I've met a handful of programmers who had a liberal arts background (i.e. Classical studies) who did programming at a non-tech company. For instance, working in the back office of a retailer or a bank to code up some internal desktop apps, web apps, or create-remove-update-delete business apps. For these jobs, knowing trade-type of skills (i.e. some experience programming especially in the "trendy" technologies) I believe is adequate. However, these jobs may not always feel very rewarding, what some computer scientists might call "code monkey" jobs... As a computer scientist, I would say it'd be very good to get a degree in it to strengthen your understanding of the theoretical background, which will help you to get a deeper understanding, helping you to become a smarter programmer and likely open the doors to more interesting projects/positions.

So what if there's no girls in my major? It is possible to interact with people outside of your studies. If anything it brings a healthy balance to your life.

So am I expected to move to Chrome now so I can be part of some exclusive club to validate my IQ? Or move away from IE so people don't think I'm stupid? Maybe they should have called this study, "Chrome Users Are Most Insecure?"

At this point, the best way to keep their credibility from further deteriorating is to provide good reports on what is going on. E.g., not like PSN, more like Amazon. Currently that Azure dashboard doesn't even load for me... has it been slashdotted or something?

As an aside: whenever a cloud system goes down, people come out to rag on the reliability of the cloud. While I'm also annoyed by the marketing guys throwing around "just put it in the cloud!!" as much as anyone else, and agree some applications make no sense living in the cloud, I'd also like to point out that for some people, doing the admin work in-house results in the same amount or more headaches.

The prevailing trend in Canada seems to be drifting way from scientific research: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16861468

Each time I read a new article about my country, I become more and more ashamed to be Canadian...

Not sure how prevalent it is in the U.S., but in Ontario, Canada, "Software Engineering" is recognized as an official type of "Engineer" -- http://www.peo.on.ca/enforcement/Software_engineering_page.html. In Ontario, like the states that you mentioned, it is illegal to call yourself an engineer without being granted the title by the self-regulating engineering body of the province. In order to be granted the title you have to taken part in an engineering university program that's been accredited by that body, and then take some further ethics tests, and work for a while under an engineer who has x years of experience.

It is a fairly new 'discipline' in engineering and I went to such a "Software Engineering" program that is accredited. The thing is, I know zero people in my graduating class of about 90 who actually took the extra steps to become a professional engineer. Mainly for two reasons; a) It only has a meaning in Ontario, and most of the lucrative software 'engineering' jobs are not in Ontario, and b) Even in Ontario, its relevance for employment is fairly limited... approaching useless I would say.

OS X's desktop search was not useful for me out-of-the-box, but I found it pretty good after I changed the settings to limit its search scope so that it's not searching for everything under the sun. I limit it to searching only Applications, Documents, PDF Documents, and Movies, because that's all I search for. Now it doubles as a smarter "Run" function (a la Windows) and document opener.

Yeah, f that noise.

Leica M9 or go home.

I buy audio CDs and like to rip them because I usually ruin my CDs very quickly. So the CD drive isn't useless to me. I may be focused in computer science, mostly hung up with math and algos, a bit behind the tech curve, but I like to think I still qualify as a computer 'professional.' : )

I think creating anything that someone values would appear 'cool' to them because it relates to their life in some way. For instance, creating the iPhone is cool because they use it every day. Getting into the details of programming an operating system for the phone, talking about the kernel's scheduler, etc, will never be cool. The same way that rock music is cool, but an in-depth conversation about the intricacies of music theory at a party is decidedly not cool.

Statements like these make me embarrassed to be in the sciences for two reasons. First, for asserting that people in my discipline believe that there's nothing worthy in human knowledge in the humanities; and second, for suggesting that people in the sciences are just doing it for the earning power. These statements demonstrate a narrow perspective of the world. And speaking of that, I'd like to point out that there are plenty of countries where it is fully possible to get an education without "enormous undischargeable debt."

I disagree. Anybody who can grasp university level mathematics can be trained to program. Programming is nothing more than formalizing what you want to do into a language. If you can formalize a problem into the language of mathematics, then programming is just a matter of learning syntax. Maybe they don't immediately comprehend the latest posh programming paradigm or trend, but given a little bit of time, they can program. The way I see it, the math behind programming is orders of magnitude more involved and complex than programming itself. Programming is just a method to manifest those ideas.

This, is a coin!

This is what I would suggest as well. I was working on a project in which all of the members were developing on Ubuntu machines. I had to move away so I didn't have access to a Ubuntu machine anymore, just my Macbook Pro. Changing the build scripts to work with Ubuntu and OS X would have been a big pain, so I installed Parallels and had Ubuntu running as a guest OS. Part of the program in the project had to pull images from a USB camera and render it with OpenGL and to save some resources I ssh into the guest Ubuntu and have the X11 apps inside Ubuntu forward to the OS X's X11 server. Performance is pretty decent.

Wait, I don't see how the security beach at Comodo rules out #1. Maybe I'm not understanding CAs correctly, but the two situations have a big distinction. In the Comodo case, somebody breached Comodo, a CA authority, and issued new CAs which could be used by a malicious site to claim that they are some other trusted site. In the case of Stuxnet, already-issued CAs for Realtek and JMicron were stolen to sign malicious drivers. CAs that had already signed legitimate drivers in the past. Aren't these two cases a bit different? I'm not saying that the CAs at Realtek and JMicron couldn't have been stolen without real human assets, but how does the Comodo case change anything?