulars are more comfortable in the roles; this time around, they're playing themselves as much as they’re playing the original crew. Benedict Cumberbatch brings his talent to a leading role, and he does well with what he was given, but he could have been utilized better. His character exists in two modes — complete stillness and furious action. There’s very little in between, and I think that middle-ground is where Cumberbatch thrives, as on BBC's Sherlock. Still, his character made a far more compelling opponent for Kirk than 2009's Nero.

There were a few points where the acting did strike a discordant note for me. To explain why, I'm going to step back for a moment and discuss one of the major themes of the Star Trek reboot. J.J. Abrams and the others running the show constantly use aspects of the original show — props, plots, attitudes, and characters — to inform the reboot. However, they’re very, very consistent about re-interpreting all of those aspects. Everything is close enough to be familiar, but different enough seem new. In most cases, it works; new phasers just look better than old phasers. New Spock is different from Old Spock, but not in a bad way. In Into Darkness, we meet a familiar alien race, and the re-interpretation makes them feel a bit alien again. But it doesn't always work, and this leads me back to the acting. Without spoiling the content, there are a few scenes that are much more direct adaptations of old Star Trek scenes than we saw in the 2009 movie. It is a really interesting and cool concept, but the execution felt very odd, for me. I'll try to describe it: knowing how the scene was "supposed" to go, it felt as though the actors were trying to recreate it, but failing. Obviously, this is not the case; it was clearly planned, scripted, and shot with painstaking care, until they got exactly what they wanted. Still, the similarity hit an uncanny valley between original and re-interpretation. Fortunately for most viewers, anyone who isn’t much of a Trek fan isn't likely to notice or care.

As a long-time Trek fan, Star Trek: Into Darkness occupies a conflicted spot in my mind. At the most basic level, I went to a movie and really enjoyed it. I don't regret the $10 I spent on it, and I suspect most people would feel the same. At the same time, I'm a bit troubled by the direction the franchise is taking. There are a whole generation of kids who are now growing up with a very different perception of Star Trek than I did. To them, it's going to be just another Transformers-style action flick with no lasting importance. There's none of the idealism, optimism, or broadmindedness that was inherent to classic Trek. It's not hard to see why that is; stories like that are much harder to tell on the silver screen, and even when done well, they don't make as much money. They're much better suited to episodic TV. Unfortunately, if we see a new Trek TV series (more likely: when we see a new Trek TV series), you can bet it will be done in the style of the Abrams reboot, and I worry that the true sci-fi stories and the thought-provoking allegories will be subsumed by over-the-top action and relentless special effects. At the same time, I think some Trek is better than no Trek, and the two Abrams films make a better legacy for the franchise than Insurrection and Nemesis. I almost envy non-Trek-fans for not having to resolve the conflict of What Trek Is versus What Trek Isn't.

Bottom line: go see it.

mask.of.sanity writes with news of the jail sentences for three members of LulzSec. From the article: "Three members of the hacktivist group LulzSec have been sentenced to a total of six years in prison. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam were charged with attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox and governments and police forces in a 50-day spree in the summer of 2011. Davis was sentenced to 24 months in a young offender's institution and he will serve half of the sentence. Al-Bassam received a 20-month sentence, suspended for two years and 300 hours unpaid work. Ackroyd was given a 30-month sentence; he will serve half. Cleary also pleaded guilty to possession of child abuse images following a second arrest on October 4, 2012. He will be sentenced at separate hearing." The Guardian has a short article on the remaining loose ends in the story of LulzSec.

Linus Torvalds, Jon 'maddog' Hall, and many other names closely associated with Linux are also closely associated with beer. (Ed. note: I have personally watched them associate with beer, and may have even joined them.) It comes as no surprise, therefore, when Linux advocate and LinuxAutomation.org founder Kurt Forsberg talks about using Linux to control his beer brewing. Kurt is a strong believer in Linux Automation who talks about home thermostats, sprinklers, and many other application, "anything you can automate..." but, he adds, "we spend all our time brewing beer so we haven't explored many of those yet." He says this with a big smile, of course. And if you want to keep up with Linux Automation on Faceboook, go ahead; like everyone + dog they have a Facebook page.

Linus Torvalds, Jon 'maddog' Hall, and many other names closely associated with Linux are also closely associated with beer. (Ed. note: I have personally watched them associate with beer, and may have even joined them.) It comes as no surprise, therefore, when Linux advocate and LinuxAutomation.org founder Kurt Forsberg talks about using Linux to control his beer brewing. Kurt is a strong believer in Linux Automation who talks about home thermostats, sprinklers, and many other application, "anything you can automate..." but, he adds, "we spend all our time brewing beer so we haven't explored many of those yet." He says this with a big smile, of course. And if you want to keep up with Linux Automation on Faceboook, go ahead; like everyone + dog they have a Facebook page.

ananyo writes "D-Wave, the small company that sells the world's only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company's latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration — the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center. The lab will explore areas such as machine learning — useful for functions such as language translation, image searches and voice-command recognition. The Google-led collaboration is only the second customer to buy computer from D-Wave — Lockheed Martin was the first."

New submitter Wisdom writes "1bir (1 Block Interactive Raycaster) is a simple ray casting engine implemented only in 254 bytes to run on a stock, unexpanded Commodore 64. The name comes from the fact that on a C64 floppy disk, 1 block is equivalent to 254 bytes stored on a disk sector. In 254 bytes, 1bir sets up the screen for drawing, creates sine and cosine tables for 256 brads based on a simple approximation, casts rays into a 2D map that lives inside the C64 KERNAL ROM, renders the screen in coordination with KERNAL, evaluates 8-way joystick input and detects collision against walls. The ray casting core employs a brute force algorithm to determine visible walls, while the mapping portion supports both open-ended (infinitely looped) and traditional, closed maps. The source code in 6502 assembly is available, with extensive comments. A YouTube video showcases 1bir in a detailed manner with both kind of maps and more information, while a Vimeo video presents a shorter demonstration."

New submitter Wisdom writes "1bir (1 Block Interactive Raycaster) is a simple ray casting engine implemented only in 254 bytes to run on a stock, unexpanded Commodore 64. The name comes from the fact that on a C64 floppy disk, 1 block is equivalent to 254 bytes stored on a disk sector. In 254 bytes, 1bir sets up the screen for drawing, creates sine and cosine tables for 256 brads based on a simple approximation, casts rays into a 2D map that lives inside the C64 KERNAL ROM, renders the screen in coordination with KERNAL, evaluates 8-way joystick input and detects collision against walls. The ray casting core employs a brute force algorithm to determine visible walls, while the mapping portion supports both open-ended (infinitely looped) and traditional, closed maps. The source code in 6502 assembly is available, with extensive comments. A YouTube video showcases 1bir in a detailed manner with both kind of maps and more information, while a Vimeo video presents a shorter demonstration."