After reading the Slashdot article, here is my opinion:

Another reason why Apple getting in to the E-book trade is bad for consumers. If I recall correctly, Apple is the reason Amazon went to the Agency model as well. Above all else, the two companies, Apple and Amazon, are not wholly at fault here. The publishing industry has been strong arming the companies since day one of e-book readers and software hitting the market.

As consumers, stop and ponder this for longer than a second. How much does it cost to make a book, warehouse it, ship it, and sell it at vendors, then collect the profit? Ok, now think about this, how much does it cost to create a digitized version of said book, store the digitized copy, sell it via ecommerce sites such as Amazon, and collect the profits? A whole heck of a lot less than a dead tree version of the same book.

This is the music industry fighting to keep an out of date business model in use all over again, except this time it is the publishing industry. There is no way a digital version of a book should cost anywhere near the same amount as dead tree version. Yet the publishing industry would have consumers purchase digital versions of books at prices somewhere between the soft cover copy and the hard cover copy of a dead tree version.

I decided to file a fraud claim with my own bank due to PayPal’s lack of resolution. Today PayPal decided to return the money back to my bank by removing it from my own PayPal account thereby causing my PayPal account to have a negative balance. What I do not understand is why this could not have been done to user Paul Calabrese’s account at the time of dispute since PayPal seems so willing to make my account negative to resolve a dispute with my bank and why I am being penalized via my PayPal account instead of the person who committed the fraud. It is my belief that PayPal could have and should have removed the money from Paul Calabrese’s account to resolve this issue and leave him with a negative balance.

Now I am left to dispute the negative balance of my account with PayPal, who created the negative balance to begin with. Most likely they will claim ignorance or it is some policy or procedure and then will attempt to go on to try to collect back the money from me by ruining my credit record. I cannot even close my own account with PayPal at this time to protest since I have a negative balance which they created through their actions. Needless to say, I have been documenting everything from the time the first transaction occured, through the dispute and claim process, and now this new twist. The saga continues….

My ultimate goal would be to locate Mr. Calabrese so I may bring charges against him for fraud and other laws which may have been broken in this failed interstate commerce transaction. I would also like to show that people are not as anonymous on the Internet as they would like to believe seeing as how fraud on the Internet is on the rise which I posit is because people believe they have some sort of anonymity on the Internet so they will not be held accountable for their actions. Club Lexus will not release the last logged IP address of Mr. Calabrese without a subpoena. PayPal will not release Mr. Calabrese’s address without a subpoena.

Here is the information I have collected on Paul Calabrese thus far:

Name: Paul Calabrese
Location: Connecticut (possibly around the Waterbury area, although this has not be verified)
Birth Date: January 14, 1986
Car: 1993 Lexus SC400, silver spruce color
Screen Name: Cal9126
Email: meth8600@hotmail.com

I would much rather attend a school which has a standard degree recognizable by any accredited institution. It appears my search will continue in seeking true, online Bachelor of Science degrees in either Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or Computer Science. So far the only other school I have found offering this has been University of North Dakota and unfortunately their lack of communication turned me off of them the first time I was accepted and planned to attend. However, if they are still the only ones out there, I may have to re-apply. One would think in this day and age, more schools would be offering accredited engineering and science degrees online.

What have I been doing with all of the extra time I have now? I have finally started catching up on movies I skipped watching to play the game. I have enrolled in Baker College’s Bachelor of Computer Science degree program. I have started getting outside more often, becoming reacquainted with that great blazing orange ball in the sky called the Sun, and I even went to the local West Michigan Fly-In event with my father and wife recently!

Davies, K. (2007, June). 23andMe: The Google Genome Connection. Bio-IT World, 6(5), 6.

Fast forward to January 16th, the expansion is released by Blizzard. People, including me, wait in line at midnight for it and rush home to see the new content, new races, etc. I play the game whenever I have a moment so that I can experience all of the new stuff that came with the expansion. Unfortunately, after three weeks of playing the expansion, I come to the conclusion that besides the new races, jewel crafting profession, and continent, there really isn’t anything new and original about the game. Flying mounts aren’t really that exciting. The quests are still the same, go gather some items, kill some mobs, deliver an item, escort an NPC, and the list goes on.

After much thought, discussion with the guild I ran, and reviewing my budget I decided to shutdown my account. Due to lack of originality and no new groundbreaking features or advancements, I feel like my money can be better spent elsewhere.

My current tabs have now been updated and my initial browser window only contains Gmail, Greader, Gcalendar, Google Spreadsheet and Writely (also owned by Google). Does anyone else see a pattern here? I can now perform all of the basic functions of the desktop online through Google’s applications. Has the browser OS (operating system) finally appeared?