Declan McCullagh wrote:

Let me plug Carnegie Mellon University, which consistently ties with MIT and one of them California schools for first place in computer science.

You must be joking. After all you've said about the school, you're recommending it? Isn't "Mr. L-18 Tag" the head of the department now? Anyway, our correspondent is asking the wrong question. There is no "best" school. If you want to be a brilliant programmer, I think you have to be born that way. If you want theory, you need to be specific about your research interests. If you want mass-marketable experience in Windoze, avoid the big-name schools, which tend to treat Windows with the respect is deserves. (At Stanford, despite having a very nice Paul Allen Center for Integrated Systems and a posh new Bill Gates Information Sciences building, all instruction is done in Think C or UNIX.) -rich