This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of USC. All opinions are 100% mine.

Higher Learning!

Look, the economy is still in pretty bad shape. Jobs are still falling, not by much lately, but still dropping. I hear it all the time, “you’re going to need to go back to school and learn new things to get the jobs that are available.” My answer to that is, “who has that kind of time or money to do so.” The cost of school is on the rise, everywhere. There is however one place to turn to, online. Major collages around the United States are offering online courses. Schools like USC are offering educators a chance to earn their Master of Arts in Teaching degree, all right from home, via online. This offers students to become part of the USC Trojan family, that‘s pretty cool. And USC also offers a tuition reimbursement program exclusively for MAT@USC graduates. Although you take classes online you’re still able to participation in the commencement ceremonies and free lifetime Alumni Association memberships. It’s like being a student right on campus, you get all the benefits but from the comfort of your home. This is the newest and fastest way of getting your degree, doing it online. Schools like USC make it pretty easy for you to get program information as well as tuition reimbursement to get you back to school. I would recommend to anyone looking to get a new degree to look into doing it online, in most cases it’s cheaper, and easier.

Lawsuit Settled!

The lawsuit filed by the Skype founders against eBay has been settled, a few months ago. Ebay has agreed to give the two founders a 14 percent stake of Skype as part of the deal. What eBay wanted to do was spin Skype off and sell stock into the business. During their research of spinning Skype an investment group wanted to purchase 65 percent of Skype for about $2 billion in cash. When the founders were told about the plans they filed suit against eBay for copyright infringement. The founders stated that they own the software that runs Skype, which is licensed to eBay under contract. They were claiming that the agreement between them and eBay would be violated if Skype was sold to this investment group. To keep this short, eBay settled because I think they wouldn’t win against the founders of Skype. So that’s why they agreed to give them 14 percent, sell off 56 percent to the investment group, and keep 30 percent for themselves. I think if they would have just brought Skype to the public they could have made a lot more money. The problem with bringing it to the public is reporting. When a company is publicly traded everything needs to be reported, incomes, profit and loss numbers. The way the deal was done nothing needs to be reported.

Are You Kidding!

I just found out that Johnny Depp was voted last years “Sexiest Man Alive.” That right, People’s magazine decided that Depp is the “Sexiest Man Alive.” He had won this so called award one another time in 2003, making him a 2 time winner. The only other 2 time winners are Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Richard Gere. I personally can’t see the point why People magazine needs to do this. I would like to know who comes up with this kind of crap. You would think they could come up with something better than this. I also think People should dump this stupid thing. Mostly because People only consider people that are famous people, in the spot light. If they would give the choice to regular people to submit themselves then I’m all for it. Until they give everyone the chance this so called award means nothing. And on top of it, they select Depp, one of the weirdest people in Hollywood.

Cost Of Flooding!

These storms and flooding across the eastern part of the United States this month has turned a lot of people’s live’s upside down. From my understanding, there has been a few people already killed, many without power, and many hurt. I read that the estimated damage of these storms and floods will cost well into the millions. A few of these states are still recovering from bad snow storms. Not only does the flooding affects the people of these states it affects all of us. Our food costs will be going up because of damage crops and delays in planting crops. We can only hope that the rains subside to reduce flooding. For some it’s to late, waters in some areas of the northeast is 20 feet over flood walls. Hopefully it will stop soon!