QUOTE (Maelstrom @ Nov 27 2009, 12:36 AM)

Okay, well, you know about computers? Do science to them.
(least scientific discipline I know of, magic numbers abound)
I can think of a few worse ones, but I like to think of most of it as engineering rather than science. While there are aspects of 'information' you can learn about by experimentation with computers, and there are bits of science you can do
with computers, 90% of what you learn in these courses is more to do with understanding and building systems than learning how to analyze information theory.
Re magic numbers, in my experience it's usually a case of "well, we COULD analyse the relationships here and describe in great detail why X number is better than Y, but it's almost completely pointless, and we'll save a lot of time and effort by just accepting that X is the best number (or at least good enough for our purposes) and moving on." IMO a lot of the challenge of programming is not understanding every piece of code, but accepting and working with code you don't understand.