If you're in publishing at any scale, and you can't justify using a Linux server, or are bound to something like FileMaker in an Apple environment, there is a huge benefit to those increases - Apple hardware is expensive, and IO and threading are currently very shitty on the MacOS platform.
I imagine people doing graphic and video work would likewise benefit. Likewise, there's been a lot of bloat added over the past couple years with all the new features, and I'm sure people would appreciate being able to reclaim some of their memory for use elsewhere.
I'm not saying the upgrade is worth $500, but it'd certainly be worth $100.
Taking them out and busting them up yourself is also pretty awesome. It's great stress relief, and useful if you've got your mind on a problem you can't quite wrap around as a distraction.
And then there's also using the old drives as ballistic testing material.
It will also help people more effectively connect seemingly disjointed information into a coherent image. What might appear to just be an extraneous fact could prove useful in finding connections. I'd also argue that the bad intel would be easier to spot, because it would not mesh well with other information being gathered.
Engineers have already come up with such contingent plants. They've been used for decades, though arguably they're not all that popular anymore due to legalese restrictions. We call them handguns.
Uh, yeah. And "Conservatives" inherently back conservation.
I've got news for you: progressives have only existed for a scant couple of years. Before that, they were self-identified as liberals, socialists, even communists. As those names became tarnished by their activities and policies, they moved onto the next most convenient label.
Considering there's a large amount of disagreement whether the UN Charter itself is even Constitutional, I'd think not. For starters, the Constitution doesn't give the federal government privileged to subjugate the respective states of the union to another power. The Constitution is quite limiting of Federal power, provided people do not "reinterpret" it for new meaning as it is deemed convenient, and basically says "the Federal government may do x, y, and z at the behest of the states and the electorate, and for everything else, the states have control".
Basically, the Federal US government has a very limited privilege/responsibility, according to the Constitution: it's to secure the nation's borders, ensure trade, and provide a modicum of governing laws so the states can get along. Things like printing currency, forming federal agencies, and so on and so forth are, despite practice, not allowed.
An expert? How the fuck do you think you should be even allowed to work in governmental sigint if you couldn't even pass the most basic questions asked of people applying for citizenship in this country?
I've met people working night security for $15/hour who know more about the laws governing this country than you do.
Kinda makes the whole "blood for oil" argument moot then, doesn't it? I wonder what the Bushitlercheney evil Haliburton empire could want with fighting the sand people, then?
I mean, if there's a marginal reason to go after their oil (at least directly), why are we there?
Oh, I know, it must be a CRUSADE to kill brown people!
No, it's likely either another proxy war - with Russia or China - for resources, or it's a legitimate war against terrorism. Those are the most likely explanations.
Failing those, you've got to start looking at the One World Order conspiracy stuff seriously, and that's really not supportable.
By nut job, do you mean politically leftist? Because, while he certainly comes close to the most leftist in Congress, I believe the mantle goes to our beloved Barry Obama.
You are correct. However, it would require us handing over our criminal president to an international body. Why would we do that, exactly? He's our problem; I think it just as fitting that we hang any war criminals ourselves.
Besides, why should we recognize the authority of some amorphous international body, when said international body (like the UN and damn near every other one) does nothing but ask the US for money and make political motions hostile to the US?
What in this world is actually important and exigent enough - that a lawmaker can effectively address - that can not wait 90 days?
Congress has no actual power but to allocate funds and approve laws (end even that's somewhat tenuous). These laws then get enforced by federal agencies: the military, law enforcement, regulatory, and so on and so forth.
Name me one instance (and explanation) where Congress passing a law which hasn't fermented for 90 days would actually be fundamentally useful. Hurricane Katrina couldn't have been averted or saved by lawmakers - there were no limitations at that point, and nothing they could've done could've resulted in quick, effective resource allocation.
No, for quick responses, you need a standing and ready structure to deal with problems. This is why countries have professional militaries, lawmakers, and regulators: forming anything effective in short order is beyond human coordination abilities.
Gentoo and Slackware are, at best, fringe distributions. They're for hobbyists who like different package systems and file system layouts, and not much else. There's a reason Gentoo doesn't have enough developers to keep its users happy: Gentoo users are, by their hobbyist nature, very demanding, and as a hobby project, there's no viable commercial model.
I imagine distributions like RedHat, Debian, Novell, Mandriva, and the like have a fair number of people working on X, as doing so makes financial sense.
Might this not provide the opportunity for a complete re-implementation of the windowing framework used for Linux and UNIX systems?
Granted, replacing something that's been in use for 40 years will be a little difficult, but it seems to me that we could do, roughly, what Apple did with OS X: provide X as a supplement to run "legacy" XWindow apps.
I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of X or the window managers, but I'd think that, while it'd be difficult, it'd certainly be possible and probably easier for the various TK developers to interface with a new system, written from scratch and designed with modern concepts, as it would be to "fix" the fundamental shortcomings in X. This way there could be a transitionary period where apps could simply be rebuilt for the new architecture.
(Maybe I'm simplifying things a wee bit through lack of knowledge, but this seems at least tenable to me given the number of people who are interested in working on X, but are held back by the antiquated architecture and design inherent in X.)
Likewise, it would be possible to retain some degree of "remote X" type functionality by implementing something technologically similar to MS's RDP.
Eyup. MS literally gave their products away for decades. Compared to many software companies, they don't put many safeguards forth to prevent their software from being warezed, and didn't in the past, either.
But they have increased their "product policing" as their market saturation increased, as well as their prices (relative and absolute).
As someone who has been struggling with messy, half-assed software for the past week, let me just say that I'd much rather prefer being able to see the half-assery up front. I want those klaxons to sound when something is broken.
It's different for things like POS and kiosk type software, but for those working with software, we like being able to know what's going on under the hood when things start misbehaving. I want to know where the errors are occuring, if they are occuring, so that if it happens again, I don't start questioning the integrity of my system (hardware/OS). I view it as akin to not wanting your car to spontaneously blow up one day, with little provocation.
And, while there are open source projects which don't do a whole lot for letting you know what's going on, directly, you can at least dig in deep if you need to. I've fixed a number of problems this way when there was no other alternative. With closed source, this doesn't even approach being an option.
Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?
The military gets results because, unlike the rest of government, it doesn't exist through simple self-perpetuation, and must attempt to justify its existence. At its core, military serves as the national immune system, protecting the body. If it does not perform, the body it serves ceases to exist.
In contrast, most government exists to serve itself; a lack of performance is simply indicative of government performing as it was always meant to perform: to serve those in power. The significance of failure or success is irrelevant, provided the politicians are still able to promise something progressive come next election so as to grant them more power.
Hey, shitty 1970s and 1980s hair and clothing styles have come back. Anything can happen!
That said, I agree with what you're saying. The "ultra mobile" fad has come and gone a half dozen times, and each time it falls flat. The only way it'll make significant headways is if the devices make significant bounds over the existing (and previous) ultra-mobiles: they need to be instant-on, and of comparable functionality to desktop machines so that users don't have problems interfacing them.
Here's the thing about software Marxism. Unlike real-world Marxism, nothing is prohibitive: you're still able - anyone is still able - to leverage the "communal" product for personal gain, with enough ingenuity and effort.
Such principles work in software, because there is (theoretically) infinite supply, whereas every single item in the real world requires production costs by nature. The infinite capacity for being copied, duplicated, and modified (cheaply!) negates the negatives of the philosophy much more thoroughly than it introduces more issues (ie, the effective resistance against monopoly).
About 5 thousand years of history? The Indus River valley?
Culturally, early Chinese society was more Indian than what we currently identify as "Chinese". Much of the pre-history/early history of China is shaped by mythological retelling and cultural identity.
I'd say half the reason MS is pissed about open source is because it's easily used to create a complete product without too much start-up cost. Look at Microsoft's primary product competitors in the last 10 years: OpenOffice.org, Google, MacOS X, Linux, LAMP, MySQL, Mozilla/Firefox - and so on and so forth. They're all Open Source (or derived from it) and people are learning about the products like they were unable to do before the days of instant messaging and Web 2.0 content sites.
While these products don't have anywhere near market dominance in their field, they've got a sizeable chunk - 1-2% here, 15% there, 11% somewhere else... it adds up, taking money not out of their bottom line, but their profits - ie, MS's bread and butter.
At the end of the day, what it really comes down to is MS competitors getting (what MS perceive to be) an "unfair advantage" by taking mostly-complete (or complete, etc.) products and leveraging them into something sellable. MS has to make (or steal, or license, or..) their products from start to finish, so why shouldn't their competitors? MS is pissed that their traditional tactics of skull duggery, theft, and marketing hype does not work as well as it used to, as the alternatives to their products simply can't be bought outright and destroyed.
Note, it's not just the GPL Microsoft doesn't like, though I'm sure that holds true. I'm sure the LGPL, BSD, and Mozilla licenses, and a myriad of others, fall under the banner of "things MS hates" - including things like successful freeware and shareware.
In my opinion, if things keep going the way they've been going for the last couple years, Microsoft will be a marginal application and appliance company within a decade. They'll have Office, a home/game system, and a very big marketing department, and they'll hold onto that market share fiercely.
Of course: there's always the possibility that MS will surprise everyone, and the next version of Windows actually will be a substantial improvement over the last, and not a face lift, added bloat and partial fix of the broken things of the previous version - like all Windows (and Vista) versions have been, sans Windows 2000.
Of course, most of the security theater going on now concentrates largely on letting people in or near the plane, but doesn't really pay that much attention to the periphery.
What of the people who work in the airport at the stores and restraunts? Yes, I know they undergo security, but the threat of familiarity ("Hey Jim. How's the wife? Fine, Bob. You? Oh, don't worry about the knife, I know you,) is big.
Likewise, there's nothing to stop some jihadist from blowing up an airplane with a shoulder-fired missile on approach or takeoff. Such devices are relatively cheap and easy to acquire, and munitions of similar potency and price have been found (with regularity) coming over the US southern border from Mexico. Who knows how many have gotten through - and, keep in mind, there are many countries in the world which would love to make a profit on their old technologies to buy new.
The cost of such a device is marginal compared to the travel, planning, and training required for the attacks of 9/11, and the potency - symbolic statement aside - is just as substantial. Can you imagine a dozen such rocket launchers (laser guided, even, not heat) being set off at major metropolitan airports country-wide? That'd be worse than any 12 single hijackers, whether they've got box cutters or submachine guns.
Oh yeah, because I forgot to mention it in my original post, let me make my suggestion as to a suggested programming language:
I'd say a good programming language for a scientist would be one which is easily extensible, powerful in and itself, and open enough in design to allow for many different types of applications. I'd personally say that something like C or Perl would be good choices, as you'd be able to bypass any of the marketing nonsense commonly associated with the newer languages, and they're used almost everywhere. While Perl is C-like, the two are dissimilar enough to offer different approaches to solving problems.
Also, I'd say some basic computing theory would prove almost as instructive, as it'd help cement the physics and software sides of the "whole system".
Programming is important to a well-rounded scientific mind for a number of reasons. They're complimentary disciplines.
My experience with the traditional science disciplines is that they unintentionally get students focusing small. With the litany of "stuff I've got to memorize" - formulas, theories, principles, and so on and so forth, all fairly tightly confined - they learn how to think creatively. Creative thinking is imperative for a scientist, but with the "undiscovered" so far above what students will learn at undergraduate level, and the sheer amount of information they're learning, they forget how to be creative.
Programming leverages many of the same skills which are useful for a scientist: process examination, planning, and 'debugging' - digging into the depths of a problem to try to find the single straw that's out of place. Like the real world, there are constraints while allowing for 'open exploration' in many respects, allowing for further expansion and actual application of the principles and process used by all scientists: correct me if I'm wrong, but the amount of such work possible at undergrad level is slim in physics (due to cost, if not other factors). Then, hopefully, they're able to apply the processes and troubleshooting learned while programming to not only physics/their science discipline, but also life in general. (You know, a well-rounded education.)
At the very least, introductory programming offers the science student an "easy" class their junior or senior year so that they don't get burn-out on their physics or biology.
Looking at it pragmatically, many physics students (or, I should say, of the ones which get employed in their discipline) will likely work in a computing-related field anyway. They'll be working for electronics companies, processor companies, and other companies which need a more in-depth understanding of physics. They will be using computers, and the likelihood that they'll be using Windows with Excel is, while not slim, seemingly narrowing.
And, not the least of considerations is the fact that most people in science disciplines will not end up doing "pure science" for the rest of their lives (or likely at all after college). The "academics for the sake of academics" argument only goes so far, and a great number of students will either have to jump into a more productive field right out of college. Having at least a little programming background will make such a possibility more open (in their minds and the minds of potential employers), leading to fewer science degree graduates taking menial jobs - ergo, more financially successful graduates. I know quite a few people who took this route, and they were thankful to have had a programming class or two in college to cut their teeth. That's good for the school and for the students.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're in publishing at any scale, and you can't justify using a Linux server, or are bound to something like FileMaker in an Apple environment, there is a huge benefit to those increases - Apple hardware is expensive, and IO and threading are currently very shitty on the MacOS platform.
I imagine people doing graphic and video work would likewise benefit. Likewise, there's been a lot of bloat added over the past couple years with all the new features, and I'm sure people would appreciate being able to reclaim some of their memory for use elsewhere.
I'm not saying the upgrade is worth $500, but it'd certainly be worth $100.
Taking them out and busting them up yourself is also pretty awesome. It's great stress relief, and useful if you've got your mind on a problem you can't quite wrap around as a distraction.
And then there's also using the old drives as ballistic testing material.
It will also help people more effectively connect seemingly disjointed information into a coherent image. What might appear to just be an extraneous fact could prove useful in finding connections. I'd also argue that the bad intel would be easier to spot, because it would not mesh well with other information being gathered.
Engineers have already come up with such contingent plants. They've been used for decades, though arguably they're not all that popular anymore due to legalese restrictions. We call them handguns.
'Progressives" inherently back progress.
Uh, yeah. And "Conservatives" inherently back conservation.
I've got news for you: progressives have only existed for a scant couple of years. Before that, they were self-identified as liberals, socialists, even communists. As those names became tarnished by their activities and policies, they moved onto the next most convenient label.
Considering there's a large amount of disagreement whether the UN Charter itself is even Constitutional, I'd think not. For starters, the Constitution doesn't give the federal government privileged to subjugate the respective states of the union to another power. The Constitution is quite limiting of Federal power, provided people do not "reinterpret" it for new meaning as it is deemed convenient, and basically says "the Federal government may do x, y, and z at the behest of the states and the electorate, and for everything else, the states have control".
Basically, the Federal US government has a very limited privilege/responsibility, according to the Constitution: it's to secure the nation's borders, ensure trade, and provide a modicum of governing laws so the states can get along. Things like printing currency, forming federal agencies, and so on and so forth are, despite practice, not allowed.
An expert? How the fuck do you think you should be even allowed to work in governmental sigint if you couldn't even pass the most basic questions asked of people applying for citizenship in this country?
I've met people working night security for $15/hour who know more about the laws governing this country than you do.
Seriously: go read the Constitution!
You are, of course, correct.
Kinda makes the whole "blood for oil" argument moot then, doesn't it? I wonder what the Bushitlercheney evil Haliburton empire could want with fighting the sand people, then?
I mean, if there's a marginal reason to go after their oil (at least directly), why are we there?
Oh, I know, it must be a CRUSADE to kill brown people!
No, it's likely either another proxy war - with Russia or China - for resources, or it's a legitimate war against terrorism. Those are the most likely explanations.
Failing those, you've got to start looking at the One World Order conspiracy stuff seriously, and that's really not supportable.
By nut job, do you mean politically leftist? Because, while he certainly comes close to the most leftist in Congress, I believe the mantle goes to our beloved Barry Obama.
You are correct. However, it would require us handing over our criminal president to an international body. Why would we do that, exactly? He's our problem; I think it just as fitting that we hang any war criminals ourselves.
Besides, why should we recognize the authority of some amorphous international body, when said international body (like the UN and damn near every other one) does nothing but ask the US for money and make political motions hostile to the US?
What in this world is actually important and exigent enough - that a lawmaker can effectively address - that can not wait 90 days?
Congress has no actual power but to allocate funds and approve laws (end even that's somewhat tenuous). These laws then get enforced by federal agencies: the military, law enforcement, regulatory, and so on and so forth.
Name me one instance (and explanation) where Congress passing a law which hasn't fermented for 90 days would actually be fundamentally useful. Hurricane Katrina couldn't have been averted or saved by lawmakers - there were no limitations at that point, and nothing they could've done could've resulted in quick, effective resource allocation.
No, for quick responses, you need a standing and ready structure to deal with problems. This is why countries have professional militaries, lawmakers, and regulators: forming anything effective in short order is beyond human coordination abilities.
Gentoo and Slackware are, at best, fringe distributions. They're for hobbyists who like different package systems and file system layouts, and not much else. There's a reason Gentoo doesn't have enough developers to keep its users happy: Gentoo users are, by their hobbyist nature, very demanding, and as a hobby project, there's no viable commercial model.
I imagine distributions like RedHat, Debian, Novell, Mandriva, and the like have a fair number of people working on X, as doing so makes financial sense.
Might this not provide the opportunity for a complete re-implementation of the windowing framework used for Linux and UNIX systems?
Granted, replacing something that's been in use for 40 years will be a little difficult, but it seems to me that we could do, roughly, what Apple did with OS X: provide X as a supplement to run "legacy" XWindow apps.
I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of X or the window managers, but I'd think that, while it'd be difficult, it'd certainly be possible and probably easier for the various TK developers to interface with a new system, written from scratch and designed with modern concepts, as it would be to "fix" the fundamental shortcomings in X. This way there could be a transitionary period where apps could simply be rebuilt for the new architecture.
(Maybe I'm simplifying things a wee bit through lack of knowledge, but this seems at least tenable to me given the number of people who are interested in working on X, but are held back by the antiquated architecture and design inherent in X.)
Likewise, it would be possible to retain some degree of "remote X" type functionality by implementing something technologically similar to MS's RDP.
Eyup. MS literally gave their products away for decades. Compared to many software companies, they don't put many safeguards forth to prevent their software from being warezed, and didn't in the past, either.
But they have increased their "product policing" as their market saturation increased, as well as their prices (relative and absolute).
As someone who has been struggling with messy, half-assed software for the past week, let me just say that I'd much rather prefer being able to see the half-assery up front. I want those klaxons to sound when something is broken.
It's different for things like POS and kiosk type software, but for those working with software, we like being able to know what's going on under the hood when things start misbehaving. I want to know where the errors are occuring, if they are occuring, so that if it happens again, I don't start questioning the integrity of my system (hardware/OS). I view it as akin to not wanting your car to spontaneously blow up one day, with little provocation.
And, while there are open source projects which don't do a whole lot for letting you know what's going on, directly, you can at least dig in deep if you need to. I've fixed a number of problems this way when there was no other alternative. With closed source, this doesn't even approach being an option.
What point font are the phone books printed in?
Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?
The military gets results because, unlike the rest of government, it doesn't exist through simple self-perpetuation, and must attempt to justify its existence. At its core, military serves as the national immune system, protecting the body. If it does not perform, the body it serves ceases to exist.
In contrast, most government exists to serve itself; a lack of performance is simply indicative of government performing as it was always meant to perform: to serve those in power. The significance of failure or success is irrelevant, provided the politicians are still able to promise something progressive come next election so as to grant them more power.
Hey, shitty 1970s and 1980s hair and clothing styles have come back. Anything can happen!
That said, I agree with what you're saying. The "ultra mobile" fad has come and gone a half dozen times, and each time it falls flat. The only way it'll make significant headways is if the devices make significant bounds over the existing (and previous) ultra-mobiles: they need to be instant-on, and of comparable functionality to desktop machines so that users don't have problems interfacing them.
Here's the thing about software Marxism. Unlike real-world Marxism, nothing is prohibitive: you're still able - anyone is still able - to leverage the "communal" product for personal gain, with enough ingenuity and effort.
Such principles work in software, because there is (theoretically) infinite supply, whereas every single item in the real world requires production costs by nature. The infinite capacity for being copied, duplicated, and modified (cheaply!) negates the negatives of the philosophy much more thoroughly than it introduces more issues (ie, the effective resistance against monopoly).
Yeah, and at this point, a more appropriate slashdot icon would be the terminator (T800) metal head/arm.
About 5 thousand years of history? The Indus River valley?
Culturally, early Chinese society was more Indian than what we currently identify as "Chinese". Much of the pre-history/early history of China is shaped by mythological retelling and cultural identity.
I'd say half the reason MS is pissed about open source is because it's easily used to create a complete product without too much start-up cost. Look at Microsoft's primary product competitors in the last 10 years: OpenOffice.org, Google, MacOS X, Linux, LAMP, MySQL, Mozilla/Firefox - and so on and so forth. They're all Open Source (or derived from it) and people are learning about the products like they were unable to do before the days of instant messaging and Web 2.0 content sites.
While these products don't have anywhere near market dominance in their field, they've got a sizeable chunk - 1-2% here, 15% there, 11% somewhere else... it adds up, taking money not out of their bottom line, but their profits - ie, MS's bread and butter.
At the end of the day, what it really comes down to is MS competitors getting (what MS perceive to be) an "unfair advantage" by taking mostly-complete (or complete, etc.) products and leveraging them into something sellable. MS has to make (or steal, or license, or..) their products from start to finish, so why shouldn't their competitors? MS is pissed that their traditional tactics of skull duggery, theft, and marketing hype does not work as well as it used to, as the alternatives to their products simply can't be bought outright and destroyed.
Note, it's not just the GPL Microsoft doesn't like, though I'm sure that holds true. I'm sure the LGPL, BSD, and Mozilla licenses, and a myriad of others, fall under the banner of "things MS hates" - including things like successful freeware and shareware.
In my opinion, if things keep going the way they've been going for the last couple years, Microsoft will be a marginal application and appliance company within a decade. They'll have Office, a home/game system, and a very big marketing department, and they'll hold onto that market share fiercely.
Of course: there's always the possibility that MS will surprise everyone, and the next version of Windows actually will be a substantial improvement over the last, and not a face lift, added bloat and partial fix of the broken things of the previous version - like all Windows (and Vista) versions have been, sans Windows 2000.
Of course, most of the security theater going on now concentrates largely on letting people in or near the plane, but doesn't really pay that much attention to the periphery.
What of the people who work in the airport at the stores and restraunts? Yes, I know they undergo security, but the threat of familiarity ("Hey Jim. How's the wife? Fine, Bob. You? Oh, don't worry about the knife, I know you,) is big.
Likewise, there's nothing to stop some jihadist from blowing up an airplane with a shoulder-fired missile on approach or takeoff. Such devices are relatively cheap and easy to acquire, and munitions of similar potency and price have been found (with regularity) coming over the US southern border from Mexico. Who knows how many have gotten through - and, keep in mind, there are many countries in the world which would love to make a profit on their old technologies to buy new.
The cost of such a device is marginal compared to the travel, planning, and training required for the attacks of 9/11, and the potency - symbolic statement aside - is just as substantial. Can you imagine a dozen such rocket launchers (laser guided, even, not heat) being set off at major metropolitan airports country-wide? That'd be worse than any 12 single hijackers, whether they've got box cutters or submachine guns.
Oh yeah, because I forgot to mention it in my original post, let me make my suggestion as to a suggested programming language:
I'd say a good programming language for a scientist would be one which is easily extensible, powerful in and itself, and open enough in design to allow for many different types of applications. I'd personally say that something like C or Perl would be good choices, as you'd be able to bypass any of the marketing nonsense commonly associated with the newer languages, and they're used almost everywhere. While Perl is C-like, the two are dissimilar enough to offer different approaches to solving problems.
Also, I'd say some basic computing theory would prove almost as instructive, as it'd help cement the physics and software sides of the "whole system".
Programming is important to a well-rounded scientific mind for a number of reasons. They're complimentary disciplines.
My experience with the traditional science disciplines is that they unintentionally get students focusing small. With the litany of "stuff I've got to memorize" - formulas, theories, principles, and so on and so forth, all fairly tightly confined - they learn how to think creatively. Creative thinking is imperative for a scientist, but with the "undiscovered" so far above what students will learn at undergraduate level, and the sheer amount of information they're learning, they forget how to be creative.
Programming leverages many of the same skills which are useful for a scientist: process examination, planning, and 'debugging' - digging into the depths of a problem to try to find the single straw that's out of place. Like the real world, there are constraints while allowing for 'open exploration' in many respects, allowing for further expansion and actual application of the principles and process used by all scientists: correct me if I'm wrong, but the amount of such work possible at undergrad level is slim in physics (due to cost, if not other factors). Then, hopefully, they're able to apply the processes and troubleshooting learned while programming to not only physics/their science discipline, but also life in general. (You know, a well-rounded education.)
At the very least, introductory programming offers the science student an "easy" class their junior or senior year so that they don't get burn-out on their physics or biology.
Looking at it pragmatically, many physics students (or, I should say, of the ones which get employed in their discipline) will likely work in a computing-related field anyway. They'll be working for electronics companies, processor companies, and other companies which need a more in-depth understanding of physics. They will be using computers, and the likelihood that they'll be using Windows with Excel is, while not slim, seemingly narrowing.
And, not the least of considerations is the fact that most people in science disciplines will not end up doing "pure science" for the rest of their lives (or likely at all after college). The "academics for the sake of academics" argument only goes so far, and a great number of students will either have to jump into a more productive field right out of college. Having at least a little programming background will make such a possibility more open (in their minds and the minds of potential employers), leading to fewer science degree graduates taking menial jobs - ergo, more financially successful graduates. I know quite a few people who took this route, and they were thankful to have had a programming class or two in college to cut their teeth. That's good for the school and for the students.