I'm not even a lawyer, ass-hat.

And I guess you'll just have to take my word for it that it makes sense, if you can't comprehend the meaning. There is no double-speak there, nor is there obfuscation, double-meaning, or implication. Every word is meant in its normal literal sense.

In that scenario it would be a secondary HD and there would be evidence on the primary HD that that is what it was, including most likely file names in the command history.

It is most likely the primary drive, either that has the OS in the case of windows, or the home directory in case of most others. Your browser and email history isn't likely on a drive that infrequently mounted.

If the HD was one that you encrypted on May 23rd, 1998 and never used again, that would be a good argument. If in fact it was a HD that you used for a couple years and managed to remember the password every day until the court ordered you to produce it, then that isn't likely to be persuasive.

That is what judges are for, to map that line onto real situations.

Right, nobody doubts that you can forget in the moment. The thing about a court order to produce the number though, it isn't a pop quiz on a timer. If it takes a couple days to remember because of the pressure, you'll be fine. And even if they send you to jail over it, after a few days of thinking time, you'll likely find a quiet moment and remember.

So I agree with you entirely, but this has all been well-considered by many judges and lawyers for a long time, and all of this hashed-through already. And even most civil rights lawyers end up agreeing there is no problem here.

It is not at all established that the fallibility of remembering is due to the memories having been stored incorrectly. Most of the work I've seen is suggestive that it is actually just the process of recall that is flawed. Depending what pathways an imaginary memory-reading-machine used, it might be able to access both!

Vampires don't figure, they just suck.

4th would certainly require a warrant. A low bar for you to claiming they "could not."

This "round-Earth" theory is just a conspiracy to keep people from trying to sail far enough to find the island with the Fountain of Youth, which gets its power from excretions from the resident sand-leaches. The whole thing is funded by the medical-industrial-complex and administered by Liberal Trial Lawyers. And anybody who gets too close is executed by Soros and the Bilderberg Council.

The reason for the anti-petroleum movement is that the oil production is connected to subterranean sand-leach breeding. If they can cap all the oil wells, man-made and natural, then they can cut off the sand-leach reproductive cycle by preventing their oil-fish larva from emerging as butterflies for the migration to the Fountain where they transform into sand-leaches. Then the Fountain will die and dry up, and the Doctors will have complete control over humanity by rationing life-maintaining "treatments."

You'd need a specific scenario that contains an actual situation of such a conflict, which would then have to be analyzed in its own context.

There is not going to be a rule-of-thumb for deciding scientific disputes in advance. It will take independent parties to attempt to reproduce the work using the different formulas and analyzing the results. And then the dispute can be peer reviewed.

Your attempt to solve disputes in advance without knowing the details suggests you have dubious motives, or a lack of exposure to basic science.

Nobody cares about their opinions. In many cases, even they themselves don't value their own "opinions" on science. It is a basic misunderstanding of scientific thought that when they talk about consensus they're talking about consensus of personal opinion. No, they're talking about consensus about what is well-proven and probably correct, or close.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 97% of hard scientists in other fields will also defer to the specialists in the field being discussed.

*waves hands* "slippery slope"... and if you slide down (any supposedly slippery slope) you end up at *LIST OF HORRIBLES*. I'll agree at least there is something sloppy here. ;)

The result is still un-useful nonsense.

The presumption is that where you valued the information enough to lock it in a safe and not write down the password, that you have a good enough memory that you anticipated being able to remember it. Where you didn't presume to remember it, you would write it down somewhere, or provide for some other means to access it.

It isn't foolproof, you could eventually forget; but you could also "remember" after a few weeks in the can, too. Outside of brain damage or illness, you don't "forget" very much; even things that are hard to recall will probably pop back into your head once in awhile.

The court assumes you know your own ability to remember and that both protecting and accessing your secrets is important to you. If you have some sort of mental health problem, then that presumption isn't valid and you'll have basic protections against these inferences.

That is a totally different issue, because if they plant evidence on your computer, they don't need encryption for that. And if they're going to "go there" they can just plant some drugs on you if for some reason they don't have the technical skill to get it onto your computer, or if you have encryption.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Leaving aside that this is UK news and the UK doesn't have the 5th Amendment, protection from being forced to testify against yourself is not based on this ideology you assume it is where your memory would be protected. You misunderstand the entire reason for the right. The reason for the right is because of the long history of forced confessions. History teaches that when the police interrogate them long enough and hard enough they can get them to "confess" to almost anything; even heinous crimes carrying the death penalty. This can be achieved without traditional torture, with just hard questioning and lack of sleep. Because of the physical power the police hold over a person who has been arrested, this is a pervasive problem in places without these protections, including historical England.

But the 5th Amendment doesn't protect physical facts, and it doesn't protect your memory; it protects you from testifying about your memory. If your memory could be read by doctors using a harmless mind-reading machine, that would be allowed, because it would be physical evidence, not testimony that might have been compelled.

Another problem with compelled testimony is where they attempt to accuse a person of lying in their claim of innocence, even before it is established that they are guilty. Prosecutors are very good at that; finding some innocent detail you remember wrong, or perceived differently than witnesses, and then using that to "prove" you're lying. And your denial contains lies, that is almost the same as a confession in the hands of a skilled prosecutor.

Another example of what can be compelled is the location of a key to safe, or the combination to a safe; assuming the police have a warrant, no physical evidence is protected by the 5th Amendment, including things like the location of a key. The safe is physical evidence, not testimony. And the location of the key is an objective physical fact that is not prone to the type of abuse that a compelled confession is.

And you would send a judge to freakin' prison over your lack of understanding of the very rights you claim to value, yet somehow know nothing about. You even then somehow manage to work in a false accusation of terrorism. There is nothing basic about your ass-hattery; you're a first class champion ass-hat!