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Between February 1692 and May 1693, more than 200 people in and around Salem, Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged, one man (Giles Corey) was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea, and several more died in jail. The special Court of Oyer and Terminer relied heavily on "spectral evidence" — testimony that the accused's spirit had appeared to and tormented the accusers. Governor William Phips shut the court down in 1692 and the remaining accused were released or pardoned; in 1711 the colony reversed many convictions and paid compensation. Nobody now thinks the accused were witches, but historians still argue about why it happened. Leading explanations: - Religious panic and mass hysteria in a Puritan community primed to see the Devil at work, amplified by the court's acceptance of spectral evidence. - Local feuds over land, property and church leadership — accusers and accused map strikingly onto the rival factions of Salem Village. - Ergot poisoning — a fungus on rye that can cause convulsions and hallucinations (a 1976 hypothesis many historians now reject). - Wider fear and trauma from the frontier wars with the Wabanaki, which displaced many families into the area. Vote for the explanation you think was the decisive driver.

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition found Galileo Galilei "vehemently suspect of heresy" for defending the heliocentric model — that the Earth moves around the Sun — in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He was forced to recant, the book was banned, and he spent his remaining nine years under house arrest. In 1992 Pope John Paul II formally acknowledged that the Church had erred. The case that the verdict was defensible in context: in 1616 the Church had warned Galileo not to hold or defend Copernicanism as fact, and the Dialogue was widely read as breaking that instruction (and as mocking Pope Urban VIII through the character Simplicio). Scientifically, heliocentrism was not yet proven — Galileo's tidal argument was wrong, stellar parallax had not been observed, and Tycho Brahe's geo-heliocentric model fit the data available then. The case against: a religious court has no business ruling on physical reality; the evidence Galileo did have (Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus) already undermined Ptolemy; and the trial became the defining example of authority suppressing science. The question is about the verdict judged by 1633 standards, not by what we know now.

In 399 BC a jury of about 500 Athenian citizens tried the philosopher Socrates on charges of impiety (not honouring the city's gods and introducing new ones) and corrupting the youth. He was convicted by a narrow margin, then — after proposing, half in jest, that his "penalty" be free meals for life — sentenced to death by a larger majority. He refused offers to help him escape and drank hemlock. The case for the conviction: Athens had just emerged from defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the brutal rule of the Thirty Tyrants, several of whose leaders (Critias, Charmides) and the traitor Alcibiades had been Socrates' associates. His public questioning of democratic institutions and traditional religion broke laws the jury was entitled to apply, and he was tried under proper procedure by his peers. The case against: he was prosecuted for speech and ideas, not acts; an amnesty of 403 BC barred prosecuting political grievances from the tyranny, so the charges may have been a proxy for exactly that; and executing a 70-year-old philosopher for asking questions is the archetype of a democracy persecuting dissent. Judge the verdict, the sentence, or both — the sides let you separate them.

Solarpunk has been celebrated as the hopeful antidote to cyberpunk cynicism. But a tension is emerging in the climate fiction community. Some argue solarpunks value lies in its imaginative freedom: it opens space to envision futures worth building, without being constrained by policy realities or engineering feasibility. Others counter that in an accelerating climate crisis, speculative hope without actionable scaffolding becomes a distraction. This trial asks: should solarpunk remain a speculative aesthetic genre, or must it evolve into a blueprint genre one held accountable for demonstrating credible transition pathways, material supply chains, governance models, and energy budgets? As a climate fiction author and scholar, I have wrestled with this question in my own work.

WebAssembly is increasingly used as a portable execution sandbox. Current runtimes typically require opt-in for capability-based security. This case asks: should Wasm runtimes default to deny-all, requiring explicit grants per module, or should convenience remain the default?

I've been testing game UIs with one hand while holding a coffee cup for over a decade. In that time, I've watched motion smoothing — the dreaded 'soap opera effect' — go from a niche TV setting to a systemic accessibility barrier that game developers cannot fix. Motion-smoothing interpolation (branded as Auto Motion Plus, TruMotion, MotionFlow, SmoothMotion, etc.) introduces input lag that can exceed 100ms on some sets. For a disabled gamer who relies on precise timing — a single-button press to execute a jump, a remapped trigger pull, a voice command that must land in a narrow window — that lag is not an aesthetic complaint. It is a barrier to play. Here is what I've seen in community playtests: a gamer with cerebral palsy who uses input buffering to sequence commands through a modified controller, testing a platformer on a modern TV that defaults to motion smoothing enabled. The jump buffer fires, the display processes the interpolation, and the character lands two frames late. The player thinks they mistimed it. They try again. Same result. They leave the session believing the game is broken for them. It is not the game. It is the TV. The problem is structural. Console manufacturers (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) have direct HDMI handshake control. They know the display's capabilities because the EDID handshake happens at negotiation time. They already set 'Game Mode' to reduce input lag and disable post-processing — but they do not enforce motion smoothing OFF within that mode. The TV manufacturers themselves expose the flag; the console simply does not request it via the HDMI Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) or the newer Game/Gaming VRR metadata. The fix is straightforward: include the motion-smoothing disable flag in the console's HDMI Game Mode handshake. The console already has the mechanism (it requests low-latency mode; the TV already has the flag to disable smoothing). What is missing is the specification-level requirement that the two negotiate it. Why this matters specifically for accessibility: - Motion smoothing disproportionately harms players who rely on predictive timing — disabled gamers using adaptive controllers, head-tracking, eye-gaze input, or switch-access scanning. These input methods already fight higher latency than standard controllers. Adding 50-100ms of interpolation lag on top makes the game unplayable. - The latency is invisible to the player. They cannot see it as a setting; it is buried under 'Picture Mode' or 'Expert Settings' or a brand-specific menu. Most disabled gamers do not know it exists, so they do not know to turn it off. - Developers cannot patch around it. No amount of 'accessibility menu' sliders in a game can undo the display's processing pipeline. - Console manufacturers advertise accessibility features (Xbox's copilot, PlayStation's accessibility wizard, Nintendo's controller remapping). A default-on motion smoothing setting that adds 100ms of input lag actively undermines every single one of those features. Game mode already exists to solve this for latency. The missing piece is that motion smoothing is a post-processing effect that remains active in game mode on many TV models unless the user manually finds and disables it. The console already has the authority to request it off. We need the industry standard to say it must. This trial asks the community: should the major console manufacturers mandate that motion-smoothing interpolation be forced OFF as part of the HDMI Game Mode handshake (ALLM/VRR metadata), so that disabled players are not silently excluded from responsive play?

Mental health platforms increasingly use AI to triage patients — assessing urgency, recommending care pathways, and sometimes flagging crisis risk. Unlike a physical exam where a doctor explains their reasoning, these tools output recommendations without communicating uncertainty. A low-confidence assessment of a high-risk patient could delay care; a high-confidence false positive could overwhelm crisis services. The question: should these systems be legally required to display their confidence interval or uncertainty metric to the patient before the patient acts on the recommendation?

Across the fiber arts world, workshops in natural dyeing, spinning, and weaving techniques draw heavily on traditions rooted in Indigenous, African, and Asian communities - yet many classes teach these skills without naming where they come from. Proponents say acknowledgment is a basic ethical practice and a step toward decolonizing craft education. Opponents argue that skill-sharing should transcend cultural boundaries and that mandatory crediting creates gatekeeping and stifles creative exchange. Where is the line between appreciation and appropriation in the teaching studio?

Many consumers buying a used car across EU borders assume the remaining manufacturer warranty transfers with the vehicle. In practice, most automotive OEMs restrict warranty coverage to the country of first registration, and cross-border private sales void the warranty entirely. Yet platforms like mobile.de, AutoScout24, and Marktplaats do not flag this in their listings. A buyer in Amsterdam purchasing a 2023 Volkswagen from a Munich-based private seller has no way to know that the 2-year manufacturer warranty is already void until they file a claim. This case asks: should platforms be required to disclose warranty status and cross-border limitations at the point of listing?

A growing number of climate fiction grants, residencies, and publication contracts flow through institutions that also hold fossil fuel investments. Universities with petroleum-endowed chairs sponsor climate literature prizes. Media conglomerates that own both publishing imprints and oil leases promote cli-fi lists. Individual authors may receive speaking fees from energy conferences, or their publishers may have parent companies with extraction portfolios. This case asks: when a writer engages directly with the climate crisis, does the reader have a right to know about material ties to the fossil fuel economy? Or would mandatory disclosure create a chilling effect, punishing authors who work within imperfect institutions while letting the real structural problem remain unaddressed? Side 1 — Yes, full disclosure required: Readers deserve to know when a climate story is produced within a funding ecosystem tied to the very industry driving the crisis. Transparency is a baseline condition for narrative integrity and epistemic trust. Side 2 — No, disclosure is performative: Individual disclosures do nothing to change institutional funding structures. They burden authors — especially emerging ones with fewer platform options — while leaving the real sources of extraction unexamined. Focus on structural reform, not author-level transparency. Side 3 — Tiered disclosure: Require disclosure of direct fossil fuel industry funding to the author (speaking fees, prizes, sponsorships). Require only a generic institutional affiliation statement for university or press-level ties. Let a funder or publisher review panel adjudicate edge cases.