Hewlett- Packard is one of the most trusted computer brands the market has to offer. They have produced excellent and highly efficient results over the years.
It is well know that HP has expiry dates for their ink cartridges. Some HP inkjet printers however, use cartridges that expire 12 or 24 months following the completion of warranty, some 18 to 30 months after installation. There are models that have a simple override process that can be used to carry on printing with an expired ink cartridge. The good thing is only a few ink supplies contain an expiration date, so there are rare chances that this will affect your printing process.
What does expiration of ink cartridges signify?
Essentially ink expiration is in-built dates on it which indicate when the HP cartridge will stop working. Air intake and water desertion can cause significant metamorphosis in ink overtime. In printing systems that have the print head and ink reservoir split, older ink can unfavorably cause failure in the print head and the ink release mechanism contained by the printer. Through ink expiration dates, however, a company can successfully avoid this phenomenon from occurring.
Why the need for expiration dates?
Why does a company publicize expiration dates? It is fairly simple, in order to guard the printer from harm and guarantee quality print outs. It acts as a sort of safeguard against forces that can cause damage to the printer and subsequent process .If the ink in the cartridge has not been depleted by the date of expiration; it either halts operations or exhibits a message of caution which can be easily overridden. But as previously stated, most HP ink supplies do not have any sort of ink expiration dates.
Steps to disable timers for HP ink cartridges:
1. Pay close attention to the indication lights situated on the printer. If you notice two lights blinking on the control panel, the two being the â??powerâ?? and â??resumeâ?? lights; along with one of the cartridge lights it indicates an expired cartridge. You will also receive an error message from the printer on your computerâ??s screen.
2. Press and keep holding down the â??powerâ?? button also continuing to press the â??resumeâ?? button for three consecutive times. The second light will stop blinking and the cartridge light will go out.
3. Carry on with the printing process till your cartridge finally runs out of the ink and the reservoir gets depleted. Pay close attention to your printouts attentively and substitute the old cartridge with a new one if you notice a lapse in the quality of the imagery.
You can also perform a simple override procedure. The instructions are pronounced in the specified cartridge user manual and also in the printerâ??s error message showcased on the home screen. You need not be an expert or computer technician to conduct this process. The user guides illustrate the method clearly enough for anyone to follow and operate. HP continues to produce world-class products with a truly high customer satisfaction. A minor glitch cannot stain the brand that is Hewlett- Packard.
James Hanning has authored this guest post. He works as a technology consultant and suggests using HP ink cartridges for more efficient printing and saving money on it.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / freedigitalphotos.net
In 1939 the idea of a flying bomb was proposed to the Luftwaffe.
This proposal was surprisingly rejected and then rejected again in 1941. However, when the Luftwaffe started to take heavy loses they considered the idea again in 1942.
The V-1 flying bomb is also known as the ‘Doodlebug’ or ‘Buzz Bomb’ and the codename that they chose when they got started on developing the bomb was ‘Cherry Stone’. The first series of the V-1 flying bombs were intended to terrorise London and the very first V-1 flying bomb was launched at London on June 13th 1944.
The V-1 flying bomb had a range of around 150 miles and used a pulse jet engine designed by Fritz Gossiau building on the earlier work of Paul Schmidt. The pulse jet engine in the doodlebug worked by air being mixed with fuel which was ignited with spark plugs. The combustion in turn forced intake shutters to close which produced bursts of thrust out of the exhaust at fifty times per second. This is what gave the doodlebug its ominous buzzing sound. The average speed of the V-1 flying bombs were 350 mph.
When the V-1 flying bombs were launched at their production peak, around one hundred V-1s were fired at the southeast of England. Nearly 10,000 in total were launched until October 1944. The doodlebug attacks caused around 23,000 casualties which were mainly just ordinary civilian casualties.
Operation Crossbow
British forces put up defences such as guns and fighters in the air to intercept the V-1 flying bombs in an operation called ‘Operation Crossbow’, which also involved pinpointing launch site and underground doodlebug depots and targeting them on bombing raids.
The construction of the V1-flying bombs were crude and cost effective, with mostly welded steel for the fuselage and plywood wings. Hitler named the doodlebug Maikafer which means ‘May bug’ in English.
The V-1 flying bombs were launched off of a type of ramp known as the Dampferzeuger (steam generator) which launched the doodlebug of at a speed of 360 mph. The doodlebug was guided by a simple autopilot that regulated the bomb’s airspeed and altitude.
There was initially a fuel intake problem with the V-1 flying bombs, as when they dived steeply, which was intended to be a power dive, the fuel flow would cease which stopped the engine dead. This was the reason people would hear an eire silence before impact. This caused many doodlebugs to hit under power, although this problem was later fixed.
My grandmother said that when a doodlebug cut out, people would count to seven before impact, as when you reached seven the impact would sound, and she said that she would usually hide under the table with her family when they came over.
Several spin-off variants of the V-1 flying bomb were developed which were piloted. However, on test flights the pilots were unable to land safely and died, which meant that they were never used in combat.
V-1 Flying Bomb Footage
Extremely Hard To Hit
The doodlebugs were extremely hard to hit by guns deployed in Operation Crossbow and were frustrating to try and shoot down. For one thing they cruised at an altitude of around 2,000 to 3,000 feet which was just above the effective range of light anti-aircraft guns and just below the optimum height for engagement by the heavy guns. They were also very small targets and hard to hit anyhow. So, new technology was needed to counter this problem.
Gun-laying radars helped to counter the V-1 flying bomb’s speed and size and Bell Labs came up with a predictor fire control system which was based on an analog computer. This new technology arrived in June 1944 and enabled guns to shoot down between 60% and 80% of the doodlebugs.
Around 2,000 barrage balloons were deployed with the idea being that the V1s would hit the cables and be destroyed. Only around 300 V-1 flying bombs were thought to have been stopped this way, as Nazi Germany cleverly fitted cable cutters onto the wings of the doodlebugs.
Fighter planes ran sorties to try and destroy the V-1 flying bombs in the air. This was extremely difficult however as machine gun fire had limited effect in most cases and if the warhead was triggered it might destroy the attacking plane. A special defence zone was set up with only the very fastest fighter planes allowed in. This was quite successful as hundreds of V-1 flying bombs were shot down. The Mosquito shot down 623, the Spitfires 303 and the Mustangs 232.
By September 1944, the attacks from V-1 flying bombs were halted temporarily when advancing Allied armies overran launch sites. The last V-1 launched was on 29th March 1945 which hit Datchworth in Hertfordshire.
CC Image courtesy of Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1973-029A-24A / Lysiak / CC-BY-SA – Source: Wikipedia
One amazing fact about water that may surprise you is that it does not conduct electricity.
The reason why water does not conduct electricity is that seldom is water completely pure, so will conduct electricity because of the impurities contained in normal water. When salts dissolve into water, ions are formed with different electrically charged atoms, positive Na ions and negative CI ions.
Water makes up a lot of the percentage of organic life-form mass, such as a tree which contains seventy-five percent of water. About two thirds of a human being is water and even the bones of human beings contain 25% water. The maximum length of time you can survive without water is about 5-7 days.
You will start to feel thirsty when you have lost over one percent of your body’s total amount of water.
Less that one percent of water on Earth is suitable for drinking as most of the water on the Earth’s surface is either salt water or is frozen solid.
There are about 13 million households around the world that drink from wells and they as such are responsible for keeping the water treated and clean. Around 800,000 wells are drilled each year in the U.S.A for commercial and domestic uses, as well as for water testing.
There are over two billion people on Earth who do not have a safe water supply.
Most people think that showering saves water, but in actual fact having a bath typically uses less water than taking a shower would use.
A big scam with bottled water sellers is to sell bottled water that is actually tap water. Around 25% of bottled water is in fact ordinary tap water. The National Defense Counsel undertook a four year test of over 100 bottles of marketed water and found that one third had chemical levels exceeding industry standards or contained bacteria.
Each person gets through around one hundred gallons of water per day when they are at home.
When it comes to contaminants dumped in water sources, it only takes one gallon of gasoline to contaminate around senenty five thousand gallons of water.
A really weird fact about water is that hot water freezes quicker than cold water. If you throw boiling water up into the air in subzero temperatures, what you will get as a result will be instant snow.
 Image courtesy of David Castillo / freedigitalphotos.net
The British East India Company was hugely successful, but what if I told you that they also inadvertently murdered 10 million Indians?
The British East India Company ended up ruling large areas of India and traded in cotton, silk, tea, opium and other goods. Control of Bengal was given over to London and the East India Company making Bengal part of the British Empire.
The British Empire’s right to rule Bengal was given by the Mughal prince. Agricultural crops were then modified to fall in line with the British East India Company’s import / export needs. Farmers were mostly forced to produce opium and not food crops. As a result, when there was a lack of rain and a heat wave there were no surplus food stocks available to local people.
One Third Of The Population Wiped Out
In 1770, one third of the population of Bengal died from food shortages and the after effects of the famine included disease and nutrient deficiency.
Poor management by the British East India Company, driven by greed was the cause of so many deaths and trade leaders did little to nothing to help in the crisis.
The need to keep emergency surplus food supplies was a necessity. However, the British East India Company favoured profit over humane common sense.
WIth so many deaths, large areas were depopulated and turned into jungle whilst many remaining survivors migrated in the search for food. The ramifications of the famine remained evident in Bengal for a decade afterwards.
Cruel Tax Laws
To make matters worse, the British East India Company extorted large amounts of tax from farmers by upping the land tax from 10% to a hefty 50% of all crop profits. Farmers were ordered to plant Indigo in place of rice for example and hoarding rice was forbidden.
Regions worst affected by the famine were Birbhum and Murchidabad. Even though reports of the catastrophe were coming in to company officers they were conveniently ignored, with profit being preferred over kindness.
With large areas of Bengal under emergency conditions it gave rise to thugs and groups of bandits who took advantage of the situation.
Violent tax collecting strategies were used by the British East India Company in an effort to further increase the company’s profits.
Britain’s colonisation of countries in the past has sometimes speeded up the development of third world countries by bringing new technologies and methods. Also, English is now a worldwide language largely because of British colonisation. However, there has also been a lot of damage done in the past where developing countries have been taken advantage of.
Have you heard about the country of Tuvalu? Their story is truly remarkable and almost unbelievable. Over the course of a few years, the nation became wealthy off the sale of the .tv domain name. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the island itself may soon no longer exist. The story of Tuvalu is one of the most bizarre and interesting in all of Internet history: History The government of the small island of Tuvalu owns the rights to the domain extension .tv.
Many websites use this extension, especially related to video content and television-related websites online. In order to release the sale of .tv domain names, Verisign and other domain hosting companies have to lease the extension from the government of Tuvalu. In 2011, the amount earned by the government of Tuvalu equaled about 2 million dollars in fees from the lease and use of their .tv extension. The Island Nation Tuvalu is a small island with only about 10,000 residents. The island was unheard of until it started the sale of the domain extension .tv.
Once the island leased the domain extension, the country was soon able to bring in millions of dollars of profit each year. Within a few years, the government of Tuvalu became one of the most profitable in the world due to the lease of the domain extension alone. Currently, the domain extension is available until the end of 2021. The last contract for the domain name was set to expire in 2016, but Verisign and the government of Tuvalu extended the contract. Because of the high fees and profit associated with the domain name, many people and companies have invested in the .tv domain extension. Global Warming However, now there is a new problem with the island. According to weather forecasts and environmental scientists, the island of Tuvalu is slowly sinking into the ocean. This is caused by increasingly warm temperatures in the area, which are leading to the melting of ice, increased periods of heavy rainfall and droughts, and other weather conditions, which are causing the island to slowly sink into the water.
Currently, the island is only 15 feet above sea level, which means that even slight changes in the height of the island could cause significant issues. Due to the uncertainty of weather the island will actually exist in a few years, some domain hosts are advising that customers refrain from the use of the .tv domain name. Some domain name investors have also cautioned against the use of or investment in the name. However, with the new contract renewal, it seems that investors and the island itself are confident that the island will remain above sea level until at least 2021. If you are unsure about using a domain name for an island that may not exist in 50 years, then it is wise to avoid the use of the .tv domain name. Otherwise, it is extremely unlikely that the island will sink over the next few years, so using the domain name should be safe for the foreseeable future.
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 License: Royalty Free or iStock source: http://www.shutterstock.com/
Simon is a professional Blogger working for Jangomail an email marketing system provider.
What was the ‘Bouncing Betty’ or ‘S-Mine’ as it is also known as?
Picture this, you are walking along and all of a sudden a cylindrical object bounces up four feet into the air behind you. It doesn’t kill you but you are severely maimed, as well as injuring others around you. What happened? You just stepped on a Bouncing Betty . . .
The Bouncing Betty was first used in World War 2 in the 1930s and was a cylindrical object buried beneath the ground with wires sticking up. When you stepped on the mine and tripped it, the mine would bounce up into the air and explode. Steel balls or metal would then tear through the poor victims body. The fact that it could bounce up into the air meant that the explosion could deal more damage.
The Germans developed a particular type of Bouncing Betty mine called the ‘S-Mine’ which had around 350 steel balls that would blast out at a deadly radius of 165 yards. This was the first mine of its kind.
These mines don’t trigger until you step off the mine.
This type of mine was an anti-personnel mine and it’s real effectiveness was that by laying down these mines it would slow the enemy’s advance down to a snail’s pace. The mine was feared by troops, as the devastation it caused was more than you’d get with a standard mine below ground. The Bouncing Betty’s blast radius could injure multiple amounts of troops. The psychological stress for troops advancing knowing that their enemy had placed these mines was intense.
Although the Bouncing Betty was developed in the 1930s, they have been used in more recent wars. For instance, they were used in the Vietnam war.
In WW2 Germany under the influence of the Third Reich produced nearly 2 million S-Mines. S – Mines were even deployed along the beaches of Normandy to slow down any possible invasion.
This mine was particularly nasty as it was not necessarily employed on the battlefield to kill enemy soldiers, rather it was intended to seriously maim soldiers over a wide blast area, therefore slowing advances and producing psychological stress.
The German S-Mine was around 5 inches tall and around 4 inches in diameter and held a main fuse on top where the trigger sensor was attached. S-Mines used TNT as it’s explosive. The S-Mine needed around 7 kilograms of weight or more to trigger, so as not to be triggered by wildlife.
When you go to your local zoo, what do your kids say when you ask them what marine animal they’d like to go see? Chances are it will be the sharks or the dolphins.
Just how many people visit the zoo and think ‘I wonder if they have any porpoises here?’ Probably no-one.
In fact, porpoises get so little attention and are so overshadowed by their related cousin, the dolphin, that the zoo will often demote the poor porpoise and have it working in the zoo cafeteria serving coffee.
Just try even mentioning “porpoise” to the general public. They will look at you in an odd way and say “What the heck is a porpoise?”
Well, the porpoise may well be ignored and is certainly not on most people’s top ten ‘most popular animals’ lists, but it is a fascinating animal and dare I say it, maybe even cuter than dolphins. They differ from dolphins by not having a beak, instead they look like a dolphin with an underdeveloped head and they are generally smaller than dolphins. Small is cute right? Unless it’s a piranha of course. When I first saw my first porpoise, I thought it was a dolphin that had had a head on traffic collision, then their little squashed heads seem to appear ‘Ferbie’ like and almost loveable.
Porpoises are classed as the smallest of the toothed whales. The teeth of a porpoise are different from a dolphin’s as the porpoise has more rounded teeth. They are generally very shy, except for the Dall’s porpoise which likes to show off and sometimes approaches boats. It won’t jump out of the water and breakdance on the boat deck, but it will ride the waves and swim around the boat sometimes. Then it will no doubt be heckled by the passengers saying “Look it’s a dolphin Mum!” This will no doubt depress the poor porpoise into a life of solitary loneliness, because nobody to this date has shouted “Wow, Mum, my favourite marine animal – a porpoise!”
So no wonder porpoises are generally shy when approaching people if people start shouting “Dolphin!” as their confidence has probably been irreparably damaged.
Porpoises bear young quicker than dolphins do and tend to hang out in groups of not more than ten. They are less acrobatic than their close cousins, the dolphin, but they are more sexually aggressive. Therefore, it is safe to say ‘never get into the sea with porpoises around if you if you are buff or are attractive’ or your holiday could all of a sudden become very bizarre, with you becoming traumatised for the rest of your holiday or being extremely happy. Of course, I’m only joking here as porpoises, luckily enough, do not interact with humans in this way.
As with most marine animals, their numbers are being diminished by trawlers using fishing nets and their food supply being limited in the same way. Nice one trawler companies, another species about to bite the dust. Keep up the good work, everyone loves you.
In the dictionary, a ‘porpoise’ is a ‘gregarious cetacean of the genus phocena’. This does nothing to improve the average layman’s understanding of this largely ignored animal of course, unless you are fluent in Latin and do crosswords in the Times newspaper regularly.
To add insult to injury, the most sighted porpoise in the North Atlantic and Pacific has been named ‘The Common Porpoise’ and what a boring name that is. Imagine saying that you’d like to own a ‘Common Dog’ or a ‘Common Cat.’ This doesn’t help in perking up interest amongst animal lovers and opening their eyes to this interesting animal.
The porpoise uses sonar to navigate and communicate and generally looks pretty chunky, almost like a dwarf dolphin that has taken steroids might look before a Mr. Dolphin Universe competition – Â yeah, you know that look.
In conclusion
The porpoise generally does not do back flips and is shy in general, so the dolphin has come in and stolen the limelight. Next time you visit your local zoo and see a porpoise serving coffee in the zoo cafeteria, give it a high five and tell it that it is beautiful in its own right and has inner beauty, and that it doesn’t have to show off doing back flips to catch your attention like those floozy dolphins do.
The United Kingdom would fair well in a corruption comparison between countries of the world. However, is this an illusion?
The UK has bureaucratic corruption, held up with lashings of red tape that has most people spinning uncontrollably into debt. It’s corruption in legalised form that is all ‘prim and proper’ but when analysed closely, is just dressed up corruption.
The Stress Of Simply Parking Your Car
Let’s first look at the simple need to park your car in England. The chances are that when you park up there will be a time limit on your stay, which will have you rushing around the supermarket or tourist destination like a mad dog. You’ll notice that most pay machines will have the sign ‘This machine does not give change’. Very odd you might think . . . the local council not making a machine with change giving functionality. Why is that? Did they forget to leave out the specs of the pay machine production when they gave the contract to the company that produced them? No, they want to keep your change, it’s as simple as that. To add insult to injustice, many machines conveniently have a 90p fee, as they know the odds of you having the correct change will be pretty slim. So, you pop in your 1 pound coin and the car park owner or council keeps your 10 pence.
So is this corruption? Yes. Although when corruption is in legal form the authorities can gloss it over as being well . . . ‘legal’ and above board, which of course makes it okay. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realise that it is in fact unfair, greedy and below the belt.
Delegating To The Masses
When you rush around the supermarket, wait in line with other impatient people who also have their car on a time limit and then the cashier says “Do you want a bag with that?” if you have forgotten your bag, people will frown at you and see you as the sole reason for global warming. It’s a good idea of course, but people in the UK are being brainwashed into believing that they are stopping global warming just by bringing their own bag to the supermarket. Every little helps, but each person having their own car and environmental footprints via the truck load of gadgets they have at home far outweighs the ‘bring your own bag’ token gesture. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea, but the country has got to do something better than that.
Separating rubbish into different bins is a good idea on the whole. Although people have conveniently forgotten that there used to be factories that sorted it out for you. Now you are doing a government service job that you were paying taxes for. Now you are paying the same taxes + more and have to do it yourself. In some places they are even charging you to take large items of rubbish to the dump. You will probably have to queue at the dump with the astronomical price you paid for fuel going down the pan as you wait. In fact, if you go around someone’s house in the UK you have to work out what each bin is for. God forbid if you put your wheelie bin at an angle or the lid is slightly up. You will be slapped with more red tape fees or they may even flatly refuse to collect your rubbish that you have painstakingly sorted out yourself.
Half the food you buy at the supermarket is already wrapped in plastic anyhow. If the government brought down the price of organic wholesome foods it would make a difference not only to the environment, but to the increasingly obese population in the UK as a whole.
Let’s face it, most people in the UK are overweight, carrying round an old shopping bag, stressed out, in debt and looking up at rain clouds. Do them a favour and give them a break and they will love a government that helps them, by reducing wholesome food prices and edging out fast foods and stress.
By the way, don’t just raise taxes on cigarettes, ban them as they are a class A+ drug in that they kill more people than any other drug. There’s just so much money to be had by governments and powerful companies around the world and so many votes to be lost if they banned them outright and closed down the tobacco companies that they just can’t bring themselves to do it. If cigarettes were a new drug coming onto the market, they would be banned instantly. It’s just too late now as too many fingers are in too many pies politically, too many people are addicted and there are large sums of money at stake, plus smokers already addicted would rebel as they’ve been railroaded into needing this drug. This is not just in the UK but worldwide.
TV License
What about TV licenses which were initially brought in to ensure the quality of the BBC channel. Now there are many channels, as well as satellite TV options. However, you still have to pay a TV license – funnily enough. TV detector vans and having to have a license, for no reason if you think about it, are absurd and laughed at by many countries. Just mention it to someone from America and they will laugh their socks off. Is a TV a dangerous animal? Is it a firearm? No. The whole thing is ridiculous when viewed with common sense.
Phone Monopolies
Want to buy a phone in England? In Thailand for example you can usually buy a phone number for around 3 pounds and buy a phone card for around 2 pounds and a phone that is unlocked. All separately. It is hard to find a phone on a contract unless you go out of your way to look for one. In the UK however it is a monopoly. You will be tied to a contract or hammered by crazy costs if you select a pay-as-you-go option. In the UK, PAYG options are always options that are tied up with stupidly high costs, as if to penalise you for not falling for having to buy a contract. The phone and communications market has been sewn up into a monopoly. All legally and above board of course.
A Lifetime Tax Charge
What about Council Tax. Ah, good old Council Tax, the tax that means even if you do pay off your house you will still have a lifetime fee for living there. Many other countries, if you pay your house off you are free. This is not the case in England however. You are never free from payments.
A Police State
So what about the ability to do your own DIY around the house that you are paying for? Well, that’s becoming increasingly difficult, as now, to be completely legal you usually have to employ someone to do the work as it will not be legal for you to carry out the work. Then, with a dash of red tape they’ll tell you that the plasterer, builder or electrician must be a member of some body or union that has a high joining fee. These fees are then passed on to you in the form of a big bill for work you could have easily researched and done yourself if it is a simple job in most cases.
One of the best opt-outs when you corner someone endorsing this bureaucratic nonsense is that they’ll quote an accident or fatality that happened when someone didn’t go through the ‘proper’ expensive channels. They will conveniently pass over all of the successful DIY work people have done in their own homes and instead quote a case where someone has come to harm. Perhaps someone dropping a trowel on their head in 1971 or some idiot that blew his house up in 1986 etc.
In the UK you live in fear most of the time, as criminals usually have more rights than victims. If someone hits you in a pub and you hit back, they can take you to court. If you fight with a burglar, he can sue you. In fact, you have to wait for him to go upstairs before you can even tackle him, maybe he will help himself to a pizza you have in the fridge and kick back on your sofa and not even bother going upstairs? Even then, you have to make a citizen’s arrest with minimum force. This is of course not taking notice of the fact that the burglar will no doubt be armed and violent. In other countries you can shoot the burglar. In the UK you have to tickle them with a feather into submission. If he is allergic to feathers he will still be able to sue you of course.
Absurd Tax Laws
In the past, England had a ‘beard tax’, so that if you wanted to grow a beard or forgot to shave, the tax collector would come round. All above board and legal of course. Then there was the ‘window tax’ where if you wanted to avoid this tax you’d have to brick up your windows. ‘View tax’ is being considered, so that if you live in a place with a nice view, the authorities get a legal backhander. ‘Computer Tax’ was once considered and still may come about in the future.
The ridiculous red tape and legal backhanders have put a lot of people in the UK in debt. With the recession, the problem has compounded itself.
Legal Loan Sharks
Short-term loans up to 1000 pounds are all the rage now. In the small print it says that there will be a 100 percent interest charge if you don’t pay on time in a lot of cases. Many young people are falling for this, defaulting on a payment and ending up with a 2000 pound loan instead of a 1000 pound loan which may compound even more. This enables legal loan shark companies to really dig in and take full advantage of people suffering in the recession. All legal in a proper British way of course. If it’s legal it can’t be corruption right?
In fact, what if third world countries just drafted up a load of legal documents to make corruption in their countries legal? Then they’d be on par with the UK and fair very well on a list of countries least affected by corruption. Sorted.
Vote Buying
Vote buying can’t be happening in the UK right? Many immigrants in the past have flooded into the UK illegally and the government has been very careful on not cracking down too much. Even though the UK is known worldwide for being soft on illegal immigrants. If they cracked down on the ability to easily settle in the UK the government would lose votes from minority groups. They then give justification for not setting up rigid immigration laws with the phrase ‘political correctness’ and try to slap people concerned with weak immigration laws as being ‘racist.’
Having strong immigration laws is essential for a country’s survival. If you go to Asia for example, in many countries it is almost impossible to become a resident. Just because countries have strong immigration rules does not make them ‘racist’. Common sense would be to look after the minority groups in England, do away with racism, but keep rigid immigration rules in line with the immigration rules set down by that person’s home country/government. Of course it isn’t fair to accept immigrants from countries that don’t offer the same freedoms to UK settlers abroad.
Benefit fraud is rife and the government knows this, however they’ve been very careful when it comes to cracking down on benefit fraud too much until now, when the recession kicked in and gave them no choice. People living off benefits and avoiding employment is a huge voting pool that if the apple cart were to be upset it would cause millions of votes to be lost.
In their efforts to be ‘politically correct’ to ensure votes they even allowed immigrants to burn a union jack and parade it through London. If you did this in the immigrants’ home countries with their own country’s flag, you’d be stoned to death or put into prison for life. But hey, don’t crack down and lose votes, just label anyone questioning the UKs weakness as being ‘politically incorrect’ or, if they persist, label them as ‘racist’ if worse comes to worst.
Of course, having said that, if immigrants come to the UK and are prepared to respect the country and bring something of value to the country, immigrants should be welcomed with open arms. Just eject the ones burning Union Jack flags and blowing stuff up. End of story.
Stress At Work
Computerised style employment is all the rage now. You will be input into a computer system and your activities monitored. They’ll maybe even hook you up to a bar coding system or some other time/productivity set up and maximise the workload to stretch you beyond your human limits.
The mass media really controls the mood in the UK now. There now is about 95% bad news with a little 5% of good news added on at the end of news broadcasts now, just for contrast and to highlight the misery. Victims that recover are not reported upon. War torn countries that recover are not reported on. If it snows, the reports will be about miserable horrific accidents, not about the joy children are having making snowmen etc. It’s gotten so bad, that if you are seen as positive, you will be seen as being unrealistic until you mention something negative. In fact, most conversations are about bad news between people in the UK, or the bad weather.
EastEnders Culture
The UK is also being brainwashed by EastEnders and miserably dark series, all a knock on effect from the media. Many people even copy the behaviour, with lots of ranting and raving, wearing footballs shirts with shaven heads and tattoos whilst boasting about how hard they are, even though they may have a beer belly and couldn’t outrun a turtle.
School Stress
If you have a child at school and want to go on holiday in school time, you will have to draft a report as to the reason why and maybe even pay a fine. Heck, your child may even be given a mandatory project to complete whilst on holiday, to really stress your family out when you should be relaxing. The handful of bad parents out there have caused the UK to make a ‘one rule fits all’ ruling. What’s the alternative? To go at school holiday times and pay double the price for your holiday and enjoy the stress of booking in somewhere that’s probably already booked or overpriced. Packed holiday destinations with droves of children to really make your holiday that much more relaxing lol The school will also have impossible targets to reach and will in some cases give your child a percentage of how they are fairing against other students. Similar to the computerised approach on employment in the UK, they’ve also lain down this kind of performance related monitoring stress for students and teachers. God forbid if a child has learning problems, the poor mite will have his low percentages waved in front of him before being labelled as a special needs student.
Really, do we need all that stress? What happened to the joy of childhood and just doing the best you can in your school years without being treated like an app on an iPad?
One Rule Fits All
Well, that’s an overview about the misery sweeping the UK. If you go on holiday to the UK however and you are not resident in the UK there are some beautiful places to visit and the history of the UK is fascinating and well documented. There is breathtaking scenery and nature and the UK is unique. If you are considering living in the UK however it can be a very different story . . .
The UK has become almost a police state. Almost communist when it comes to taxing people. If one person does something stupid, a law is brought in to inhibit all the sane people in the UK also, making them pay the penalty of other people’s mistakes. The lashings of red tape and rules probably kills more people with stress, more than the damage the odd idiot would do if there were more freedom. A majority of people are responsible and a lot of rules are well over the top, as well as rules that extort money from you and cause stress, such as car parking – Â expensive time limits with machines that don’t give change.
UK Stuck In Bureaucratic Mud
There is so much unneeded red tape that it drives up the prices of electricity and water bills and the cost of living as a whole, stressing people out even more. New emerging countries are competing in the world arena now and there is increased trade competition. If the UK wants to compete with these developing countries and new economic forces it must shed some red tape and start using common sense to push forward. Those emerging countries have got half the red tape that the UK has and will move ahead whilst watching the UK get stuck in expensive bureaucratic mud.
I would like to think that there might be a revolution in the UK, but alas, people who are trapped in debt and struggling have no time to protest and it’s kind of seen to be immature adults in the UK, as Victorian values still linger. Instead, unemployed people selling the ‘Big Issue’, Bob Marley fans or university students with time on their hands are usually the only people to show up at a protest. The rest of the population usually just moans  (in a very British and mature way of course) behind  closed doors. A very popular, but wholly ineffective way to bring about change.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / freedigitalphotos.net
Of course, no-one can be sure that there is life on other planets, but when I hear someone say “I don’t believe in aliens and life on other planets” I have to secretly laugh to myself at the absurdity of such a statement.
So why do I find other people’s sureness about us being the only life in the universe amusing? Because it’s nearly mathematically impossible for there not to be life on other planets out there in the universe.
First of all, let’s take a closer look at the stars we take for granted when we look up to the sky on a clear night. As you know, stars are suns. There are more suns in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches worldwide on Earth. In the known universe there are thought to be around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns.
For a planet to sustain life, at least as we know it, there needs to be a liquid and sunlight, such as water is here on Earth. Then you have a real possibility for life to exist. Organisms adapt to the conditions of the planet. Therefore, creatures on Earth from single-celled organisms right up to the complex life forms we see today make use of the gases and conditions to provide a roadmap for evolution. Oxygen may be breathable and healthy to us humans, as we’ve adapted to make use of oxygen, but to an alien life form that is unfamiliar to oxygen it may be seen as a poison. Poisonous gases and substances that we label as ‘poisonous’ are just chemicals that we have not adapted to over our evolution period. As with some animals who are able to eat certain foods that are seen as poisonous to other animals. If I eat chocolate it is nourishing. If I feed chocolate or dairy products to my dog he will become unwell in time.
Therefore, when people make the assumption that an alien would have to breathe oxygen and drink water with steak and eggs in order to survive, this would be extremely shortsighted as it would almost surely adapt to its own environment. Maybe even breathe a different gas and eat very different foods.
So, what are the odds of there not even being life on one of the planets near the 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone? Pretty slim. On a universal scale it’s almost laughably impossible for there not to be. There would have to be a controlling force to overcome these odds, such as a God for example that has decided to make it possible for only Earth to sustain life whilst keeping the other trillions of stars just as a kind of decoration.
Why do a lot of people, even when presented with these overwhelming odds still shake their heads and dismiss the possibility of alien life forms existing? Well, they usually have been conditioned by the media and associate aliens with popular movies, UFOs and imagined aliens that like to touch down in farmers’ fields in the Spring, conveniently next to roadways sporting ray guns and speaking fluent English.
The fact is that I doubt they will be aliens armed with blast weapons and laser beams. They may be bacterial organisms, tubular worms or other non-impressive life forms, or even more advanced than us.
“So why can’t we see them?” some people may ask.
We are separated with unimaginable distances from exploring other star systems. It takes 100.000 years for light to travel at light speed from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other end. So even if we invented an unmaned spaceship that could travel at the speed of light it would take around 15 generations of humans down the line before we’d even get results – Â and that would be travelling in a non-stop straight line, with no deviations to fly to planets near suns.
Just so that we have a round about idea of what a light year is, it takes light 1 second to circle the Earth 6.5 times!
The observable universe is 93 billion light years across and galaxies are moving further away from each other at the speed of light. Unless there is some future technology that can move faster than the speed of light, which will be hard as Einstein’s theories state that it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light, we will not even be able to make contact with another planet harbouring life.
I can’t, of course, possibly know for sure if there are lifeforms on other planets, but if I had to bet my life savings, I’d certainly bet on “yes” instead of “no.” Â There are likely to be thousands of planets with life forms on just looking at the math, with millions of different species.The odds are in my favour, but there is no visible proof attainable. We may not be alone, but we’re alone in the fact that the distance is too vast for us to ever make contact with technology as we know it today.
Image courtesy of nuttakit / freedigitalphotos.net
Have you heard about the country of Tuvalu? Their story is truly remarkable and almost unbelievable. Over the course of a few years, the nation became wealthy off the sale of the .tv domain name. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the island itself may soon no longer exist. The story of Tuvalu is one of the most bizarre and interesting in all of Internet history: History The government of the small island of Tuvalu owns the rights to the domain extension .tv.
Of course, no-one can be sure that there is life on other planets, but when I hear someone say “I don’t believe in aliens and life on other planets” I have to secretly laugh to myself at the absurdity of such a statement.
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