I Had No Idea The Fifth Amendment Was This Important

I guess this was boingboinged but I saw it on Crimesift — videos of a law professor and a cop discussing the reasons never, ever to talk to police. For any reason. I had no idea. The Fifth Amendment isn’t a last resort if you’re guilty. It’s a basic operating procedure if you want to minimize your chances of being wrongly convicted if you’re innocent. Not because police are evil or anything like that, but because there is no way to be sure you’re not breaking a law at any given time, and because the system is set up such that there’s no way anything you say to the police can possibly help you (it can be disqualified as hearsay by the prosecutor, no matter how useful it would be to you) and there’s about a dozen ways that it can hurt you.

The videos are long but worth watching. After the defense attorney speaks, the cop gets up and affirms everything the defense attorney has said, with the qualification that while he is willing to lie, mislead, and manipulate people into confessing, he will not have someone in the “interview” room in the first place unless he honestly believes they’re guilty. Of course, if that’s true, then you should assume if you’re being interviewed by the police that they probably already honestly believe you’re guilty of something, wrongly… which means it’s best to shut the hell up, for the reasons given in the previous video by the defense attorney.

Yow. Eye-opening.

I’m A Jerk For Thinking This I Guess

I read today in the headlines that there was a shooting at a church in Tennessee. I thought something like this, though not in these exact words: “That’s weird, in the South, churches are usually in the business of inciting violent hatred; they’re not usually the target of it.”

When I actually read the news story about it though, my prejudiced thought seemed to be vindicated: this was far from a stereotypical southern Evangelical church: it was a progressive, liberal, ACLU-supporting, Unitarian Universalist church. Very much a target for crazy gun-toting hateful people in America.

UPDATE:

Yahoo News: Man Shot Churchgoers Over Liberal Views

On the flipside, Topher noted in the comments that when you hear “violence in a church in the South” the first thing you might logically think of is church burnings, which have been linked to race, robbery, and just general malice.

Foxconn Motherboards Detect And Sabotage Linux, Apparently at Bill Gates’s Specific Behest … or not

Holy crap, deep evil from Microsoft seems so late-nineties. But this bit just came out. And it references the late nineties! Two parts:

A technically savvy Ubuntu user reverse-engineered the BIOS on his badly-performing Foxconn-brand motherboard. In it he found a program that checked to see if Linux was running on it, and fed it bad information about the hardware (specifically about the ACPI system, which is a standardized system for power management on PCs) so that it would not work correctly. When he contacted Foxconn about it, they said that the motherboard wasn’t “certified under Linux” so who cares? The user, Ryan, pointed out that the board was advertised as supporting ACPI, and its ACPI was intentionally crippled if you ran Linux on it. They blew him off.

This would all be a minor saga in the history of third-rate hardware manufacturers, if it were not for the discovery last year of a Bill Gates email from 1999 where he complained about how Microsoft was working so hard on the ACPI standard, and Linux was reaping the benefits, and wondered if there was some way to make sure that “even if they are open” the ACPI extensions to the BIOS would only work with Windows.

Huh.

UPDATE:

Or maybe it’s all just nonsense and confusion, and there’s nothing sinister about the hardware at all.