Computational physics is indeed a very good choice. I'll go a step further and recommend any field where modelling is done in an operational setting, i.e. meteorology (weather, tornadoes, ...), aerosol physics (volcano ash!), oceanography, etc.

Often the difference between developing simulations just for research purposes and developing them in an operational environment is code quality. Mission critical code must be more rigorously developed, which means that there is more opportunity for CS majors to apply their software engineering skills to practice. Also funding for operational work tends to be more stable than research grants, since there are more immediate benefits to society.

There are, however, also opportunities to do research. I have a MSc in computational physics and in the few years I've worked with operational model development I've continuously had opportunities to participate in research papers. The PhD's I've worked with always seem appreciate my contributions, I have plenty of work to keep me busy and I learn exciting new stuff about nature every day.

Slashdot is often at it's worst when it comes to science, especially when the story is even tangentially related to global warming. Judging from the summaries, the stories almost always seem to be submitted by people with an agenda. So they just post the most misinformed summary possible of a subscription-only original article. And Slashdot editors have time and again demonstrated their readiness to publish anything they think somehow proves global warming false.

If only open access publishing would become more commonplace. Then everyone could see the original article and actually make their own minds up.

Even now it would be nice if they at least linked to the freely available abstract.

I'm a physicist (of the modelling kind, though, not an experimental one).

Let me tell you, if you want to support Open Source in science, support GNU Octave. Matlab is the de facto standard in many fields just because students are conditioned to use it during undergraduate education. However, it's ridiculously expensive and many institutions are just looking for an excuse to dump it. Surprisingly often they haven't even heard of Octave.

Octave has improved a lot in the past few years and version 3 is actually quite impressive. Matlab code often runs with minor or no modifications at all. It even supports multidimensional matrices now. At my lab Octave has become an integral part of the research process. We couldn't do without it, I never use Matlab any more.

So, if you are in a position to try Octave instead of Matlab, or recommend it to scientist, I hope you do that. Octave project is also looking for help and I can assure you that by helping them you are helping numerous scientists around the world. Including yours truly.