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Forget Those Cartoons…..

…Courtesy of The Religious Policeman, here’s some blasphemous emoticons!

Instructions:
1. Rotate your screen 90 degrees to the right.
2. Don’t forget to take that coffee cup off first. Oops, too late, should have made that instruction 1.
3. Read the emoticons. What do they say? Try not to drool on the keyboard.
4. Rotate the screen 90 degrees to the left.
5. If your mouse has turned into a crab, you missed instruction 4.

Here they are:

Muhammad (((:~{>

Muhammad playing Little Orphan Annie (((8~{>

Muhammad as a pirate (((P~{>

Muhammad on a bad turban day ))):~{>

Muhammad with sand in his eye(((;~{>

Muhammad wearing sunglasses (((B~{>

Muhammad giving the raspberry. (((:~{P>

Giving Muhammad the raspberry. ;-P

So, are they blasphemous? I haven’t a clue, in Quran class, I was the one who used to skip to the back to see if it had a happy ending. So I asked the Imam. Here was his answer:

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful

Dear Brother,Asalaamu ‘Alaikum wa Rahmatu Llahi wa Barakatuhu –

I pray that this message reaches you in increasing iman and wellbeing.

If these so-called “emoticons” remain just a collection of symbols, then that is all they are; they are devoid of meaning and significance.
On the other hand if, in the same way that :) turns into :), it turns into a likeness of the Prophet (PBUH), then it would indeed be a grievous sin to type them or indeed to look at them, and you would be condemned to the eternal tortures of Hell.

But first, we would come and burn your house down.

I pray that Allah Most High grants for you the path of success in this and every matter.

And Allah Knows Best.

So there’s your answer, No naughty emoticons.

in:

General

Accessibility

In web design, accessibility means making a site accessible to all. Sounds pretty obvious and simple, doesn’t it? You make a site, put it up on the web and everyone can read it. Can’t they?
Well, no, it’s not quite that simple. Most people automatically assume that building a website is simply a matter of graphic design, pretty much the same as painting a picture and sticking it up in a gallery; you put the text and graphics together on a webpage, and that’s it.
But that isn’t it. Putting a website together is far more like architecture, in that you have to think about the people who are going to use it. For instance, not everyone has good eyesight (or any sight at all), or can use a mouse; not everyone has the latest browser or the latest whizzy hardware, or a super-fast internet connection. To extend the painting analogy: making a website is like an artist, instead of putting their picture up on a gallery wall, standing in the gallery handing out sheets of detailed instructions telling people how to make the artwork at home using whatever paints and canvases they have. (Yes, I know – sounds like a conceptual art idea; so I’ll slap my copyright on it right now!)
Making a site accessible isn’t terribly complicated, though you need good web design skills. there are plenty of accessibility guides on the net: Accessiblenet.org, Accessify.com and the RNIB Web Access Centre are all good places to start.

So why should you make websites accessible? Well, if you had a shop or a gallery, would you deliberately make it impossible for disable people to get in? That wouldn’t be very good for your business, would it?
In any case, why not treat disabled people with respect and dignity? You might think that one is a no-brainer, but there are people out there who think otherwise, at least when it comes to making accessible websites. More than once, I’ve read comments like “I don’t want blind people on my site!” or even “Blind people don’t go on the internet – how can they read the screen?” Shocking and ignorant, yes, even more shocking is the fact that quite a lot of web designers actuall think this way.
In the US at the moment, Target, one of their biggest supermarkets is being sued because it has so far refused to make its website accessible; some of the comments on various webdesign forums illustrate how far disable people still have to go in terms of being treated with respect. For instance, here’s a random selction of posts from the thread discussing this case at Sitepoint:

Whats ignorant is thinking disabled people are normal. They are not normal. Stop drinking the PC happy juice. The idea that everyone, regardless of their personal condition, has a “right� to the exact same life is one of the most ridiculous notions of the modern era. Here in the US we spend 10x more per year to send one disabled kid to a normal highschool than we spend on the smartest kid in that highschool. Then we wonder why our kids aren’t as smart as those from other countries. Chances are the disabled kid probably doesn’t even know the difference, its only so his parents can feel their kid is normal

The internet is not a birthright, neither is the phone, neither is buying an electric blanket at Target and it has nothing to do with lack of empathy. Blind people can’t drive cars either … shall we sue the auto makers that they aren’t making automobiles accessible?

There are some things in this world that handicapped people just can’t do. And those of us who are not handicapped shouldn’t try to sugarcoat it for them.

Its not the sites fault people have bad eye sight, if you have bad eye sight you should expect it… its no ones fault and if the site owner wants his site for normal people then thats fair.

If they where blind then why would they be on the computer?

And these people are all professional web designers (or claiming to be such)! Yikes! How many years ago was it that Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the following?

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

Some people have obviously never heard of it.

in:

Techie Stuff

Solar Returns

In astrology, a Solar return chart is a chart set for the moment your natal sun returns to the exact position it occupied at the moment of your birth. In other words, it’s an annual ‘birthday chart’ that gives the flavour of the coming year for the person concerned; it is read and interpreted the same way as a natal chart.
My birthday is next month, so out of interest, I pulled up a Solar return chart for myself.
Solar Return chart
As you can see, it has Scorpio on the AS, with Moon in the 8th opposing Pluto in the 2nd. So there will be an emphasis on finance and finacial problems. No surprises there, but at least the Moon/Pluto opposition is wide, out-of-sign and separating. So things look like improving slowly and steadily in that department. Additionally, Jupiter is placed in the first house, trine to the Sun and Mercury, so that’s another optomistic sign, although the fact that Jupiter is retrograde indicates that money will be going out as fast as it comes in. (I am expecting the results of my claim for Disability Allowance in a couple of weeks; I fully expect to be told politely to bog off, as happened the first time – as one disability rights campaigner has put it: “You have to be dead and minus your legs before they’ll award you any disability benefits!”. However, I’m now quietly hoping….)
The Sun, along with Uranus and Mercury, is place in the 4th house. So another emphasis during the year will be on home matters. Maybe we’ll get the bathroom finished at last?
Saturn in the 9th house is forming an opposition to Venus and Chron in the 3rd house. The 9th covers foreign lands, travellling abroad, higher education, organised religion. Saturn there shows some kind of formalising, crystallising, building going on in those areas of my life. The third house refers to all forms of communications, local travel and siblings. Hmmmm….. Something to think about there.

An additional way to read in a Solar Return chart is to compare it with your natal chart. In my example, some intersting things are goling on – the SR Moon is exactly conjuct my natal Uranus, while the SR Uranus is trine my natal Moon, as well as being in the Moon’s house. And too, the SR ascendant is conjunct my natal Moon. That sort of cross-aspect is known as a double-whammy; it strongly emphasises something. In this case everything to do with health and home. So it’s looking good there!

in:

Astrology, General

It’s Tempting…

…to ressurrect my “Worst Website of the Week” catagory when I come across sites like Joe Pasquale’s fansite.
But remembering my experience the last time – no, I won’t be starting it up again as a regular feature. However, I couldn’t resist this one time – this really is a terrible piece of design. And since I got it from this blog, which dubbed it “Worst Website of the Week”, anyone who objects should send their illiterate and obscene emails there and not to me, thank you.

PS: And note that I’ve not said a word about Joe Pasquale’s fans. Sometimes I cannot believe my self-restraint.

in:

General

One of Those Mysteries…

…You know – Why is the fluff in your navel always blue? Why do men wear ties? What is Steve Fossett for?
Well, i’ve come across another one of life’s mysteries. Yesterday, I was looking at a website I’d not come across before. It was fine, except for one page, where all the text was blinking most annoyingly. Going to “view source” revealed the cause – the body tag contained the styling “text-decoration: blinking”.
I couldn’t see a contact address for the webmaster, so I whipped off an email to the web-owner, telling them about the bug. This morning, I got a reply from somebody whom I take to be in charge of the website (it wasn’t from the site-owner). “Thank you for your interest” it said, “I will see what I can do in the next few weeks.”
Ehh?? A “few weeks” to edit one line of HTML??

Like i said, a great mystery. I think I’ll go back to pondering the Steve Fossett question….

in:

General

Gordon, You’ve Just Lost My Vote…..

Gordon Brown has just finished his speech – the one that he evidently hopes will let everyone know that he is stepping into Mr. Tony’s shoes.
I’ve only been listening to bits of it, as I rush around the house. But it seems to me that he’s lost it. Totally. He’s announced the introduction of compulsory ID cards, in the teeth of not only strong political opposition but also practical objections from security experts who say that a national ID scheme cannot possibly work in the way envisaged.
Oh – not heard this bit, but B says Brown plans to ban any celebration of terrorist atrocities like 9/11! So, no more Guy Fawkes bonfires, then. And he intends to make Trafalgar Day a national holiday. He didn’t offer any reasons for this, just took it as read that the battle of Trafalgar was the most important British war vistory in several centuries. Historians might have to remind him of a few facts, such as the fact that Napleon had decided long before then not to invade England. Or the fact that it wasn’t the deciding battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Or the fact that it was a virtual massacre – 4,400 French casualities as against 449 “British” casualties, most of whom were actually Irish.
There’s lots more – like spending billions on largely unspecified “security measures”. But’s that’s already more than enough for me. I used to think that Brown would make a better PM than Mr Tony – and he’s a fellow Pisces, too. But the Lib Dems will probably have my vote next time.

in:

General

Boycott Eygpt!

Now here’s a curious thing – it appears that those “blasphemous” cartoons that have got the Muslim world in such an uproar were published in an Eyptian newspaper last October; less than a month after they appeared in Denmark but a good three months before anybody in the Middle East started making a fuss over them.
Here’s the proof, from Sandmonkey (with thanks to the Pagan Prattle).
Sandmonkey also offers some cogent reasons why the row has only now just been hyped blown up:

Now while the arab islamic population was going crazy over the outrage created by their government’s media over these cartoons, their governments was benifitting from its people’s distraction. The Saudi royal Family used it to distract its people from the outrage over the Hajj stampede. The Jordanian government used it to distract its people from their new minimum wage law demanded by their labor unions. The Syrian Government used it to create secterian division in Lebanon and change the focus on the Harriri murder. And, finally, the Egyptian government is using it to distract us while it passes through the new Judiciary reforms and Social Security Bill- which will cut over $300 million dollars in benefits to some of Egypt’s poorest families. But, see, the people were not paying attention, because they were too busy defending the prophet by sending out millions of e-mails and SMS-messages, boycotting cheese and Lego and burning Butter and the danish Flag. Let’s not even mention the idiots who went the usual route of “It’s a jewish conspiracy”, spouted the stupid argument about the Holocaust, or went on a diatribe with the old favorite “There is an organized campaign-headed by the west and the jews- to attack and discredit Islam, and we have to defend it”. They proved, once again, that the arab world is retarded and deserves no better than its leaders.

in:

General

The ScHNEWS News

Some of the news you didn’t see last week, from SchNEWS

MISSILE DEFIANCE – VICTORY AS EDO INJUNCTION TRIAL MISFIRES
Another blow struck for free speech in Sussex. The nasty little stitch up between Sussex Police, arms dealers EDO MBM and protest bashing lawyer Timothy Lawson Cruttenden (see SchNEWS 492, 471) to crush dissent has started to unravel.
EDO MBM, who manufacture parts for the Paveway bomb system and are involved in the manufacture of unmanned combat air vehicles, much loved by the US and Israeli militaries for targeted assassinations, are now ducking for cover as the legal bombshells go off in their own faces.
Back in March 2005 the arms dealers, urged on by Kerry Cox of Sussex Police, applied for an injunction under the Protection from Harassment Act which would have limited the regular pickets of the factory to ten silent protesters on a Thursday afternoon (See SchNEWS 492). No doubt they were assured by Britain’s leading expert “quote” Timothy Lawson Cruutenden (TLC) that this would soon put paid to the pesky protesters. The injunction, by its definition of ‘protester’, initially applied to everyone on the planet. Although the judge refused to impose limits on numbers it confined protesters to a narrow grass verge opposite the factory. It also prevented them from filming. This was vigorously enforced by a combination of private security and heavy policing. Private security goons abused their immunity from video in a series of provocative actions. Over thirty arrests have been made at the factory since court proceedings began last March and two protesters were remanded to HMP Lewes for alleged breaches of the injunction.
Despite the prospect of hefty legal bills, the fourteen individuals named on the injunction mounted a vigorous defence. In shades of the Mclibel Trial (See SchNEWS 79 & 485), the case has proved an embarrassing PR fiasco for the US-owned bomb manufacturers. A two-day hearing saw their fat being pulled out of the fire by the Attorney General as they were accused of war crimes (See SchNEWS 521). Then MBM MD David Jones ‘retired’ on 31st December. TLC has repeatedly attempted to delay a full hearing of all the issues, perhaps because many of the allegations made against activists (such as shining lasers into the eyes of employees) were so spurious that they would not stand up in court.
UTTER CONTEMPT
As the case began to turn sour, TLC resorted to bizarre intimidatory tactics, such as revealing his knowledge in an email of a protester’s private phone numbers and his dubious acquisition of one prominent activists private diary, which had been ‘anonymously left’ at his office. His level of information on individuals, which included access to statements from a number of police forces from criminal cases which hadn’t yet been to court, pointed to high level and highly improper contacts within the police. In fact when a judge ordered him to reveal details of correspondence between the corporation, the police and himself, he refused on the grounds that EDO ran a paperless office while his was ‘full of papers’. SchNEWS reckons it’s not just papers TLC’s full of. This refusal brought a warning from the Judge that he had ‘grave concerns’ about TLC’s conduct and advising him to seek legal representation to defend himself from allegations of professional misconduct.
Ordered to seek mediation with the defendants, executives from the US parent company EDO Corp flew in to broker a deal. The first thing to go was the definition of protester, meaning that legal restrictions on demos at the factory no longer apply to anyone else but those named. Next the company agreed that if the seven legal-aid defendants agreed not to assault EDO employees then they would drop the proceedings against them. As legal aid would have been withdrawn anyway if they refused, they accepted and left EDO to pick up the two hundred grand legal bill. The other defendants are fighting on to expose EDO’s machinations in open court.
In another twist last week, three people were acquitted in Brighton Magistrates of holding an illegal assembly of …er three people outside the factory in March last year. The case collapsed because the police wanted to hide their operational decisions during ‘Operation Kirk’ behind a Public Interest Immunity certificate. According to their press release this was because ‘the prosecution were asked to disclose specific details in relation to operational tactics and sensitive information used to brief police officers. As a result the prosecution took the decision to not disclose the details and took the preferred option to offer no evidence in this case…’ Yer ever cynical SchNEWS can’t help but wonder how many of those ‘operational tactics’ were discussed in EDO’s boardroom, which might make the information very ‘sensitive’ indeed. But we’re sure it’s all on the level.
MASONIC BODGE
Spokesman for SMASH EDO Andrew Beckett told SchNEWS, “We always knew that this attack on our rights was politically motivated and involved high level co-operation between the police, the lawyers and the arms dealers – but to have it becoming public knowledge is amazing. The collapse of the injunction is a major victory for civil rights and the peace movement. We will now be fully able to express our disgust at the presence of a bomb manufacturer in the middle of our community. We will be here until EDO isn’t.”
EDO EVENTS
Feb 14th 4-6 Outside EDO MBM ‘Naming the Dead’. The names of civilians killed in the invasion of Iraq will be read outside the factory.
March 1st Victory Demo – With all restrictions removed on protest outside the factory this is gonna be a big one.
* See www.smashedo.org.uk

Lack of Incite
The editor of the Pravozashchita newspaper in Russia has been found guilty of inciting ethnic hatred in his coverage of the Chechnyan conflict.
Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, head of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, was given a two-year suspended jail term. The charges relate to statements by Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov,
published by the paper two years ago. Dmitriyevsky insists the charges are in retaliation for his reporting of rights abuses.
His paper, part of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, is seen as one of the few independent sources of information about events in the troubled republic. The paper is critical of the Kremlin’s
policies in Chechnya. Russian prosecutors said the statements by Maskhadov – shot dead in March 2005 – and Akhmed Zakayev were aimed at fementing racial and ethnic hatred.
Campaigners believe his trial is part of a clampdown on the work of NGOs. The For Human Rights group told the AP news agency the verdict was “a continuation of the shameful practice of false
accusations against human rights defenders and active opponents of the war in Chechnya”. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law giving the authorities wide powers to monitor the activities and finances of NGOs. The authorities have already tried to close down the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, accusing it of tax evasion.

Pen mightier than sword shock
An emergency meeting of the Security Council has been called for next Tuesday, to discuss a clear and present threat to humanity. No trivial matter like nuclear war, an escalating industrial-military complex or continued oppression of the masses; a dark new power is emerging: cartoons. A new world order is taking shape, with Europe taking the lead. Previously neutral Denmark has been secretly stockpiling satirical material and testing it on unsuspecting religious fundamentalists. Copenhagen and Paris refused to comment on the satirical capability of their Weapons of Mass Derision but it is believed they are capable of starting fires as far away as Beirut or Tashkent. It is feared that the crisis could escalate from pockets of graphic violence, to an all out inky Armageddon. The US is particularly concerned, because as spokesman Hanna Barbara admitted, due to a lack of vital element irony, they haven’t got the offensive capabilities required for global domination. They are also extremely concerned with the ominous build up of molten manga occurring in East Asia Meanwhile, here at SchNEWS, we’re awaiting a team of crack UN(FUNNY) inspectors to check our archives for weapons grade
satire.

in:

The News You Didn't See

The Cats Are Taking Over…

I don’t mind cats, actually. I quite like them, and am always polite to any felines I happen to meet. However, I don’t like ‘cat people’, people who can’t seem to go five minutes without talking about or looking at or fussing over their pets.
Charlie Stross’ blog is one of the places I go to to escape the purring pussies. Charlie is an SF writer, a geek, an avowed opponent of all kinds of New Age nonsense. And, importantly, a bloke – a properly beardy, BLOKEY bloke. So, by all the immutable laws of the Universe, he ought to be a cat-free zone.

But, nooooooo!!!!!! In the course of two days, he has posted TWO cat pictures. Not cats eating birds or disembowelling mice, or having stuff piled on top of them, or being posed in post-modernly ironic costumes, or anything like that. But cats – his OWN CATS!!! – being cute!!
Horribly cute! Unberarably cute! Gazing at the camera with incredible soppiness, just begging to be picked up and AHHHHHED over.
Aaaaahhhh- Nooooo! I must not succumb to these demons – my eyeballs will explode! For the love of God, somebody please tell him about Kitten War! Then he can post all the cute-kitty piccies he has online, without me having to look at them and fall under their ghastly spell of cuteness!

in:

General