Ilya Lipovsky (lipovsky@cs.bu.edu) on 2/18/08 wrote:
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>Information Technology is part computer science and part business and management.

I'm afraid the terms aren't as rigorously defined as you imply. "IT" is often used as a synonym for "software engineering". According to Wikipedia, the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) define it as "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." No mention of business or management (of people, anyway).

>Computer Engineering is part computer science and part electrical engineering.

You probably meant "electronic engineering" (although, according to Wikipedia, this distinction exists more outside the US than in).

>As to informatics, the article in Wikipedia is a bit unclear, but I suppose, according
>to it, in the US it connotes a general study of information processing and exchange
>between natural (e.g. humans) and artificial systems (e.g. PC's).

I have seen different universities use all of these terms, and no more accurately than some universities use the term "computer science" -- therefore, you can't assume that just because a university teaches a course called computer science that does not seem to have any science in it, that computer science itself is not a science.

Furthermore, none of those terms adequately cover the same territory as the term "computer science".

>By the way, in Russia Computer Science is "informatika" just as in Netherlands.

Wikipedia notes, however, that "informatika" translates into English more closely as "computer science" than "Informatics":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics#Etymology

In English the two have different meanings.

>I don't know, but personally, having double majored in physics and computer science,
>the term "science" means something different to me. In a way, used together with
>the word "computer" the whole thing doesn't sound quite right. Hence, the search for a subjectively "better" term.

As I said in my other post, that's probably because you have a restrictive view of what science is. At my university the mathematics department was part of the science faculty, and applied mathematics is basically indistinguishable from physics and engineering; likewise, theoretical physics has far more in common with mathematics than it does with empirical sciences.