David A. Perini

If you want to earn a degree from Harvard without mortgaging the next 30 years of your future earnings, matriculating with students going through the traditional program isn’t going to cut it… assuming you’re able to get accepted in the first place.

Fortunately, there’s a little-known way to get into Harvard without applying that also reduces the total cost of obtaining a Harvard diploma by more than 75%. Here’s how.

Claiming that the outlook for the music industry is grim is like claiming that the outlook for the transportation industry is grim in 1910 because the market for horse carriages is declining.

With all the talk about President Obama receiving the Nobel Prize recently, my opinion doesn’t have much more impact than a drop of water in the ocean. But I am bothered that many of my fellow Americans feel we have a right to be proud of this accomplishment. By preemptively honoring something yet to happen, the award is pointedly disrespectful to other recipients, to the institution of the Nobel Prize, and to our President himself. It cheapens by political interference the very challenge it intends to reward.

I can forgive the Nobel committee its eagerness; all awards break down as an authentic measure of accomplishment. What transforms this misstep into an outright embarrassment is Obama’s acceptance of the award. A man of integrity would have recognized that the nomination, no matter how flattering and encouraging, was misguided until rightfully earned. The humble thing would have been for Obama to politely refuse, citing a desire to respect the award’s intentions and earn it justly — it would have made a great PR moment and rightly rebuked the Nobel committee for its rashness.

By accepting, the President continued his current agenda of building popularity rather than affecting real change — change in the way we measure our world leaders.

The new comic strip by John Allison, creator of the fabulous Scary Go Round, has officially begun.

Trooper One: “I hear they’re gonna build a new [Death Star]… almost as big.”

Trooper Two: “Haven’t we learned anything?”

Trooper One: “Look, if you don’t rebuild, the Jedis win.”

Trooper Three: “You know I think Emperor Palpatine knew about it all along, and he let it happen just to justify going to Hoth. [...] There is no way one X-Wing could’ve taken this thing out, no way.”

One of the great new features in iTunes 9 is app management… We can now organize our pages (and pages) of apps right in iTunes, no more dragging jiggly icons across 9 or 10 screens.