Argoff, I tried finding your contact information but could not. I'd like to use your essay on my site. Despite your views on intellectual property, I'd still feel better getting your permission first.
Paul Davies is a religious person. And so when there are two competing theories, one of which includes his ideals of religion, and one which does not, he will choose the first if there is no other evidence given. The reason that the multiverse theory is postulated is to give a kind of evolutionary account of the cosmology of the universe. Who knows if there are other universes, or if they are anything like our own? We certainly will never know.
But Davies' favored alternative is a much less viable option. To explain away the existence of our world with something that's even more complicated, such as God, is no explanation at all. Explanations reduce complex things to simple things. And if God can create something as complex as the universe, he must clearly have at least that much complexity within Himself.
We've seen this conflict before. Look at these well designed humans! How could they have possibly arrived upon this Earth? Surely only a being as complex as God could have accomplished such a wonderful feat! This was the great argument of the last two centuries, and the consensus is that evolution and natural selection form a much better explanation than divine creation.
And I guess not much has changed since then. Look at this well designed universe! If things were only slightly different, no life could have been formed at all. Surely there is a divine influence at work! But whenever you drop something like God into your explanation, you've only made your job harder. Now instead of explaining life or the universe, you have to explain the existence of this vastly powerful and mysterious creature that made it all take place.
The other possibilities, though possessing many flaws, are much more plausible. It's much more plausible to think that many universes were created, and that only those suitable for life actually developed life, than it is to think that there is only one universe, whose existence can only be explained though divine creation.
The Sheffer stroke is very useful for theoretical CS, but little use for practical CS. Since we know that anything that can be represented with ANDs, ORs, and NOTs can be reduced to NORs (Sheffer strokes), we can speak of the limitations and capabilities of the Sheffer stroke and have it apply to all CS. But would someone want to program in it? Hell no, you're absolutely right about that.
Is it useless for practical purposes? I think not. I can easily imagine a logic interpreter converting everything to Sheffer strokes as an intermediary form, to simplify the task of the interpreter.
I'll third that. No one wants a "Yes" man. When the shit hits the fan, there will be hell to pay. And then when business starts saying, "How come we didn't see this was going to happen," you'll look good, and feel better, knowing that you suggested the right action before it was too late.
Show me someone who has been imprisoned even though they were innocent and I will give a crap.
Happens all the time. That's why even the accused have rights. If things like this can happen even when all procedures of law are followed, imagine what can happen when all the procedures are bypassed in the name of "security".
Please, no more roll your own classes for features that have been part of the language for years, especially collection classes.
This isn't something you do on a whim. But on a tight loop that has an iteration for every character of a file of several megabytes, you can't keep calling iter.next(). Code reuse is nice, but I've never seen a class that is one size fits all. Always using the existing API, even when it doesn't make sense, is just stupid.
If you feel the need to move to a database, you want a real one...
That's a BS argument if I ever heard one. I regularly find myself programming "lite" versions of Java util classes, because the ones included in the API are too bulky. So, under your line of reasoning, if I need, i.e., a Set class, I should always go for the most featureful and heavyweight version I can find. There should never be any reason for anything lighter weight.
Of course, this is false. Every feature you add is a performance hit, and a cost hit. If you want row-level locking, stored procedures, etc, you're going to pay for it in terms of resources, performance, and money.
If you ever watch "Forensic Files", you'll see that whether someone passes or fails a polygraph examination has little to do with their guilt.
The people that are most likely to pass a poly are the total psychopaths who just don't care or have convinced themselves of their innocence. The father whose daughter has just disappeared will be so grief stricken that he'll fail a poly no matter what actually happened.
No one has come up with a satisfactory answer? To who? Someone who can never be satisfied?
To pretty much anyone but themselves. Come up with any answer, and it will have problems. We're capable of labelling things "true" and "false", but we're just not sure how we do it. If we did know how it was done, then the problem of artificial intelligence would be easy--we'd simply have to take our description of how truth is determined and program it into a computer.
In any case, suffice it to say that no general theory of "truth" has been uncontroversial, whether among philosophers, scientists, politicians, or laypersons. Think about it! If there was no controversy about what made things true, then there would be very little controversy about anything in general. You just take your theory of truth together with the available information, and viola, you have truth! But there is controversy about a great many things, and this debate spills over into general talk of what makes things true.
Without metaphysics, you would have no truth. And everyone employs the notion of truth. So everyone is a philosopher, to some respect.
You may disagree. You might say that there is nothing "metaphysical" about truth at all. If that is so, then it should be easy to say what it is that makes things true. Yet no one has come up with a satisfactory answer so far. So there is some use for philosophy.
There are plenty of other examples as well. Ethics is just a branch of philosophy. And since people are voluntary agents--that is, they interact with the world--ethics are inescapable. And since philosophical reasoning is inherent in any ethical stance, you are doing philosophy by merely choosing to continue your existence.
Philosophers take these problems that do not fit within empirical (or mathematical) study and refine them to the degree that they can be refined. You can ignore the work of philosophers, but you will just end up just rediscovering some of their results.
I think you misunderstand the grandparent post. You said
Otherwise, we'd be right back in 1984 and the last video game crash. A major contributing factor was Atari's lack of certification for games, and the subsequent glut of pure crap. Do we want to go back to that?
But there has been no event in the general computer game market that would correspond to a "crash that could only be rectified by computer makers exerting absolute control over what runs on their hardware." So perhaps there were more factors at stake in the 1984 video game crash than that Atari lacked absolute control over it's hardware.
The government spends millions if not billions of dollars processing all the tax returns each year. Not only do all tax returns have to be processed, but many of them have to be audited.
I've heard many cases of tax software saying that a person owes less to the government than they actually do. So the government evaluates this return from the tax software, and either runs it through its own program to check it or hires an expensive accountant to check it. Then the goverment figures out that the return is in error, and has to contact the tax payer to reconcile the difference.
Most problems of this sort would be totally avoided if the government published a program that represented the corpus of knowledge of the tax system. Hell, they practically do it already. If you look at tax forms, it looks like program pseudo-code.
The only reason makers of tax software get so much money is that gathering all this information is a big pain in the ass for the average citizen. It would be a pain in the ass for the government to do it as well, but they already do it.
So really, the private tax software packages are just duplications of the government's work.
When the apple is thrown away from Earth, there are two vectors: the velocity vector pointing away from Earth, and the acceleration vector pointing towards Earth. Assuming that the acceleration vector never decreases to zero, the velocity vector will continue to decrease in magnitude and, eventually, point the other way--towards Earth.
Of course, many things complicate this picture, such as other bodies in the universe, the theory of relativity, the possibility of orbit, and so on. There is one complicating factor that does concern us particularly--the cosmological constant. This allows there to be a speed S such that if you throw the ball faster than S, it never comes back. Without the inflationary model, and without the other complicating factors, there would be no such speed S.
First of all, do not extrapolate beyond what you could possibly know. We live today, and we have evidence that there were things before us for a very long time. But we have no guide as to what exists "before the universe". Had you seen X number of universes, and knew the nature of their origin, you might be able to guess the nature of the origin of our universe. But no one knows about other universes, let alone what happened "before the beginning" of our own universe.
Secondly, from my understanding, the Big Bang complements the Inflationary Model. Everything started accelorating from a giant explosion. But as the galaxies got further apart, the void between them tended to increase it's size. This is the mysterious "inflation" force that keeps galaxies accelorating away from each other.
There must be such a force if everything keeps expanding forever. Imagine that Earth is the only object in the universe, and someone throws an apple straight up so that it does not fall into orbit. Eventually, no matter how far away that apple gets, it will come back to Earth. That's because there is nothing accelorating it away from Earth, and gravity pulls it towards Earth. In order for the apple to keep increasing it's distance from Earth, something must keep pushing on it.
The thing that keeps pushing it is the inflationary force, or, alternatively, the cosmological constant. It does not explain the origins of the universe, but rather it's fate. So it is irrelevant to a question of "the beginning of time."
Thinks like "Big O" algorithm analysis, data storage techniques, and compiler theory form the basis of Computer Science and provide the structural underpinnings for most of the software engineering methodologies out there today.
Programming within certain fields can certainly be broken down into known variables. If you are programming a DB app, for example, you'll need a schema and an idea of how you are going to get information into and out of the database. Much of actual program involves such known things.
But what if you are doing something no one has done before? Software engineering simply doesn't have anything to say. Computer science involves developing means for information processing, much like X engineering is limited by whatever X is (i.e, "mechanical" engineering). But that computer science deals with "information" doesn't really limit it at all.
The only limits that can be said about information processing are either (1) so fundamental to be of no use in all but the most theoretical work, or (2) so abstract that they can never be translated into things we need.
For an example of the first, we have Turing machines. They place theoretical limits on computer science. But rarely do you see someone say, "I would do that, but it is an impossible task for a Turing machine."
For an example of the second, we have software development models. These are usually prescriptive in that they say you should write lots of documentation and form a byzantine design document before you even start thinking about code. Regardless of their relative merits, you cannot use these models to gleen any useful information. For example, the waterfall model will tell me that I should do this, and I should do that, but it will not tell me what I want to know, which is how long the project will take.
That being said, I think most attempts at analyzing a problem before solving it are doomed to failure. To determine feasability, you just have to do it. I recall several times when I would figure out a simple way to do something when analysis had previously determined, "This is impossible or impractical because..."
Computer science is about solving problems. Software engineering is trying to solve the problem of solving problems. But you can only abstract so much. In the end you have to solve the original problem. You can't just form some abstraction that lets you solve anything that could possibly come up.
The GPL is all about consumer choice. The only reason the GPL exists is to guarantee consumer choice in a world of copyrights and licenses. The GPL exploits laws that usurp consumer's control to give the control back to the consumers. If these laws did not exist, the GPL would not be needed.
This is why it is often called "copyleft" instead of "copyright". It is designed to turn copyrights on their head.
X windows virtual screens
on
Peephole Displays
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hasn't this been done before? In X, if the virtual resolution is larger than the screen resolution, you use the mouse to move around. How is this much different?
It is absolutely necessary to interpret the meaning behind what is said in the constitution. When this is done, people often accuse a judge of "legislating from the bench." But what if Congress had passed an extension of 100 billion years? This, according to the literal language of the Constitution, counts as "limited". If the judges agree that 100 billion years is too long, then the extension not only has to be limited, but effectively limited. This obligates the judges to decide what is an "effective" limit.
There is no hard and fast rule, so the judges have to decide. The Constitution makes it necessary to decide exactly what "limited" should mean, and it does not grant this power to Congress. What "limited" is interpreted to mean will have a drastic impact on what counts as Constitutional or not, but this does not imply that the SC can avoid making this decision. They are obligated to make this decision. In fact, they have made the decision. Their decision is that even an extension of 100 billion years would be permissible.
Now, something that most people miss is that there is a very easy way to weasle out of this. The Constitution says that Congress "may create limited monopolies." It never says what Congress cannot do. But again, the intention of the framers is paramount. The people writing the Constitution enumerated an ability of Congress. Taken literally, there is no limit applied to this ability. But they clearly intended there to be a limit to this ability. If no attempt is made to divine the intentions of the founders, then SC will leave themselves with very little work.
There has been a problem that has plagued philosophy for some time. It goes like this. Suppose you were just a brain in a vat, and that all your experiences were simulated. Could you possibly know it? This problem was dramatized quite well in the movie "The Matrix". The answer is that we could never tell the difference. This may not have an important impact on our lives. After all, a hamburger tastes just as good whether it's a perfect simulation or real.
But this does have impact on software. How does the software "know" that it is running on a trusted platform. It must go through APIs that tell it this. These APIs can be subverted and replaced to always say "Yes, you are running on a trusted platform!"
Maybe it doesn't go through an API. Maybe there is a DRM instruction that gets directly executed on the processor. We can't replace the API in this case, because there is none. But we can run the program through an emulator. How will the program know whether its instruction are directly running on the chip or just being emulated by another program. This emulator could be simple, it pipes most assembly instructions directly to the chip, but any DRM related instruction gets subverted to avoid limitations of DRM.
Now, I'm not saying that such a task is easy. It's also not easy (perhaps not even possible) to make a human experience a simulation that could be mistaken for reality. But the possibility cannot be ruled out. But it is important to realize that, no matter how much software manufacturers try, they simply cannot gaurantee that their program is only being run a certain way on machines that they have no access to.
If you are suggesting that subjective experience is unassailable from the point of view of a third party, you should reconsider your beliefs about those who claim to have experienced alien abductions, or religious awakenings.
becuase obviously some blowhard./ guy knows what she experienced better than she does.
If you are suggesting that subjective experience is unassailable from the point of view of a third party, you should reconsider your beliefs about those who claim to have experienced alien abductions, or religious awakenings. People judge each other all the time. If fact, you are judging those who judge others.
Also, there is a fair amount of tu quoque going on as the AC below pointed out. No one calls a woman a "blowhard" for criticizing men. General criticism of men, such as your post above, is never attributed the same negative stereotypes as are general criticisms of women.
Men claim women are too sensitive, women claim men aren't sensitive enough. Which is right? Could there even be a non-arbitrary means of deciding such a question?
One thing that can't be denied is that there are differences between men and women. These differences may be due to nature, or nurture, but they are certainly there. It is a well known fact that women chose to be involved in the computer field less than men. It should not be assumed that these decisions are coerced without evidence.
Much of the "coercion" displayed in this thread as anecdotal evidence would be laughed at by those suffering hardships in other countries. One cannot blame a lack of interest on someone else. People who do bad in school do so because they are not interested in their school work. Is is the fault of the school that they lack interest? Perhaps if we gave them better grades they would have more interest, but this would be unfair to those who had interest before unearned grades were handed out.
Similarly, there are probably ways that we could make women more interested in CS, but would this be fair to those that already have interest in the subject matter? Just as we fault no one but a student for doing poorly if it is due to lack of interest, we should fault no one for the ratios in CS curriculums except for those who, had they had different interests, would have made those ratios different.
In any IS course, you'll hear again and again how computers are merely the tool, the instrument, and the most important part of any system is the user(s).
We're already told that. It makes no difference.
That being said, to a certain degree your suggestion makes no sense. When doing advanced topics in math, it's somewhat difficult to emphasize at each and every point of theory how it relates to the betterment of society. It'd simply get in the way, and sound propagandistic. That, and the teachers would definitely be against it, since they actually have in innate desire to learn and appreciate their subject matter, rather than merely seeing it as a tool to other means. If you replaced them with people who thought otherwise, students would not so easily be able to learn the subject matter.
Slashdot Mirror
No, thank you!
Argoff, I tried finding your contact information but could not. I'd like to use your essay on my site. Despite your views on intellectual property, I'd still feel better getting your permission first.
Regards,
Brandon
Paul Davies is a religious person. And so when there are two competing theories, one of which includes his ideals of religion, and one which does not, he will choose the first if there is no other evidence given. The reason that the multiverse theory is postulated is to give a kind of evolutionary account of the cosmology of the universe. Who knows if there are other universes, or if they are anything like our own? We certainly will never know.
But Davies' favored alternative is a much less viable option. To explain away the existence of our world with something that's even more complicated, such as God, is no explanation at all. Explanations reduce complex things to simple things. And if God can create something as complex as the universe, he must clearly have at least that much complexity within Himself.
We've seen this conflict before. Look at these well designed humans! How could they have possibly arrived upon this Earth? Surely only a being as complex as God could have accomplished such a wonderful feat! This was the great argument of the last two centuries, and the consensus is that evolution and natural selection form a much better explanation than divine creation.
And I guess not much has changed since then. Look at this well designed universe! If things were only slightly different, no life could have been formed at all. Surely there is a divine influence at work! But whenever you drop something like God into your explanation, you've only made your job harder. Now instead of explaining life or the universe, you have to explain the existence of this vastly powerful and mysterious creature that made it all take place.
The other possibilities, though possessing many flaws, are much more plausible. It's much more plausible to think that many universes were created, and that only those suitable for life actually developed life, than it is to think that there is only one universe, whose existence can only be explained though divine creation.
The Sheffer stroke is very useful for theoretical CS, but little use for practical CS. Since we know that anything that can be represented with ANDs, ORs, and NOTs can be reduced to NORs (Sheffer strokes), we can speak of the limitations and capabilities of the Sheffer stroke and have it apply to all CS. But would someone want to program in it? Hell no, you're absolutely right about that.
Is it useless for practical purposes? I think not. I can easily imagine a logic interpreter converting everything to Sheffer strokes as an intermediary form, to simplify the task of the interpreter.
I'll third that. No one wants a "Yes" man. When the shit hits the fan, there will be hell to pay. And then when business starts saying, "How come we didn't see this was going to happen," you'll look good, and feel better, knowing that you suggested the right action before it was too late.
97.8 billion is way less than the GDP. Congress just allocated 80 billion for the war in Iraq. I think you mean 97.8 trillion.
Happens all the time. That's why even the accused have rights. If things like this can happen even when all procedures of law are followed, imagine what can happen when all the procedures are bypassed in the name of "security".
This isn't something you do on a whim. But on a tight loop that has an iteration for every character of a file of several megabytes, you can't keep calling iter.next(). Code reuse is nice, but I've never seen a class that is one size fits all. Always using the existing API, even when it doesn't make sense, is just stupid.
That's a BS argument if I ever heard one. I regularly find myself programming "lite" versions of Java util classes, because the ones included in the API are too bulky. So, under your line of reasoning, if I need, i.e., a Set class, I should always go for the most featureful and heavyweight version I can find. There should never be any reason for anything lighter weight.
Of course, this is false. Every feature you add is a performance hit, and a cost hit. If you want row-level locking, stored procedures, etc, you're going to pay for it in terms of resources, performance, and money.
If you ever watch "Forensic Files", you'll see that whether someone passes or fails a polygraph examination has little to do with their guilt.
The people that are most likely to pass a poly are the total psychopaths who just don't care or have convinced themselves of their innocence. The father whose daughter has just disappeared will be so grief stricken that he'll fail a poly no matter what actually happened.
To pretty much anyone but themselves. Come up with any answer, and it will have problems. We're capable of labelling things "true" and "false", but we're just not sure how we do it. If we did know how it was done, then the problem of artificial intelligence would be easy--we'd simply have to take our description of how truth is determined and program it into a computer.
In any case, suffice it to say that no general theory of "truth" has been uncontroversial, whether among philosophers, scientists, politicians, or laypersons. Think about it! If there was no controversy about what made things true, then there would be very little controversy about anything in general. You just take your theory of truth together with the available information, and viola, you have truth! But there is controversy about a great many things, and this debate spills over into general talk of what makes things true.
Ok, I'll bite.
Without metaphysics, you would have no truth. And everyone employs the notion of truth. So everyone is a philosopher, to some respect.
You may disagree. You might say that there is nothing "metaphysical" about truth at all. If that is so, then it should be easy to say what it is that makes things true. Yet no one has come up with a satisfactory answer so far. So there is some use for philosophy.
There are plenty of other examples as well. Ethics is just a branch of philosophy. And since people are voluntary agents--that is, they interact with the world--ethics are inescapable. And since philosophical reasoning is inherent in any ethical stance, you are doing philosophy by merely choosing to continue your existence.
Philosophers take these problems that do not fit within empirical (or mathematical) study and refine them to the degree that they can be refined. You can ignore the work of philosophers, but you will just end up just rediscovering some of their results.
But there has been no event in the general computer game market that would correspond to a "crash that could only be rectified by computer makers exerting absolute control over what runs on their hardware." So perhaps there were more factors at stake in the 1984 video game crash than that Atari lacked absolute control over it's hardware.
The government spends millions if not billions of dollars processing all the tax returns each year. Not only do all tax returns have to be processed, but many of them have to be audited.
I've heard many cases of tax software saying that a person owes less to the government than they actually do. So the government evaluates this return from the tax software, and either runs it through its own program to check it or hires an expensive accountant to check it. Then the goverment figures out that the return is in error, and has to contact the tax payer to reconcile the difference.
Most problems of this sort would be totally avoided if the government published a program that represented the corpus of knowledge of the tax system. Hell, they practically do it already. If you look at tax forms, it looks like program pseudo-code.
The only reason makers of tax software get so much money is that gathering all this information is a big pain in the ass for the average citizen. It would be a pain in the ass for the government to do it as well, but they already do it.
So really, the private tax software packages are just duplications of the government's work.
As others have pointed out, I'm incorrect in concluding that the apple must fall back to Earth.
Yes, I've taken calculus (degree in math, if you can believe it). Just wasn't my best and brightest today.
When the apple is thrown away from Earth, there are two vectors: the velocity vector pointing away from Earth, and the acceleration vector pointing towards Earth. Assuming that the acceleration vector never decreases to zero, the velocity vector will continue to decrease in magnitude and, eventually, point the other way--towards Earth.
Of course, many things complicate this picture, such as other bodies in the universe, the theory of relativity, the possibility of orbit, and so on. There is one complicating factor that does concern us particularly--the cosmological constant. This allows there to be a speed S such that if you throw the ball faster than S, it never comes back. Without the inflationary model, and without the other complicating factors, there would be no such speed S.
First of all, do not extrapolate beyond what you could possibly know. We live today, and we have evidence that there were things before us for a very long time. But we have no guide as to what exists "before the universe". Had you seen X number of universes, and knew the nature of their origin, you might be able to guess the nature of the origin of our universe. But no one knows about other universes, let alone what happened "before the beginning" of our own universe.
Secondly, from my understanding, the Big Bang complements the Inflationary Model. Everything started accelorating from a giant explosion. But as the galaxies got further apart, the void between them tended to increase it's size. This is the mysterious "inflation" force that keeps galaxies accelorating away from each other.
There must be such a force if everything keeps expanding forever. Imagine that Earth is the only object in the universe, and someone throws an apple straight up so that it does not fall into orbit. Eventually, no matter how far away that apple gets, it will come back to Earth. That's because there is nothing accelorating it away from Earth, and gravity pulls it towards Earth. In order for the apple to keep increasing it's distance from Earth, something must keep pushing on it.
The thing that keeps pushing it is the inflationary force, or, alternatively, the cosmological constant. It does not explain the origins of the universe, but rather it's fate. So it is irrelevant to a question of "the beginning of time."
Programming within certain fields can certainly be broken down into known variables. If you are programming a DB app, for example, you'll need a schema and an idea of how you are going to get information into and out of the database. Much of actual program involves such known things.
But what if you are doing something no one has done before? Software engineering simply doesn't have anything to say. Computer science involves developing means for information processing, much like X engineering is limited by whatever X is (i.e, "mechanical" engineering). But that computer science deals with "information" doesn't really limit it at all.
The only limits that can be said about information processing are either (1) so fundamental to be of no use in all but the most theoretical work, or (2) so abstract that they can never be translated into things we need.
For an example of the first, we have Turing machines. They place theoretical limits on computer science. But rarely do you see someone say, "I would do that, but it is an impossible task for a Turing machine."
For an example of the second, we have software development models. These are usually prescriptive in that they say you should write lots of documentation and form a byzantine design document before you even start thinking about code. Regardless of their relative merits, you cannot use these models to gleen any useful information. For example, the waterfall model will tell me that I should do this, and I should do that, but it will not tell me what I want to know, which is how long the project will take.
That being said, I think most attempts at analyzing a problem before solving it are doomed to failure. To determine feasability, you just have to do it. I recall several times when I would figure out a simple way to do something when analysis had previously determined, "This is impossible or impractical because..."
Computer science is about solving problems. Software engineering is trying to solve the problem of solving problems. But you can only abstract so much. In the end you have to solve the original problem. You can't just form some abstraction that lets you solve anything that could possibly come up.
The GPL is all about consumer choice. The only reason the GPL exists is to guarantee consumer choice in a world of copyrights and licenses. The GPL exploits laws that usurp consumer's control to give the control back to the consumers. If these laws did not exist, the GPL would not be needed.
This is why it is often called "copyleft" instead of "copyright". It is designed to turn copyrights on their head.
Hasn't this been done before? In X, if the virtual resolution is larger than the screen resolution, you use the mouse to move around. How is this much different?
It is absolutely necessary to interpret the meaning behind what is said in the constitution. When this is done, people often accuse a judge of "legislating from the bench." But what if Congress had passed an extension of 100 billion years? This, according to the literal language of the Constitution, counts as "limited". If the judges agree that 100 billion years is too long, then the extension not only has to be limited, but effectively limited. This obligates the judges to decide what is an "effective" limit.
There is no hard and fast rule, so the judges have to decide. The Constitution makes it necessary to decide exactly what "limited" should mean, and it does not grant this power to Congress. What "limited" is interpreted to mean will have a drastic impact on what counts as Constitutional or not, but this does not imply that the SC can avoid making this decision. They are obligated to make this decision. In fact, they have made the decision. Their decision is that even an extension of 100 billion years would be permissible.
Now, something that most people miss is that there is a very easy way to weasle out of this. The Constitution says that Congress "may create limited monopolies." It never says what Congress cannot do. But again, the intention of the framers is paramount. The people writing the Constitution enumerated an ability of Congress. Taken literally, there is no limit applied to this ability. But they clearly intended there to be a limit to this ability. If no attempt is made to divine the intentions of the founders, then SC will leave themselves with very little work.
There has been a problem that has plagued philosophy for some time. It goes like this. Suppose you were just a brain in a vat, and that all your experiences were simulated. Could you possibly know it? This problem was dramatized quite well in the movie "The Matrix". The answer is that we could never tell the difference. This may not have an important impact on our lives. After all, a hamburger tastes just as good whether it's a perfect simulation or real.
But this does have impact on software. How does the software "know" that it is running on a trusted platform. It must go through APIs that tell it this. These APIs can be subverted and replaced to always say "Yes, you are running on a trusted platform!"
Maybe it doesn't go through an API. Maybe there is a DRM instruction that gets directly executed on the processor. We can't replace the API in this case, because there is none. But we can run the program through an emulator. How will the program know whether its instruction are directly running on the chip or just being emulated by another program. This emulator could be simple, it pipes most assembly instructions directly to the chip, but any DRM related instruction gets subverted to avoid limitations of DRM.
Now, I'm not saying that such a task is easy. It's also not easy (perhaps not even possible) to make a human experience a simulation that could be mistaken for reality. But the possibility cannot be ruled out. But it is important to realize that, no matter how much software manufacturers try, they simply cannot gaurantee that their program is only being run a certain way on machines that they have no access to.
Also, there is a fair amount of tu quoque going on as the AC below pointed out. No one calls a woman a "blowhard" for criticizing men. General criticism of men, such as your post above, is never attributed the same negative stereotypes as are general criticisms of women.
Men claim women are too sensitive, women claim men aren't sensitive enough. Which is right? Could there even be a non-arbitrary means of deciding such a question?
One thing that can't be denied is that there are differences between men and women. These differences may be due to nature, or nurture, but they are certainly there. It is a well known fact that women chose to be involved in the computer field less than men. It should not be assumed that these decisions are coerced without evidence.
Much of the "coercion" displayed in this thread as anecdotal evidence would be laughed at by those suffering hardships in other countries. One cannot blame a lack of interest on someone else. People who do bad in school do so because they are not interested in their school work. Is is the fault of the school that they lack interest? Perhaps if we gave them better grades they would have more interest, but this would be unfair to those who had interest before unearned grades were handed out.
Similarly, there are probably ways that we could make women more interested in CS, but would this be fair to those that already have interest in the subject matter? Just as we fault no one but a student for doing poorly if it is due to lack of interest, we should fault no one for the ratios in CS curriculums except for those who, had they had different interests, would have made those ratios different.
We're already told that. It makes no difference.
That being said, to a certain degree your suggestion makes no sense. When doing advanced topics in math, it's somewhat difficult to emphasize at each and every point of theory how it relates to the betterment of society. It'd simply get in the way, and sound propagandistic. That, and the teachers would definitely be against it, since they actually have in innate desire to learn and appreciate their subject matter, rather than merely seeing it as a tool to other means. If you replaced them with people who thought otherwise, students would not so easily be able to learn the subject matter.