Tonight President Obama will announce that Osama Bin Laden is dead during his unscheduled speech.

According to a House Intelligence committee aide, a predator drone hit and DNA testing revealed that the dead body was in fact Bin Laden. The United States current has custody over the body.

EDIT: Here is the speech:

The first production diary video from The Hobbit, as posted by Peter Jackson on his facebook page. Enjoy!

Today, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Benzos announced that Amazon Prime will also include free streaming of over 5,000 movies and TV shows for no additional cost. According to the announcement posted on Amazon.com, there will be no commercials and no limits to how much you can stream. This is great news for those that already use Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime is Amazom.com’s service which allows you to purchase any eligible item and receive free two-day shipping.

Prime normally costs $79 per year but students can get it free for their first year. There is also Amazon Mom for parents or caretakers which gives free Prime benefits. For those that are neither parents nor students, try their free trial.

[Correction: You must have a paid Amazon Prime account to enjoy free movie streaming. This disqualifies Amazon Student accounts.]

If you already are an Amazon Prime member, start streaming for free today.

Below is the official announcement:

Image by See-ming Lee 李思明

This is a guest post by Bob Hartzell, in-house writer and chief researcher for Master Degree Online.com. Bob addresses the issues confronted by would-be college students and professionals returning to school trying to develop career options. He recently covered the accounting mba programs top 5 list according to US News & World Report.

After years of stepsister status the online education format is becoming the new greatest thing among traditional universities. It can be a boost to the revenue stream for them and it is also a way to reach the unemployed and underemployed millions who have realized they need to retool their education a bit in order to compete in today’s job market. USC took a tentative step by putting their Master of Social Work degree online and saw their enrollment in the program quadruple in two years.

They have expanded their online presence steadily and today they have an amazing graduate level program for engineering available online, offering master’s degrees in aerospace engineering, electrical, mechanical, civil, biomedical and computer engineering, and many others. Even Stanford’s gotten into the act, with sixteen online master’s degrees available in engineering and statistics. Of course you have to gain admission to the university first, and these degrees aren’t cheap. USC is asking a little over $900 per credit.

Public universities that have gotten into the online game can be much more reasonable in cost, particularly (as usual) for in-state students. There are some impressive and innovative programs out there.

1. University of Maryland has about 90,000 students worldwide studying online through the University of Maryland University College, one of the eleven degree granting institutions in the state system. UMUC is the largest provider of online education among the public universities.

2. University of North Carolina draws from all sixteen of its campuses to offer online undergraduate and graduate degrees in a wide range of fields. They offer 27 degrees and certificates in business, 18 in computer science and IT, 88 in education, and so on through an extensive list.

3. University of Illinois has dozens of degrees and certificates available online from the three campuses. The degree programs include bachelors’ in several of the liberal arts majors, and masters’ degrees in education, IT, and several of the health sciences.

4. University of Massachusetts offers a variety of degrees, most of which are generated from the Amherst campus. But the Dartmouth, Boston, Worcester and Lowell campuses all contribute as well to a remarkable array of options. The nursing program alone offers 13 degree options; in education there are 20 bachelor’s and masters’ degrees available.

5. Penn State University World Campus offers over seventy degree and certificate programs. Criminal justice, project management, public administration and software engineering represent the range of academic options available through this virtual campus: Penn State was one of the earliest adopters of online education.

Another option that shouldn’t be overlooked is the schools that have been in the online education business for years. The degree mills are slowly being weeded out by savvy applicants or shut down by public agencies that have the authority to torpedo educational frauds. Online schools that treat education as a business have improved on several fronts as the format has become more acceptable. The technology has reached the point where classes can be taught in cohorts, so students get to know their colleagues. Communication with instructors is in many cases easier in the online format than on a large campus and also in many cases can be via a teleconference link.

Accreditation has become a necessary reality for online schools that want to prosper. Accordingly many of these schools have invested in upgrades of their faculty assets and alignment of their curricula to meet the educational standards established by recognized accrediting bodies. In many cases the process has taken years, but the schools that want to maintain a viable business model know they have to meet traditional academic standards. The key for the colleges and for potential students is accreditation by an association or commission recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Cost and Credibility

Professional online schools have also, in many cases, become a bargain today. They have been characterized as overpriced, underperforming institutions in the past; for some of them that is still the case. But if you compare tuition costs for out of state students at public universities with tuition costs for professional online schools you will probably be pleasantly surprised. Increasingly the same can be said for in-state students at public universities, where budget problems have led to skyrocketing costs. Tuition and books at the University of California for 2011 graduate students is about $12,000. Those are in-state student costs; a graduate program at an accredited online school is going to be competitive and you don’t have to worry about where you live or how you’re going to get to campus.

Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. Let us celebrate in this British gentleman’s honor and prove that evolution has selected men and women to enjoy alcohol.

From Wikipedia (in case you seriously have been living in a cave for the last 150 years):

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who realised and demonstrated that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and much of the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, providing logical explanation for the diversity of life.

At Edinburgh University Darwin neglected medical studies to investigate marine invertebrates, then the University of Cambridge encouraged a passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories.

His 1859 book On the Origin of Species established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

In recognition of Darwin’s pre-eminence, he was one of only five 19th-century UK non-royal personages to be honoured by a state funeral, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

Related: YouTube video of a British man explaining how old the earth is and making fun of creationists. It is related because the man is British.

This past Sunday, Comcast in Arizona mistakenly showed a 30-second clip of a porn video to its viewers watching the Superbowl in analogue TV. The video is below, but is is definitely NSFW and contains a little too much penis.

Related: Following is the video from Janette Jackson and Justin Timberlack’s waldrobe malfunction:

If you feel suddenly politically inclined after seeing President Obama’s speech yesterday, here is a quick collection of inauguration videos from the past:

Theodore Roosevelt (March 4, 1905)
Woodrow Wilson’s Second (March 4, 1917)
Warren G. Harding (March 4, 1921)
Calvin Coolidge (March 4, 1925)
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First (March 4, 1933)
Frank lin D. Roosevelt’s Fourth (January 20, 1945)
Harry S. Truman (January 20, 1949)
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s First (January 20, 1953)
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Second (January 20, 1957)
John F. Kennedy – (part 2) (January 20, 1961)
Lyndon B. Johnson (January 20, 1965)
Richard M. Nixon’s First (January 20, 1969)
Richard M. Nixon’s Second (January 20, 1973)
Jimmy Carter (January 20, 1977)
Ronald Reagan’s First (January 20, 1981)
Ronald Reagan’s Second (January 20, 1985)
George H. W. Bush (January 20, 1989)
Bill Clinton’s First (January 20, 1993)
Bill Clinton’s Second (January 20, 1997)
George W. Bush’s First (January 20, 2001)
George W. Bush’s Second (January 20, 2005)
Barack Obama’s First (January 20, 2009): Part 1, Part 2

You can catch many of these videos on Hulu.com in case any of the above stop working. Also, all the speeches since George Washington are located on Bartleby in text form.

[Source: MetaFilter]

Today, is a day that will live on in history. If you missed the inauguration, like I did because I was in class, you can watch it on FoxNews.com. Fox even has some very spectacular post-inauguration coverage that does not at all go completely off-topic and talk about irrelevant conservative issues and is completely bias. Note: This will most likely be the only time we will ever link to Fox News, but no other stations that we looked into had the video up at this time (most just had a live feed during the inauguration).

What did you think of the inauguration speech?

EDIT: Here are direct video links to the speech from YouTube:

Consumerist released a list of the top 25 universities in the U.S. And I thought I went to an expensive school…

1. Sarah Lawrence | $53,166
2. George Washington | $50,312
3. NYU | $50,182
4. Georgetown | $49,689
5. Connecticut College | $49,385

Check out Consumerist.com for the remaining 20.

Source: College Candy | Image by austins_irish_pirate

In an attempted to outwit the media, we at College Being are announcing at 12:34am on November 4, 2008, that Barack Obama has won the 2008 U.S. presidential elections. The pundits thought it would come out a closer match between Obama and McCain, but they were wrong. In the end Obama won the popular vote and beat McCain’s electoral college vote by more than double. Congratulations to the new president of the United States. Let’s HOPE he lives up to his promises.

Official Barack Obama campaign photo | Source: our imagination

Edit: It seems our prediction was ahead of CNN by over 22 hours.