I Googled "History of the 5th Amendment" and got a crap=ton of hits. Not the least of which is this:

"The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The right was created in reaction to the excesses of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission—British courts of equity that operated from 1487-1641. These courts utilized the inquisitorial method of truth-seeking as opposed to the prosecutorial, meaning that prosecutors did not bear the burden of proving a case, but that sufficient "proof" came from browbeating confessions out of the accused. These courts required the accused to answer any question put to him, without advance notice of his accusers, the charges against him, or the evidence amassed. With the abolition of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, the common law courts of England incorporated this principle of nemo tenetur—that no man should be bound to accuse himself. By the 18th century, English law provided that neither confessions coerced during the trial nor pretrial confessions obtained through torture could be used. This was based on the belief that coerced confessions were inherently unreliable. The right to be free from self-incrimination was established in nine state constitutions and was a tenet of the common law throughout most of the colonies before it appeared in the U.S. Constitution. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the Fifth Amendment to apply not only to criminal proceedings and pretrial proceedings in criminal matters, including police-station interrogations, but also to "any other proceeding, civil or criminal, formal or informal, where his answers might incriminate him in future criminal proceedings." The law also prohibits prosecutors from making reference to a defendant's refusal to take the stand as probative of guilt. So long as the government is compelling potentially incriminating speech—either before a jury or a Senate Committee—the right can be invoked."

Seems plausible.

So many smart people on Slashdot. Why they no use their "Google-Fu"? http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/

>Distance/video learning can help to enlighten. It can even help to educate people who genuinely want to learn (typically, this works better with adults).
I have to agree here. I'm in a distance-learning theology coursework, and I'm doing 10X the work I ever did while I was in college, and learning and retaining more.

The problem here is one of relegating your own hiring practices to the realm of the very employee you are trying to avoid. Let me explain... I helped a local University (the one I attended) install a pretty massive software package. I trained their entire team on how to use it, and how to bring in what they knew about UNIX scripting to make the thing even more powerful. Six months later, one of the basic admin gigs came open, and I applied for it. I was well qualified for the position, and my experience outweighed everyone else in the department. I was perfect for the job. The screener was the department head, who was a good friend of mine as well. He was painfully sorry he couldn't hire me because the University had a "college degrees only" policy for hiring, and would have no one in these positions that didn't have a degree. Best part: a girl with a degree in Kinesiology got the gig in the computing services department doing that job. I had to train her too.

I'm sorry you can't comprehend that this does happen out there. 15 years of Java in 2000. 10 years of Windows 2000 in 2002. I've seen both asked. In fact, MANY times this has been covered right here on Slashdot... several years ago. Long before you ever joined the site. You should really pause to consider who the readers and posters in Slashdot are. Many of them are employers, consultants, engineers... Those with PhD's and in fields of research you'll never be a part of. Many of us work for the largest companies in the world.

Or 10 years of Windows 2000 in 2002. The answer is always the same, too... "that's what my client wants" and my answer is also always the same: "Then your client is an idiot and you can't count."

I think this'll only affect the desktop market. (why I run my desktop OSes - Linux, Windows, OSX - on a Mac instead of a PC). In the server space, though, that's big freaking money, and I think the manufacturers will be extremely reluctant to cause this trouble in that space. One of two things could happen here, I think... this will be enough of a political black eye that MS will give in and suggest allowances for other OSes or there will be pressure coming back from the server side toward desktops that can effect change. In any event, this will be interesting to watch.

Based on the dealings I have had with IBM over there years (several companies, different projects), IBM needs to spend their time figuring out how to make their own products work rather than trying to figure out user behavioral patterns. The fact that I've never seen a single IBM project completed at an employer of mine in the 20 years I've been in IT tells me that instead of searching their email, folks might actually need to use it as a "To-Do" instead. http://43folders.com/ http://inbozero.com/

No, I launch iTerm and go into full-screen mode and never leave. You don't *have* to use the GUI for anything you don't want to.

> U.S. joined that one 1974 Also the year WIPO became a United Nations entity. Probably the reason why.

Actually, since the inception of the Berne convention, Copyright was modified that copyright laws from country to country would be observed across political and national lines. Prior to Berne, there were no guidelines, and individual countries' copyright laws held, but for their own country. Most of these things are managed through the World Intellectual Property Organization and its Copyright Treaty signed by a great number of nations. So, diatribe aside, it isn't just the U.S.

No Agenda Show actually. They exposed (as the first scanners were going in) that the former chief of Homeland Security (Chertoff) is the one responsible for bringing them in. Nevermind his security consulting group has a client that manufactures the machines. No Agenda has been consistently months ahead of both the news and public reaction on a number of similar issues. http://noagendashow.com/

What's a "modem"? ;)

try to find a union for IT in the U.S. And then try and waggle that around as a weapon in an at-will state, and see what that gets you...

>> we banned the admins from touching the critical environments unless the software engineers who had designed said environments okayed it Interesting quote here. In the UNIX world (I'm assuming you're talking a Win environment) the security structure is exactly the opposite. You grant permissions just enough for development to do their job, granting sudo level access where necessary, holding it back where appropriate. Often times you'll find that the very most brilliant of software developers are quite uninitiate in the ways of the operating system (unless they're a systems programmer, at which point this comment does not apply). They know an IDE, perhaps some basic shell to get their job done, and maybe even a very small portion of the software serving stack they're dealing with (in a web services world, this tends to be the case). In my 20 years, I've only found 3 or 4 developers that could be trusted with shell to their own serving platform. Sad, but true. That's why I find your comment so interesting. I have never seen it where the developers (usually clueless) dictated system access policies to admins. Admins are admins for a reason. :)