Throw nickels at the heads of anyone talking or with a bright screen out.

I don't disagree with you (Harvard grad here), but a couple things I need to point out. First, as a professor, I can tell you that cheating happens everywhere. Second, I saw the spreadsheet thing on the Colbert Report, which is, of course, not a reliable news source. While it's certainly possible that there is an issue with corruption, Harvard is also composed of about a dozen different schools with totally different sources of funding, faculties, etc. One school having corrupt professors would not indicate anything about the others.

I'm not sure if you were replying to me, since I never insinuated the error you spotted... the article is clearly about finding jobs with a PhD in the humanities, that's what I addressed.

I certainly wouldn't disagree with you about the people taking on debt, in fact I'd go farther and say doing that you have to be stupid to walk willingly into that kind of financial hole. In the humanities, if you go to a top school, the sort that will actually land you a job, you never pay them a dime. I only did a master's at Harvard, not even a PhD, and the degree was virtually free without any help from the state. The PhD I'm starting, like at any good school pays me a significant living and research stipend on top.

The issue is that the jobs are taken by the graduates of the elite institutions. I don't know where Ohio State University stands in Literature, but unless it's ranked in the top ten for that field, the chances of getting a job when one opens up is virtually nil.

It's simple arithmetic. The top schools, Ivies and their equivalents produce an equal or greater number of PhDs than there are positions opening in any given year in the humanities. Why would any school that is hiring, when they have applicants from half a dozen Ivies bother looking at someone from a lower ranked program? Sure, there is more to it than simply the program that mints you: how good your dissertation is, if your adviser is friends with the people hiring etc., but remember that the people graduating from the Ivies will also have very good dissertations and advisers who are friends with (or former professors of!) the people hiring!

If you want to be a humanities professor, and think you can do it without going to a top school, then yes, your cause is lost from the beginning. But, if you are as great as you think you are, and can get into a top program, then your chances aren't as bad as people make it out to be.

If we could come to an agreement for China to stay out of it, it seems like NK is a bigger threat than Iraq ever was, and, unlike Iraq, there are obviously pervasive human rights violations going on there with the prison camps.

I hate anti-pirate Bryan, he should mind his own business

There are several videos on youtube now of people filming the clouds and then the explosion (assuming sonic boom). Why did the boom take place so much later? At the speed of sound, even a sonic boom 30 miles away would only take a few seconds correct?

I finished my Master's at Harvard last year, and it seems like the name is the only reason this made the news. I bet most people are just happy to see the smartest and often hardest working students in the country fail.

ah, that makes more sense. Hopefully I'm not the only one that made that error!

A CD costs ~$13 retail which normally works out to about a dollar a song. Subtract things like the record labels cut, distribution, physical materials (I don't know how much these are normally) and I imagine you'd end up with something like 50 cents per song for the artists. Anyone have figures on this?

Then you have to figure that this artist's music is getting far more exposure than they would through any kind of physical media or brick and mortar store...

What am I missing?

After taking stock in my life during 2012 on New Years, I realized it was the first year since 2007 that I hadn't been involved in a long term committed relationship. I also had a match.com membership from 12/15/2011 - 12/15/2012...

I can't help but wonder if there is a correlation. I did go out on dates regularly, sometimes things got hot, but rarely. Really, the only emotional fling I had was in the summer with someone I met "off"line.

I can't tell you how often I would have had buyers remorse if I paid for an app that I tried first through installous. I see it so often in the reviews of so many apps, people regretting their decision, or demanding their money back. For me, it helped ensure that the developers who did a good job got paid, and those that put out a poor or deceptive product got squat. I'll be looking for a replacement...

Assuming a 0 or microgravity environment, how far is "very far"?

I also have a Master's degree in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard where I spent a lot of time studying them as well. I thought I would just repost what I did last year when slashdot ran an almost identical story. The questions that seem to arise when something like this is posted are perennial so I hope this answers some of yours or clarifies some things, and, as before, feel free to ask any questions you might have and I'll do my best to give a scholarly answer:

It's taken this long to publish partly for bureaucratic reasons, but mostly because there are thousands of fragments that are basically shredded wheat that had to be put back together, reconstructed, translated, categorized, edited, and published. This was also around the time the State of Israel was formed, and the cluster**** that was caused a lot of delays and red tape.They have not been kept secret, they have been steadily published in the DJD series (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert) for the last 50 years as this tremendous task has been accomplished. As someone said above, yes people were not very careful with them by today's standards, people smoked around them, drank coffee, and used the handiest invention that had just come out-"scotch tape"- to piece them together. All that said, with the exception of fragments in private collections, the last of the Dead Sea Scrolls were published in the early 90's.

This is not publishing anything new, or secret. It is being scanned and put online for the public, who doesn't have a clue what to do with them, can look at them. Scholars have known how to look at them, in the DJD, and in a half a dozen other widely available publications that have been around for decades.

Facts the dilettantes have said in these comments that have made me [face_palm]:
The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS hereafter) were composed in Qumran, not Jerusalem. (some of the stuff is clearly copies of other documents that circulated elsewhere however)
The Qumran community responsible for the scrolls existed between the 2nd century BCE and ca 70CE during the Roman war.
There is nothing in the DSS about Jesus
There are, however, certain strong affinities between things we find in the DSS and the New Testament, including the method of scripture interpretation, some apocalyptic ideas, as well as the stuff you would expect people with the same basic religion, ethnicity and geography to share
There is nothing damaging or threatening to the modern religions of Judaism and Christianity. To be sure, the DSS are of tremendous importance for contextualizing their origin and telling us what life was like back then, but this is not a conspiracy to keep them hidden.

for some reason, the thing I'm marveling at the most is that it knows it has 8 legs. How?!

Why not 6 or 7? ...because 7, 8, 9?