Is it just me, or is Marks and Spencer trying very hard to be green? I’m all about being green, but I’m not one for supporting pathetic, horrible business ideas, and Marks & Spencer have really done it with this one.

Apparently, they’ve conducted research which concluded that the average life of a plastic bag was short-lived, and that it was bound to hit the trash can shortly after the goods were purchased and handed to the customer in the bag. So, instead of learning from better business in the United States, they’ve now decided to charge every customer 5 pence per plastic bag, like that’s going to make any sense. So far, this applies to Marks & Spencer Food only; the flashy plastic bag image must stay with the clothing or what?

Look, I think it’s simply a stupid idea to ‘help the planet’ by charging people for bags. Do they really think that someone who’s spending £50 in a department store will mind paying 5p for a bag in a country where the sales tax / VAT is 17.5%? No! Not only that, the best solution to a problem is not to penalize the end, but to tackle it at the root.

Why doesn’t Marks & Spencer switch to paper bags? There are environmental hazards with paper too. But come on now, it’s a step in the right direction. This attempt at winning the ‘green supermarkets war’ is a bad one; all Marks & Spencer will do is turn off customers. Anyone with even a little common sense can see that there is a problem with this model to help the planet. Just charging customers is a pathetic publicity stunt, one at which I hope Marks & Spencer fails, because it is an extremely superficial attempt to justify their savings and profits above and beyond a rather noble cause.

Help the UK and the environment by switching to paper bags that can decay, Marks & Spencer, not by passing on your cost to the customer. A fine should be imposed on all stores that supply customers with plastic bags. Then we’ll see who charges 50 pence and who switches to paper bags.

On another note, why isn’t the UK switching to paper bags?

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I recently read in an article published in a British Magazine which stated that the fact that Obama is leading the polls over Hillary Clinton, and it appears will most likely beat her, is proof of the fact that America is no more a racist society; well, maybe not as racist as it used to be a few decades ago. On the other hand, another gentleman, who was interviewed in the article, stated that it’s not that America is no more racist, it’s just that America has learnt to deal with the racial problem better.

That may well be true, but it appears that America is no more interested in the (at this point democratic) political ideologies of the mature, white person. But is that the only reason that Obama is winning? The simple fact that he’s young, and black, and has a different attitude toward most things than, say, the Clintons or the Edwards or the Kerrys? Probablt not.

But here’s what I can tell you. If you read the news, the interviews, the poll results, the poll analysis, political experts, etc. etc., it seems like the US public has become so fed-up of the corruption in the White House, that at this point they’re willing to take up new blood, new blood that’s different, that won’t change his/her mind every now and then, and new blood that may offer something new. The new part is key, because we’ve all seen what the Bush’s are capable of doing; between father and son, they’ve done it for almost 16 years, and America is more than hurting because of that.

The one simplest reason why Obama is leading the presidential race ahead of Hillary Clinton and John McCain (who looks like he’s angry all the time; maybe he should be checked into anger management or something) is because he is NEW. People don’t know what he will do or what he can do, and people are desperate. They have seen what the white folk have done (no racism meant), and they’re willing to take their chances with what NEW brings, because with white they now have to associate the sadistic presidential rule of President George W. Bush. That’s a distaster, for both Clinton and McCain.

But there are other reasons why Barrack Obama may win the US Elections. Despite the attempts of Hillary Clinton and John McCain to defame him on the public financing / funding issue, these are not serious enough allegations to damage his credibility. With Iraq being a failure, Hillary Clinton’s former stance of supporting the war has from the very first day put her on very questionable grounds. John McCain is all about war; civil, international, world. He’s a war-like people, and he’s too traditional, which again gives Barrack Obama an edge. Obama, on the other hand, never voted for the Iraq War, and that gives him the only head start he needs in addition to being NEW.

What plays against Obama, however, is the lack of confidence people have in the leadership of black people. The same article also discussed the fact that although people are all for new and all for Obama, they are slightly hesitant, because they think that since a black man has never been a president, can he do it? White people have been becoming US Presidents for the last 200 years, and they’re bred for it. But is a black man educated, complicated, and charismatic enough to lead America. Well, we’re going to find out, won’t we?

I’m not voting, since I’m not a US National and don’t live in the US. But tell me, who do you think will win the election eventually? Not who’s best, who do you think will become commander and chief?

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� I’ve recently had some problems with my Hewlett Packard dv2415us notebook, which was� replacement for my HP dv2120us.� As I’ve said earlier, it may be possible that the dv2000 series suffers from problems.� � I have heard good things about the dv9000 series from some people.

In any case, I will discuss the problems with the dv2415 in another post.� For now, here are the latest QuickPlay Download Keys.�

On another note, a friend has offered to take some time and put up a guide about TV & DVB related information on PC/Notebooks, which will discuss the best DVB cards and Software, including HP QuickPlay TV.� If folks are interested, please let me know via the following poll, so that if there is interest, we may spend time on putting the guide together.

Please vote, and then proceed to the QuickPlay Download.

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The URL to download QuickPlay from is http://downloads.asifism.com.� Please use the� WinRar download available to extract the files.� If� you have any� problems,� do share.�

HP QuickPlay Direct 2.3 Sliced into 20 different parts: � ed8c02a1f5f0c2e31cfcaf766db2ac6b

HP QuickPlay Direct 2.3 Full:� 9aca553911c690e4ecbe16ceff24af73

HP QuickPlay for Windows 2.3, 3.0 &� 3.6:� a8ea2e0668ac1fe856900fcccea1f834

HP QuickPlay TV:� e04b326192cb2b6c312f7f9fe6436800

WinRar 3.6.2:� bbeb0066d215042ed2a7b6a70afa9ea4

I recently wrote a small, not so comprehensive post about how my blog went from receiving 34 hits a month to over 5,000 unique hits a month in under a year. I also mentioned that your primary goal, when making money, is NOT to get people to visit your blog and click on your pay per click ads like Adsense and make you money, but it is to provide genuinely relacant and good content with an ultimate goal to drive traffic. Once you get some of that with good relevant content, well, there are much more efficient ways than PPC advertisements to monetize your blog.

What if you got paid to blog rather than get paid if someone clicks on your PPC ads? Sounds more attractive doesn’t it. It should, because maybe, MAYBE 1% of your visitors will click on your PPC advertisements. If you were actually getting paid to blog, you would have two benefits that you wouldn’t with pay per click advertising:

1. You’re blogging on a topic or content someone wants you to blog, which means there is a market for that particular product out there, and that actually means that you’re putting useful content on your blog, thereby inviting more traffic to your blog.

2. Your making money from your blog is NOT solely dependent on pay per click advertising, which can be a nice alternative to you logging in to your adsense account 5 times a day to see whether you’ve actually made any money.

In addition to the above two benefits, your visitors will NOT be bothered by obstructive pay per click advertising banners all over the place, which will make for a more pleasant experience, possibly attracting more traffic to your blog.

I know you’re dying to know what this way of blogging for money is. The good news is you CAN make money from your blog, but the bad news is you CANNOT do it with bad content. You have to be willing to blog, and NOT just to make money. Here’s how to actually make money with your blog, or what can actually being coined as ‘blogged advertising.’

Use Smorty, a blog advertising service.

Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. Smorty can tell you who’s willing to pay what. This is something you could attempt as an individual too, but unless you’re someone who gets over 20,000 unique valid and relevant hits on your blog, chances are an advertiser will turn you down. With Smorty, you don’t have to worry about that. Once your blog is approved for writing, you can make money with articles you write on your blog!

This may sound too good to be true to some of you, but it isn’t. And, quite frankly, if you’ve been relying on PPC networks to make you some extra money from your blog, this will sound like quite the pay rate! Check it out for yourself!

Rambo 4, was, without a doubt, one of the best action flicks in a long time. It comes packed with explosions, gunshots, violence, and sense of realism on multiple levels. The film has, however, not done too well in the United States. It has done OK internationally, but it has not received the response that it should have.

Sylvester Stallone shines once again in the heroic / historic role of Rambo, this time in Thailand, to take a group of missionaries from Colorado who’ve come to Thailand into war torn Burma. Later, he has to lead a group of mercenaries (ex British Army, and watch out for the Bald Irish fella) to rescue these missionaries. The move is great, although the violence and action is not for the faint hearted. You haven’t seen bodies being torn to pieces with a bomb before; you will see that here.

This movie is good not only because it is Rambo and its action packed. Stallone looks good without a doubt. For being 62, he may have a double chin and all going on, but he still comfortably pulls off the role of Rambo, and does it quite fashionably. But its not just Stallone’s performance or the action packed fun that makes this film worth watching.

Stallone, being the creator and director, has focused on a topic that in 2007 received some attention in the world media. Burma, which has basically been a country with a civil war and military rule since the 60s, has seen oppression of its people and destruction of its history by its own military. As it stands, no country in the world has attempted to help Burma out or suppress its army, primarily because Burma doesn’t have much that concerns or anything to offer to the world. Burma isn’t Pakistan posing an extremist threat to the world, nor is it North Korea posing a suicidal threat to the United States, with the result that no really gives a hoot about what goes on there.

Well, apparently Stallone does. I’m not sure how extreme the depiction of Burma in Rambo 4 was; it is, nonetheless, probably based in part on the situation there, and respect to him for that. Stallone shines in this movie not only because of his acting and portrayal of Rambo that we’re used to, but because of the idea and message he tries to give to his audience. I don’t know how many people will look at it that way, because I’m sure many of the viewers were turned off by the excessive violence. However, I think the film was done well; not only was it entertaining, but it carried some good value and a hint of the eye opening truth of how really pathetic the world is. I recommend that if you’re over 18, and you can stand some violent footage, watch the movie. It’s worth watching, if not for the entertainment value, for humanitarian reasons.

Bravo, Sylvester Stallone.

If you watched this movie, please tell me and other readers what you thought of it:

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For those of you who have been having problems downloading and extracting QuickPlay Direct 2.3, please also try downloading the version of Winrar that I’ve provided.� Most likely, the error in extraction is because a different version is being used to zip up and slice the HPQPDP file and a different version is being used to open it.

Scroll down on this page for the download keys post.� As always, if there are any problems, please leave comments to let me know, and we’ll see what I can do to resolve the problem.

I’m aware that there are hundreds of articles out there that tell you how to blog, how to drive traffic to your blog, and how to get rich off of your blog and get an independent income. Well, that’s not what I’m going to do here.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has made this site a success, whether or not you came here for HP QuickPlay, you contributed to making this a site where thousands of people come every month. Here, then, before I go on telling you how I accomplished it, is proof that the site has increased traffic on a monthly basis.

Asifism.com is a domain I bought at University some time in 2003-2004, to build some kind of a personal website. From that time, the site has taken many different faces. However, this blog was put up a year ago, and from the 34 visitors I received in February, 2007, I am now expecting the total number of vistors to cross 5,400 for this month. That’s a sharp increase, keeping in mind that this is a unique number of visitors, and is not the number of hits, which, as of this moment, are 14,598 for the month of February, 2008.

You’ve seen all the guides on the internet on how to get traffic to your blog: widgets, domain name, content, advertising, marketing, etc. etc. However, ultimately, your strongest source of traffic is going to be the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft Live Search. Even your advertising and marketing, be it on forums, blogging networks, or via social bookmarking can help drive an extremely decent amount of traffic to your web site.

But the magic, the key, to getting traffic, is content. You need to have the content that people want. If you have the right content, that is written well, you’ll get listed on the search engines, and your social bookmarking will get visitors soaring onto your web site. 95% of the traffic on Asifism.com has come from search engines, and it’s not because i’ve spent time writing some fantastic articles, but because I offered something no one on the web did.

I spent many, literally hundreds of hours pulling my hair out and trying to resolve a problem that quite possibly had a solution somewhere on the internet, but it was scattered, and scattered all over the place. Before that solution disappeared, I was able to collect and put all the pieces together, and become, at some point, the only web site to offer a solution. Then, I was willing to help out. HP QuickPlay was the product that I spent hours with, and the experiences I had with my HP laptop, support, and software were so horrid, and I figured since I’ve been able to get through, I can help others with it. The idea was not to get traffic, but it worked wonders as you can see.

As traffic relevant to HP grew, I wrote another article on getting deported from the US. Again, this article did well, and immigration and deportation, always being a hot topic in the US got some hits. At one point Asifism.com was listed # 1 on google when someone searched for “US Deportation Facilities,” and people searched for that term because the beloved ICE would move people to facilities without telling friends or family of the deportee.

The social bookmarking thing is new. I have recently started to promote the web site on social bookmarks like BloggingZoom (http://www.bloggingzoom.com), Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), Delicious, Digg It (http://www.digg.com) & Mixx (http://www.mixx.com). Social Bookmarking can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your site, but you’ve got to be crafty and skillful to lure people to your content. It takes practice and time, but it’s something that most people can do.

When blogging, I think the key is to not focus on the making money part. Once you have the traffic going, you can worry about placing your adsense ads or other widgets that can help you monetize; but if you keep wondering about how you’re failing at making money, you probably won’t make it. This article: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to-make-money-online-with-website/ is a wonderful tool on how to monetize your blog, but it’s phase 2.

Remember, when blogging, quality matters. If you have content that people want to read, that has continuity, people will keep coming back and possibly subscribe to your feeds. That’s key, just like any business, repeat customers do the trick! Scout the internet for what kind of articles and blogs are doing well on the web, and write content on similar things. Alternatively, you can write on something you’re good at and come across likeminded people. Remember, just one or two articles won’t do it. You have to keep plugging away, add more information, and eventually, through a social bookmark or a search engine, the right people will find you.

Concentrate on giving the information people need. That’s the most important thing when getting traffic. This isn’t a detailed article on how to conquer the internet, it’s me, in very simple terms, telling you how I got traffic to my site. If I can do it, so can you.

With the Pakistani Election coming to an end this week, we know who’s sitting in the front seat to drive this overcrowded nation of almost 200 million people. Although you can this election was pretty intense and nail biting (given its Hollywood like character: Murder, Suicide, threats, patriotism, etc. etc.), somehow, no matter how intense the election, the problem is that no political party has a particular agenda or a stance it takes on any particular issue.

With Pakistan People’s Party (The Ex-Benazir Bhutto & Currently Asif Zardari group) taking the lead in the polls, Pakistan Muslic League (Nawaz Sharif group) coming in second, and PML- Q (Musharraf’s party) coming in third, and with the PPP and the PML-N attempting to form an alliance to oust Musharraf, things could get pretty nasty for Pakistan pretty soon. There’s no telling how long Zardari and Sharif can continue the sweet talk, because as it is, I’m sure their dislike for each other is, well, more than quite obvious.

But the major problem with the future of Pakistan is not what lies ahead with the confrontation of these three political leaders (so-called), but what will happen once the confrontation is complete. With Musharraf losing out on majority support and retiring as an Army General, his say in the government and direction of the country is far less than it would have been if he was the Chief of Army Staff. Despite the fact that Nawaz Sharif & Co. won quite a big part of the National Assembly seats, there is still a lot to fear in the future of Pakistan.

This is primarily the case because no matter how you look at it, Pakistan People’s Party will run the show, and no matter who is made Prime Minister, be it Amin Faheem or not, Asif Zardari will run the show and run Pakistan; and that’s the danger! Not that I have anything personal against him, but Zardari is known to be a chronically corrupt man, who has quite possibly murdered his own spouse (Benazir Bhutto, if you’re wondering) for the chance to reign over Pakistan. In the past, as a senator / MNA in Pakistan, Zardari has been coined as the 10% man, i.e., any contract or deal that goes through the Pakistan government, Mr. Zardari gets to keep 10%of it. Well, he could manage to do it because Benazir Bhutto was the Prime Minister.

Asif Zardari is a man who is known to have murdered, torchered, looted, and raped the Pakistani Government and Pakistani people at the highest of levels. Not that the others have been much different. I do not say that Nawaz Sharif would put the betterment of Pakistan before his, and neither can the same be said of Musharraf’s record over the last 9 years. However, I fear that Asif Zardari is the worst of the lot, and he has scandals and actions of his past to prove it.

Not only, I suspect, will corruption rise to an all time high under his rule, but the country will be drained of its already slim natural resources. I’m not very clear on Zadari’s relationship with the Maulana/Fundamentalist groups of Pakistan, although it is evident from history that they despised Benazir Bhutto. However, forming a coalition with Nawaz Sharif here can be useful, since he has the experience and tact to deal with that crowd; it’s one of the few things he was capable of doing. This one topic alone is detrimental to the future of internal Pakistan and for its relationship with the outside world.

With the mass increase of long beards and lack of education in Pakistan over the last few years, and given the trend of suicide bombings not only in Pakistan but globally, it is imperative that no matter how corrupt Zardari is, he pay attention to dealing with this issue of religious extremism and increasing the level basic education. Ultimately, that’s where Pakistan needs to start work to elevate itself from a worseing third world status.

I suppose it’s too early to decide what’s going to happen. We will first probably have to see the three of them bicker over whether or not Musharraf stays. Once that’s over, we will witness the destruction or rebuilding of destroyed country, that suffers from an extreme lack of being a nation. I can only but pray.

Folks,

With extensive work underway on the production of DesignerPottery.com, I have set up and launched a designer pottery & ceramics blog to keep everyone posted and upto date about about production, design, special offers, discounts, and to ask anyone who may be willing to contribute to do so.

I’ll be posting to the blog regularly, so please check back regularly for more details and updates. The URL to the Designer Pottery & Ceramics Blog is: http://www.designerpottery.com/blog.

Most bloggers I know will scream (or groan or grumble) if you make them sign up for yet another social networking account. I’m one of those bloggers myself.

But this new upstart piqued my interest because it’s actually beneficial and incorporates elements such as blog advertising, blog promotion, a Wikipedia-type database and, limitedly, social networking.

The site is called Qassia and is a “credit-driven intelligence engine coupled to a cascading tag-based web directory”.

That doesn’t mean anything to you so I’m going to explain.

When you sign up, you’ll get a profile page for promoting yourself. Then you post tidbits of information to the Intel database. You can post anything and everything, from lengthy treatises on quantum physics to what your dog likes to eat.

“What we value is intelligence about the people, companies, and places around you. The people and places do not have to be famous, and the intelligence does not have to be earth-shattering.”

You see, anyone can contribute anything.

Each Intel you post gets you a backlink to your blog and ranks you higher on the web directory.

Each Intel you post could potentially attract advertising and every dollar earned on your posts is 100% yours.

Cool, huh?

It’s now in closed beta, which means you can only sign up by invitation.

But fret not because I am personally inviting you to try it out now!

Here is the magic link: http://anawaz.qassia.com

It’s not limited to bloggers, of course. Anyone with a website you want to promote can benefit from it.

See you in Qassia!

P.S. This article was taken from http://sheylara.com, so called damsel in distress.