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.

I call fail on this argument. Of course the right to not be beaten by the police exists as a separate right. Now how do you enforce it?

"Your honour, I was told I would be beaten until I testified against myself."
"Those are serious allegations. And yet, these 5 fine police officers all testify that you banged your own head against the wall repeatedly in an attempt to make it look like you were mistreated. Please continue with your testimony. And remember, you can be imprisoned for contempt if you fail to answer the questions of this court to its satisfaction."

The right to not be forced to testify against yourself helps protects the innocent from police looking for a quick conviction rather than the correct one, and using any means to get it. The power of the court to compel testimony is very powerful, and needs counterweights to help prevent its abuse.

It also protects society from having guilty men go free because an innocent person was convicted in their place. If you cannot be forced to testify against yourself in court, then it removes a lot of the incentive to compel false testimony against someone's will. They go to court, refuse to confess, and instead of going back to jail for contempt, they walk free as there is no other evidence against them - and are no longer at risk of torture, as they are no longer in custody.

If an inference of guilt can be drawn from silence, then the right to remain silent is pointless - refuse to confess to these trumped up charges? Then go to jail anyway because we've decided your silence makes you guilty. The state is a powerful actor, with many resources. Requiring them to provide evidence - literally, that which is seen - of guilt prevents the state from simply offering innocent people this choice:
a) confess to this crime and go to prison
b) refuse to confess to this crime and go to prison for refusing to confess.

The right to not be considered guilty merely because you stay silent is only part of the counterweight against the state imprisoning the innocent, but it's an important one. This is not a theoretical - there have been abuses in the absence of it.

Lilburne was arrested upon information by an informer acting for The Stationers' Company and brought before the Court of Star Chamber. Instead of being charged with an offence he was asked how he pleaded. In his examinations he refused to take the oath known as the 'ex-officio' oath (on the ground that he was not bound to incriminate himself), and thus called in question the court's usual procedure. As he persisted in his contumacy, he was sentenced (13 February 1638) to be fined £500, whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned till he obeyed.

On 18 April 1638 Lilburne was flogged with a three-thonged whip on his bare back, as he was dragged by his hands tied to the rear of an ox cart from Fleet Prison to the pillory at Westminster. He was then forced to stoop in the pillory where he still managed to campaign against his censors, while distributing more unlicensed literature to the crowds. He was then gagged. Finally he was thrown in prison. He was taken back to the court and again imprisoned. During his imprisonment in Fleet he was cruelly treated. While in prison he however managed to write and to get printed in 1638 an account of his own punishment styled The Work of the Beast and in 1639 an apology for separation from the church of England, entitled Come out of her, my people.

That was the first in a long series of trials that lasted throughout his life for what John Lilburne called his "freeborn rights". As a result of these trials a growing number of supporters began to call him "Freeborn John" and they even struck a medal in his honour to that effect. It is this trial that has been cited by constitutional jurists and scholars in the United States of America as being one of the historical foundations of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is also cited within the 1966 majority opinion of Miranda v. Arizona by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There are a number of other examples of the Star Chamber being used to convict and punish men who protested against the Church and State power of failing to confess to trumped up charges. It was a handy way to punish the inconvenient.

It's not hard to find current examples of innocent people imprisoned because of a browbeaten or tricked confession, then later freed by DNA evidence proving their innocence. Without the right to remain silent and not have it taken as evidence of guilt, that number would be far higher.

Here's another example. A case is based on circumstantial evidence against a wealthy man. He pays someone to testify that they committed the crime. If they can be convicted for staying silent, then once before the court, they either confess and go to jail, or stay silent and go to jail. They can testify that they were bribed, but may well not be believed and sent to jail anyway. If the guilty man is wealthy enough, he can buy a dozen people to testify of their guilt, and create doubt and confusion.

With the right to remain silent, the paid self-incriminator goes on the stand, stays silent, and goes home as there's no evidence against them, and keeps the money!

Now, we don't have to care about whether someone desperate or stupid enough to commit false testimony goes to jail - the important point is that with the right to remain silent, then it makes it impractical for the wealthy to buy their way out of jailtime as anyone they pay to testify of their guilt can keep their mouth shut and walk away with the money. So there goes the incentive for the wealthy to try and buy testimony.

It's nothing to do with kids getting age-appropriate material (this time). Their contention is that adult pedophiles first see pictures of children being abused (or anime versions, which are no different according to them) which then encourages them to go out, abduct, rape and murder children.

The obvious solution for the censor brigade is the same setup that mobile phone networks have largely switched to - heavy filtering by default (in this particular example, they want maximum google safe search as default on for everyone) so adult men can't find pictures or anime of naked children, and thus, will never go on to rape and murder real children. Tada! In order to see any sites that are otherwise filtered - such as legal porn, medical sites, art sites, any site to do with the town of scunthorpe - you have to register yourself as a dirty porn watching perv, which list presumably the police will be watching closely in case you start desiring to go on a child abduction and murdering rampage, and will explicitly discourage people from doing, thus keeping their minds clear of unpure thoughts in good Christian fashion.

That it achieves one of their other goals, the appearance of a kiddy-friendly internet with no adult-only activity ever, is just a happy co-incidence.

In a separate but parallel move, the Home Secretary is trying to revive the Snooper's charter - i.e. ISPs, webhosts, service providers such as google and facebook would have to keep extensive logs of what emails and websites UK users visit, which the police and security services can troll through at their leisure, looking for Islamic terrorists planning on chopping down passersby in the street with machetes. And probably now porn-viewing adults, in case they turn out to be child murdering pedo's.

It is the usual 'ban this filth, won't someone think of the children' attempts to whitelist the internet, but this time it's to protect the children from the men who murder them because they saw porn on the internet and decided to get the real thing. That child porn is ALREADY blacklisted by the list run by the IWF, and subscribed to by most ISPs, and he was getting stuff that wasn't on the blacklist, and thus filtering wasn't actually even doing the job they wanted it to when running as intended is being conveniently ignored.

That they and the home secretary don't have a damn clue about how the tech, ISPs or the internet work is a given. They see it as one giant branch of WH Smiths, and it's just like banning the sale of dirty magazines, and will obviously solve the problem once and for all, and anyone that tries to point out the flaws is in league with the terrorists and the pedo child murderers, and heaven forbid anyone express concerns about the Big Brother or Free Speech aspects.

Because it's a full linux computer about the size of a credit card for $35 that runs on a couple of watts? That can do far more than say, an arduino (though arduino still rules for hardware interfacing).

For your average dev who can plop down the cash for a macbook pro or the like, it's terribly underpowered. For someone on a tight budget of money and/or power, such as for maker builds or students, it's pretty awesome. I have one running as a headless personal web server/gitbox because I can and it beats the hell out of the electricity cost of running a full blown x86 server for that job.

Getting a much snappier hw-accelerated GUI is no small thing either.

While this would be an issue eventually, the big problem with fossil fuels is not the direct energy liberated (eventually ending up as heat) but the CO2 acting as a multiplier for that sodding great fusion reaction 1AU away. Compared to the amount of energy that the earth gets coming off the burning day star, even near free personal fusion reactions would be a big improvement over the gigatonnes of CO2 we're chucking blithely into the atmosphere.

And plastics. And probably jet fuel (fusion reactors probably won't be very light or energy dense, and of course you still need to store your generated electricity in a dense form somehow). Natural gas will still be very important, as we use a lot of that to make fertilizer - and we tend to get that out alongside of oil.

While it's true transport costs are more fuel than anything else, fusion reactors are not an automatic fix. What would we do with an effectively safe and unlimited heat source? Use it to heat water to steam, turn turbines, and generate electricity, just like we do with coal stations and fission reactors. Or use the turbines directly, if you go back to early coal. Still, that's going to be heavy, and probably maintenance intensive - it certainly is with any other form of getting useful work out of a heat engine. So big ships, yup, probably. Cars and planes? Not so much. We'd still need to solve the energy storage problem. Otherwise we'd just switch everything to super-capacitor powered systems charged by electricity from a giant network of fission reactors already.

We do have nuclear batteries already, of course. They're still not really small enough to be DeLorean suitable. Though with ENOUGH power, we could just synthesize hydrocarbons from air and water, and then reburn them like we do now I guess.

More water, fertilizer and politics. Almost free energy to transport it would help, but it wouldn't stop the iowa agribusiness influence, or stop the warlords stealing food shipments, or make food crops grow in dustbowls or exhausted soil - you'd still need long term planning and massive infrastructure changes to really improve things, which we've already demonstrated aren't really our strengths as a species...

In 1994 a friend and I assembled a .22 from hardware store pipe, a hacksaw, a drill, some nails, and springs. It had a hammer and a trigger. We followed no plans...we just knew you needed a barrel, and something to smack the rim of the bullets we had...and we improvised

Ah, but you forgot something something Libertarian something something Internet something something Freedom!

Leaving it running for at least 2 weeks is not exactly promptly in my book. Even putting it in the release code disabled, without notification, is shady as hell. The forums are apparently riddled with complaints about gpu problems, including dead graphics cards on machines running the bitcoin software. While it's entirely possible it's pure co-incidence, it's also entirely possible they damaged thousands of dollars worth of high end graphics cards - which given they can easily cost $500 a pop, wouldn't take many. Consumer grade GPUs aren't designed to run full throttle for weeks at a time. Especially if, for example, a gamer has a manual fan control so they can shut up the half dozen case fans when idling, and ramp them up when they start a gaming session (I use this exact setup). A couple of generations back, I fitted after market copper heatsinks and fans to my GPUs to improve cooling at lower fan speeds, but the downside was they had to be manually controlled via a rheostat, so if something like this had been running without my knowledge it could easily have literally cooked my gpus without me being any the wiser as I ramped them down when to cut noise I was just browsing slashdot et al. Those cards are still trucking in a friend's machine several years later, incidentially.

Criminal damage in the course of trespass for profit? Seriously bad judgement, and really not funny. Worth jail time? No. Worth some real consequences? Yes.

The problem is also the heat sink. Without convection and conduction, you're left with heat radiation, which is pretty damn slow. Worse, any such heat sink would actually pick up more heat due to being in direct sunlight - the existing solar shield on it to protect the instruments was at 400k! Would depend on the design, but I imagine it would be tricky to even break even against solar heating - that's a lot of energy headed your way all the time (and solar panels only convert a small part of it). So if you packed some kind of big folding heatsink to get it in the launch vehicle, you'd also need a folding shield to protect that too. Complex and heavy, and that's before you even start on the active heat pump system, which is a nightmare engineering job in space in and of itself - you really can't afford it to fail.

Frankly carrying your own dump tank of coolant (which eventually gets effectively depleted) seems like it probably was the sensible option. We got 4 years of unique data gathering, and it will take a lot longer before we finish processing it. Space is a really harsh environment, even for machines.

Christians don't believe in many Gods - Odin, Zeus, Mars, Allah, His Noodliness, Cthulu, to name a few. I just believe in one less. By the way, the clue is in the name - atheist. As in not a theist, i.e. not a believer. I don't think about, or worry about, Gods or their absence, except when theists turn up, usually to tell them politely I'm an atheist, so thank you, but not interested, and now would you kindly stop ringing my doorbell every weekend and posting wasted flyers through my door.

To borrow phrasing from a subsequent reply - "atheists are also making a decision based on a belief of their own: that there is not a God."

This is not correct. I simply don't factor belief in Gods into my decisions at all. As a Christian, do you classify yourself as a non-Odinist? Do you factor your non belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster into your every day life and decisions? Are you an active, dues paid member of the 'Thor is not a real God' club, meetings on Thor'sday, except every second week, on Woden'sday? (Seriously, look up how many old Gods have days of the week named after them - romance languages like French use the Roman gods instead)

So unless you can tell me with a straight face that on Saturdays you actively excercise your non-belief in Saturn, aka Chronos, father of Zeus, and use it affect your decisions and thought process, then please give atheists the same courtesy and accept that we simply don't believe the same things as you, and that does make our non belief in Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, or Mary Mother Of God (forgive me, not sure which sect you are) any more a religous belief than your non belief in Saturn, Woden etc makes you an active non Wodenist or non Saturnist.

The whole thing about proof is our response to getting bugged by evangelical theists of all stripes. 'MY God is the one true God, and my faith is the one true faith, and you should believe it too!' - to which we say, 'Fine. Prove it.'. We certainly don't spend our days thinking about it, or incorporating it in our decisions. Well, maybe Dawkins does. But he's a sexist blowhard, and is not a representative of all atheists, any more than Abu Hamza represents all Muslims, or Koran burning Terry Jones represents all Christians. Most of us are normal, quiet people who simply don't have a particular belief that some others do, and there's plenty to go around. Not being religious does not make us weird, strange, scary or sinful. We just don't want the State to dictate what beliefs we should be forced to live by.

TLDR; if atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is the most popular hobby in the world. I have some 'What Would Cthulu do? Devour all!' bumper stickers so you can factor your not-Cthuluist religion into your daily life.

Once you've got the ADE version epub, you can easily strip off the DRM using a calibre plugin, so you don't have to faff about with authorising devices in future when you change reader/app.

I did that with the books I bought for my kobo; I've since upgraded to a kindle paperwhite, and used calibre to convert the drm-removed files to mobi, and can read them on that now. If a higher-res kobo with built in light had been available at the time, I probably would have stuck with that...

Well it's certainly pretty straightfoward to remove the adobe digital editions drm from the epub and get a vanilla, unrestricted epub at the end of it - as long as you have the key to download and open it in the first place, anyway. As I understand it, epub DRM is done as an additional layer, separate from the XML/CSS that makes up the document itself, and no particular scheme is part of the spec - once the drm layer is removed from the content, it's no different to an unrestricted epub. But the file itself is an epub extension, so the ADEPT DRM is admittedly inside the zip file, and you need something capable of reading adobe digital editions restricted epubs to read it, i.e. pretty much any e-reader except the kindle. For me, the drm layer is a wrapper round the content that once removed gives a vanilla epub, but as you define it, no, it's not a separate wrapper with a custom extension.

And what are IT supposed to do? Leave a known vulnerable version with dozens of critical flaws - including the HIGHLY exploitable browser plugin - on business critical PCs across the org, including the business critical ones of that small group?

Who's neck would it be if those machines got remote rooted by some chinese hacker driveby? I'm betting not yours.

Perhaps a dialog with IT where you don't install the browser plugin at least, and firewall the group off from the rest of the network in exchange for a tested, custom (i.e. slower) rollout for your setup. It wouldn't hurt if your department volunteered to cough up the cash to pay for the extra engineer time required...

Or you could start evaluating alternative platforms for your business critical software that don't have more holes than my colander?

For future reference, the adobe digital edition version is the drm-wrapped epub for transferring to any compatible app/reader. For kobo store to kobo reader, they use their own format (though it's still epub inside I think) - the formatting is a little better sometimes than the epub version. So you can buy in the kobo store, on pc or reader, and then sync directly over wifi into the kobo without needing to run it through calibre or any pc first - once it's in your kobo store library, you can delete and download direct as many times as you like. If you don't have wifi, you can download it in the kobo desktop app (again in kobo's own library format) and sync to the kobo over usb. I haven't tried it in wine (the desktop app is windows or osx only), but that may work better for getting it onto the reader than going via adobe crapware.

Of course, that still leaves you with getting a permanent copy to put in calibre via adobe digital editions, left as an exercise for the reader. Given you'd already paid for it, I'd probably have just pirated the drm free version...