A 33-year-old Vancouverite has downloaded what appears to be about 60 per cent of the seventh and final Harry Potter book - even though the children’s novel isn’t officially supposed to be released until midnight Saturday.

The apparent discovery of major portions of the novel on a European website is part of the continuing Harry Potter hype over the imminent release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

It also follows on the heels of the recent release of the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Byron Ng said he started on his search for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Monday after reading a newspaper account of the heightened security around release of the book - including using measures such as global positioning technology to track the trucks delivering the books to retailers.

Oddly enough, Ng doesn’t consider himself a big Harry Potter fan. “I know the basics and I’ve watched some of the movies but I don’t really pay attention to it,” he said in an interview.

“This is a high-value release so I looked at it for fun.” Ng said he went online and found what appear to be the novel’s first few paragraphs mentioned in an article that appeared Sunday in The Guardian, based in the U.K. He used that information to Google to find the rest of the novel.

On a peer-to-peer-sharing website where directions to pirated movies and other material are located he found that someone had posted what purported to be the first 495 pages of the 794-page book.

So he downloaded it too.

“It is not an E-book or Word file, which is what people would normally do” he said.
“What some guy did was take pictures of it, 500 little files, each with a picture of a page. Someone took the trouble to do that.”

Read more - http://www.canada.com/

http://www.alpineglacierwater.net/

Alpineglacierwater.net’s $30 US-a-bottle water a winner in international ritzy ‘water bar’ market - rhere is huge demand for luxury water

A Westbank couple is cashing in on the lucrative American luxury market — with high-end Canadian glacial water selling for $30 US a bottle.

Tim and Andrea Bates, of Alpine Glacier Water Inc., launched their 10 Thousand BC water — drawn from the Coast Glacier Range 320 kilometres north of Vancouver — in January.

Now, six months later, it’s one of the most prestigious and expensive bottles among the 76 varieties on sale at a just established “water bar” in Bill and Hillary Clinton’s adopted hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y.

The converted Via Genova cafe in the ritzy community about 90 minutes’ drive north of New York City sells 10 Thousand BC for $30 US a bottle.

At $55 US, a bottle of Tennessee-sourced Bling H2O will set you back the most. As the name suggests, it comes with Swarovski crystals attached.

“The 10 Thousand BC is my most luxurious water,” says Via Genova owner Diane Felicissimo.

“If you’re talking about just water, that’s my most elite bottle, and people love it with a salad.”

Tim Bates said he always knew there would be a huge demand for luxury water.

He and his partners stumbled upon the glacier nine years ago, he said, and bought the rights in 1999, waiting for the luxury market to emerge. They chose the name, 10 Thousand BC, to honour the age of the glacier.

“We believed in big things for this water and we just took a leap of faith to make it happen,” Bates said.

“If you had to jump in your car and a plane to try and find a glacier source, that would cost you a lot of money; we bring that source to you in a high-end package.”

The company pumps about 453,600 litres at a time, shipping it by barge to the Alpine Glacier’s bottling plant in Westbank, near Kelowna.

It’s then distributed to the U.S., Germany and Eastern Canada.

The high-class water has become so popular, the company has been invited to showcase the product in gift bags at the Academy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival and the Las Vegas Real Estate Awards.

From http://www.canada.com 

The reputation of online sellers at Amazon carries more weight with consumers than the online seller ratings at eBay, according to a study released today by the University of BC’s Sauder School of Business.

Professors Paul Chwelos and Tirtha Dhar found that the high ratings for merchants on eBay had little significance because the feedback mechanism which allows buyers to rate sellers also lets sellers rate buyers, resulting in a retaliatory system in which everyone is loathe to give criticism for fear of being criticized themselves.

“It is a set of incentives that produce feedback that isn’t very useful or informative to buyers,” said Chwelos, who produced the study, “Differences in ‘Truthiness’ Across Online Reputation Mechanisms” with colleague Tirtha Dhar, in which they considered more than 100,000 online transactions, looking at the experience of sellers who listed on both sides.

The differences in the feedback mechanisms, which allow for a two-way feedback in eBay plus a difference in the ratings scale of the two online selling sites, result in ratings that are inflated on eBay. The same sellers on Amazon garner lower ratings, the study found.

“Everyone looks good on eBay basically because of the way it works,” said Chwelos. “We found about three times the negative feedback on Amazon as on eBay for the same seller.

“There is about three to three-and-a-half times more negative feedback on Amazon than on eBay.”

http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process — provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.

#1 Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.#2 Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.

#3 Grasp both ends of the spindle firmly while a friend or loved one flushes, thus activating the patented GFlush™ system, which sends the weighted cable surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes.#4 When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.

#5 Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing.#6 Insert the TiSP installation CD and run the setup utility to install the Google Toolbar (required) and the rest of the TiSP software, which will automatically configure your computer’s network settings.

#7 Within sixty minutes — assuming proper data flow — the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.#8 Congratulations, you’re online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)