MacDefender tried to install itself on my system a few days ago. Oddly enough another fake anti-virus bit of malware did the same to my Windows machine on the same day. With MacDefender nothing happened as I have the open safe files option disabled in Safari. Of course on Windows it had already installed part of itself and was spamming UAC elevation requests non-stop until I nuked it, at least it looks like I did anyway.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until OS X became a target. Granted this isn't as bad as what happens on Windows, but the arms race has begun.

In my college the math, physics, engineering, etc departments never used scan-trons, at least not in any class I ever took. For most of the courses it's not a problem to grade by the next day since there's one, maybe two sections and maybe 50 students at the most (although I've seen as few as 6 including myself). However, in courses such as calculus and physics with hundreds of students they still managed to grade all of these exams by the next day. The exams were basically 8-10 pages long with one question with multiple parts per page and a bunch of blank space to answer. The exams were divided up amongst the graders and grad students who helped with the recitation and lab portions of the course.

Strangely some of my other courses such as psychology, sociology, and similar did use scan-tron sheets. I never got the grades the next day since the scan-tron machine was clogged up.

There is such a thing as a visual programming language. I'm sure if someone really wanted to they could wrap a good node based visual programming language around C.

Although one of the people to respond to you is right, GUIs don't mean no text.

I think I've been hanging around /. for far too long. The first thing I thought about doing after reading that guys last name was making a list like you did...

I'm so glad /. is turning into wikipedia with its bullshit. Clearly if anyone says anything good about something that they bought they are a corporate shill. In fact, I am quite clearly a corporate shill for dozens of corporations because I like their products!

When it comes to laptops your keyboard choices are pretty slim. They're all pretty much mushy scissor switch type keyboards with a short key travel distance. The only real differences I've seen between laptops is the actual key shape and to some extent the layout.

I'm not saying the keyboard isn't important of course. In fact I'm in the camp that thinks it's very important because it's one of two things you interact with constantly while using the device. I'm so picky about keyboards that I'm actually constructing my own for my desktop. When it comes to laptops there isn't anything I truly like, just a bunch I can tolerate. So the keyboard isn't even on my list of items to compare. YMMV.

The math required for a degree doesn't determine whether or not it's an engineering degree believe it or not. Chemical and petroleum engineers require a far better background in chemistry than they do in math. The math they need is the math that their chemistry background needs (stoichiometry and statistics for the most part). So by your statement they aren't true engineers. Nor are materials engineers. If one day there are genetic engineers their background will depend far more on biology and chemistry than mathematics. So they won't be engineers either.

Engineering is the application of core sciences, they all use math to varying extents but their engineering title shouldn't depend on the prerequisites set forth by the university.

Then offer Software Engineering in the Engineering department.

Perhaps I went to the wrong university, but my computer science degree was more like a software engineering degree anyway. The vast majority of my teachers were not math prodigies. I actually did both math and computer science and whenever I tried to link the two I got blank stares from my computer science professors, although my math professors could give me wonderful insights even though that wasn't their field of study.

Overall I enjoyed my math degree far more than my computer science degree; I've always been one to prefer the theory over the application. I'm sure if they had offered a choice between a software engineering degree and a pure computer science degree I would have chosen the latter and probably would have enjoyed it more. In my eyes math in a computer science degree isn't a problem, it's the fact that they're trying to meld two different subjects into the same degree. Math in computer science is just a red herring and detracts from the actual problem.

I'll have to disagree on Starcraft 2 and Mass Effect 2. I'll concede they are both good games, but not good sequels.

Starcraft 2 had a very weak storyline compared to the first. To top it off the actual game hasn't really changed. There's minor tweaks here and there, but as TFS states, it was more of a step sideways, not a step up. I know it also states not to change the basic formula, but StarCraft 2 didn't really change anything, at least not for a casual person.

Mass Effect 2 was a complete letdown compared to Mass Effect 1. ME1 had problems no doubt, but most people looked past it because the storyline was so good. ME2 didn't fix those problems though, they largely replaced them with new problems. I could go into detail but I'm sure you'll find it all on the internet anyway. Also, the storyline in ME2 was not nearly as good and the Terminator near the end drew a collective "wtf?" from my friends and I. I get that it's the middle child and can't go straight to the epic conclusion, but there were just so many things off with the storyline. Although I will say the characters were generally much more enjoyable in ME2.

How are they one step above rent-a-cops? Your statement seems to be implying that by the very virtue of not being from private industry they are better than private industry, which is a pretty weak argument. Especially when all the evidence doesn't really put them one step above anything. Further even if we assume you're right, that they're one step above rent-a-cops, how on Earth does that make you feel even remotely better? I can't even come up with an adequate analogy to express how stupid I think that sentiment is. Also note that I'm not even saying private industry would be better, I just think your post is wrong.

Oh no, they love games because they can make a lot of money off of them. Just look at the relatively recent DLC trend which is massively overpriced. Oh perhaps dedicated server binaries for PC games which as far as I've read (feel free to correct me) must be licensed by game server providers. The binaries aren't released publicly (CoD, BFBC2). Or even things you only get if you buy the game first hand but if you buy it second hand you have to pay extra to get those things (if you want them).

Let's see what they come up with next.

Well, I suppose we can wait and see what they do with Wikileaks...

If photons did have mass then they wouldn't be traveling the speed of light. The speed of light would still be a constant, but light wouldn't actually travel at that speed. As far as an alternative to dark matter, I'm not really qualified to answer that. According to wikipedia the upper bound for the mass of a photon is 1 x 10^(-18) eV/c^2 which is miniscule. For reference an electron has a mass of about .5 MeV/c^2. Considering dark matter is supposed to take up 80% of all matter in the viewable universe, I'd have to guess no. Like I said though, I'm not a physicist so take this with a grain of salt.

A photon (most likely) does not have mass. Although, interestingly enough, it does have momentum. It is affected by gravity, such as passing by a star, because spacetime is curved and the photon is merely following a geodesic (generalized notion of a straight line through curved space)..

As someone who has studied algebraic geometry quite a bit I find the jump from classical mechanics to relativity to be very beautiful mathematically. The former is still useful as the approximation is close enough for the majority of situations, but it did unwittingly make some assumptions which turned out to be wrong. To me dark matter and dark energy seem like a kludge and I do hope we just unwittingly made some assumptions about the system that turn out to be false. Of course that's just the mathematician in me, always searching for perfection. Dark matter and dark energy may very well be real, I'm not a physicist.