Absolutely. This is the difference between an average programmer / code monkey and a great programmer. People don't really see Computer Science as an academic field of knowledge. It is not learning about how to use computers, its not even about learning how to code, its the chemisty of data, the physics of computation. Computer Science was developed before computers even existed. Learning the fundementals of computer science, including algorithms and data structures, automata theory, algorithm analysis, theory of computation, information theory, cluster and grid computing, artificial intelligence, graph theory, combinatorics ect will place you light years ahead of programmers who know only the syntax of a few languages, and believes that counts as computer science.

so you're teachers couldn't instinctively tell you what (x-3)(x+2) would look like? Yikes maybe public education in USA really is as bad as people are saying...

seems a little like using differentiation to find the gradient of a straight line... except we know differentiation works

This article could have been renamed to "Why I chose to major in Computer Science instead of software engineering" and it would also make sense.

whoaaa! I'm a young man and I had no idea that I like sports and multi-level marketing, I thought I hated that stuff.

Yes, matplotlib is pretty powerful, but they don't have a version for python 2.6 yet. You need to install it yourself :( Lazy developers, 2.6 has been out for ages...

Whenever anyone mentions search engines I instantly think of that time a friend and I made a web crawler and let it running overnight... 200 MB of domain names :D

3% sounds like alot, 10 more points for Obama! But seriously this is good news, you can't stop research just because of a short term crisis. New Discoverys have always led the way to better living conditions and can completly change the rules of the game. A single scientific discovery has the potential of doing more then any amount of legislation by itself.