Comment They can't be serious. (Score 5, Insightful) 148
The alternative, which is everyone writing their own mostly terrible implementations, is far worse.
Comment In the words of James T. Kirk (Score 1) 125
"Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship because while you're there, you can make a difference."
Comment Re: 64-bit BS (Score 2) 512
Third, phone apps would suck on a laptop or desktop.
If only Microsoft would realize this.
Comment A Modest Proposal (Score 2) 202
The number of commenters failing to understand that the article is satire is staggering. Hell, look at the "department" the article is from.
Comment Re:I have a suggestion. (Score 1) 305
How is this the opposite of how most other languages work? This is obvious behavior, both myObj and newObj contain references to the same object.
Comment Re:Looks almost as nice as JRuby, but not quite. (Score 1) 444
Look at Java and C#, it worked well for them.
Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161
An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
