Perfect celebration for cat friday. Via Metafilter–be sure to check out comments.
Even better: squid with human teeth for squid friday.
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Month: October 2007
The fight has started for fair arbitration. TortDeform has an extensive write-up on the second day of hearings associated with the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007. I’m familiar with all of the cases mentioned in the testimony, and they just barely demonstrate how far reaching the problems of binding mandatory arbitration agreements are.
I noticed that the National Arbitration Forum was not asked to testify. I rather expected them to roll out Mary Pawlenty, wife of current Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and, I thought, NAF’s General Counsel, to testify. What I missed earlier in the year was Ms. Pawlenty stayed with NAF less than a month. I’m not surprised she left. One peek into the workings of NAF was more than enough to send her running.
Yet this is the same company one of Utah’s Congressional representatives, Chris Cannon would like to have adjudicate many of our employee civil rights, and consumer law civil cases. If I were a resident of Utah, I would take a closer look at Representative Cannon’s campaign contributors.
Deborah Williams, a Maryland woman (and another lifelong Republican) who, along with her partner Richard Welshan, had a franchise with the Coffee Beanery, which cheated her in a variety of ways. Despite a finding by the Maryland Attorney General that the Coffee Beanery committed fraud, she was forced by the American Arbitration Association to arbitrate her claims in Michigan (500 miles from her home), spent more than $100,000 on arbitration fees to the AAA. For all of her pains, the arbitrator disagreed with the Maryland Attorney General and entered a large award against her. The arbitrator also entered a “loser pays” attorneys’ fee award against her, requiring Ms. Williams and her partner to pay the Coffee Beanery’s attorneys’ fees. In the low point of the hearing, Rep. Cannon essentially tried to get Ms. Williams to agree that all of her problems were her fault for not researching the Coffee Beanery on the internet and discovering in advance that they were defrauding people. Ms. Williams described the various steps that she had taken to do due diligence about the Coffee Beanery prior to becoming a franchisee, but Rep. Cannon persisted in trying to get her to say that her problems were all her own fault.
However, this is not a Democrat versus Republican issue. There are Republicans who are also appalled at the abuses resulting from mandatory arbitration clauses.
The evidence against mandatory arbitration agreements is overwhelming, but I’m still concerned. There’s a lot of money being spent to fight the Arbitration Fairness Act. A lot. It disturbs me to realize that the money is being spread around to the Democrats, as well as the Republicans. In fact, Hilary Clinton is the second highest recipient of financial institution campaign contributions, which has really led to me to question her candidacy. At one point, I was ready to vote for her. Now, I’m not.
What’s more difficult, though, is getting people to become interested enough in the issue of fair arbitration to contact their congressional representative and encourage support for this bill. If it doesn’t bleed, blow up, blow over, or burn, America doesn’t care.
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Visual Feedback
From the Semantic Web mailing list:
Every time I work on logos, I learn something new! The main
lesson so far from the Semantic Web logos: Get more feedback on usage policy before deploying. Thank you all for your comments. Most of them related to the usage policy, so you will find a proposal for a new one below.
As the W3C discovered, kids love empty boxes. Of course, the example of logo morphing pointed out in the mailing list was the most innocuous and plus speak of the bunch, so we’ll have to see how far we can really push this ‘box’ in the future.
via Sam
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Riots in the valley
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Rumors have been flying that riots and violence unimaginable have been happening in the fire-stricken disaster areas around Los Angeles and San Diego.
Firefighters are now refusing to enter and render assistance to victims in communities such as Rancho Bernardo and Del Mar. “We’ve heard of gangs of white people roaming the streets, shooting at anyone who passes”, said one firefighter, who wished to be anonymous.
The AP Wire just published a news flash: Del Mar Evacuation Halted Amid Gunfire…Shots are Fired at Military Helicopter”.
Pulled from a golf game, Bobcat Stick was quoted as saying, “it’s just unbelievable…how people are behaving, with the shootings and now the gang rapes and the gang violence and shooting at helicopters who are trying to help out and rescue people.”
The National Guard refused to approach Rancho Santa Fe because “we’re waiting until we have enough force in place to do an overwhelming force,” Lt. Gen. H. Dweebus Ahole told reporters on October 22nd.
Evacuees at the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, where up to 10,000 evacuees anxiously watched the stadium’s television sets, hoping for a glimpse of their neighborhood on the local news, have spread stories of horrors–including the rape of a 7 year old girl, nay, dozens of babies being raped, as the dead from the violence lay, like kindling, waiting to be burned.
The evacuee suffering worsened when the Red Cross was denied access based on fears for the safety of the volunteers. Those denied succor at shelters have fled to nearby San Clemente, escaping past barriers erected to keep them out.
Some people haven’t been able to update their Facebook accounts. My god, the inhumanity.
This post is tagged satire. However, everything written here in the post, except the last sentence, was published in the media, but about Katrina and the people of New Orleans. Every sentence was also found to be untrue.
I wish the best for the folks in southern California, and hope the fires are soon out.
Categories
Dash it all
‘ve moved on from SVG to the Canvas element, and am still suffering whiplash at the downward steepness of the step. Leaving aside that one can defeat canvas easily just by turning off script, about the best documentation I found on the element is Mozilla’s implementation. The specification is buried within the HTML5 work, which if you think on it, defeats every last bit of argument about not including SVG because it’s “presentational”.
About the only negative associated with SVG is how to include it in the pages–the specification, itself, is really nice. Once all of the features are supported in the main browsers, you’re going to see some amazing stuff.
You don’t realize how nice SVG is, until you look at the Canvas element. For instance, I created an SVG example on how quadratic bèzier curves work in SVG. The canvas element also supports the same type of curves, so I went to re-create the example. I hit a wall immediately. Why? Two words:
“dashed lines”
No, there is no way of adding either dashes or dots or combination to lines in canvas. You can use a custom function and create tiny little lines using lineTo and/or one of the curve functions, but there’s no way to actually just specify the dash-dot pattern to use, and forget about it. My canvas demonstration of quadratic bèzier curves ended up looking a tad bit different.
I went searching on HTML5, the canvas element, and dashed line support and found a couple of discussions about supporting dashed lines in canvas. The official word is: not trivial to implement, no one really wants them.
Considering that one of the first implementations on the canvas element I created uses dashed lines, I beg to differ on the ‘no one really wants’ assumption. Sure, I can use a custom function, such as the one I’m using to emulate a rounded corner rectangle, but I can’t help thinking this isn’t the most efficient approach. The user agent should be able to optimize for dashes in line drawing if these are part of the specification, but there is no real optimization for functions that create hundreds of little dashes based on rotate, curve, line, move.
While researching the missing ‘dashes’, I ended up being more caught up in the discussions associated with the canvas element. It wasn’t until looking for dashed line that it hit me: why was there such deeply presentational discussions associated with a version of HTML that’s specific to semantics, only? Especially when you consider that in the recent discussions about support for SVG in HTML5 there was pushback for supporting SVG within HTML5 because SVG is ‘presentational’. In fact, Jacques just wrote, the following on this topic:
The subject came up in a discussion over at Sam’s blog about SVG-in-HTML5. Some people were arguing that, even if it were technically possible, it would be undesirable to sully HTML5 with the inclusion of foreign dialects, like MathML or SVG. The latter, in particular, was in some quarters considered too “presentational.”
This annoyed me sufficiently that I gave the following example:
Say I wish to discuss irreducible representations of SU(3). I think it should be perfectly acceptable to point out that: Rank-2 Symmetric Tensor Representation⊗Fundamental Representation=Adjoint Representation⊕Rank-3 Symmetric Tensor Representation
No, I don’t understand what Jacques wrote, either, but the SVG shows properly.
Of course, the issues associated with SVG (and MathML and RDF/XML, if it comes to that) go beyond just the presentation. SVG is a well-defined markup based on XML, which requires precise handling on the part of the user agent and the agent generating or creating the SVG. HTML5, on the other hand, is meant to be a less rigorous environment, where the lack of precise application of markup is handled with greater indulgence.
Lack of precise application of semantic markup, I should say, as there are new semantic attributes, values, and elements being added to the spec. One assumes this is so that search engines, such as Google, can better process the web page ‘semantics’. In fact, much of the semantics associated with HTML5 seems to be specific to search engine optimization.
I can understand some of the ‘foreign markup’ implementation concerns about SVG. What I can’t understand is why the HTML5 group hasn’t split the canvas element off into a separate specification–not if presentational purity is a goal of the specification. Just because it’s easier to include the canvas element in HTML5, doesn’t mean it should be included, if the underlying purpose of HTML5 is to provide an interim, better behaved, but more forgiving, semantic web page markup. According to the HTML5 spec:
This specification is limited to providing a semantic-level markup language and associated semantic-level scripting APIs for authoring accessible pages on the Web ranging from static documents to dynamic applications.
The scope of this specification does not include addressing presentation concerns (although default rendering rules for Web browsers are included at the end of this specification).
The scope of this specification does not include documenting every HTML or DOM feature supported by Web browsers. Browsers support many features that are considered to be very bad for accessibility or that are otherwise inappropriate. For example, the blink element is clearly presentational and authors wishing to cause text to blink should instead use CSS.
Blink is presentational, while dashed lines are not? I suppose one could also push line patterns off on CSS, but then why would one not also push stroke style and fill pattern, as well as such esoteric items as maximum miter height?