korch

Let me get this straight.

A wealthy, white, educated, privileged male who is incredibly talented and who won both the birth and tech lottery back in the 90's is now whining about the government taking too much in taxes?

Cry me a fucking river.

There are tens of millions of poor Americans & immigrants working as a permanent class of indentured laborers, while a smaller pool of the middle class are slowly being bled to death, both physically and economically(who's kids are more likely to die in foreign wars, the rich or poor?), by our American culture's inhumane, cruel war mongering fetish.

Yet the rich fucks who have to pay the majority of the taxes, and who already get to keep the majority of the profits for their own lavish life styles feel entitled enough to complain that their slice of the pie isn't big enough? Seeing this appalling attitude of entitlement everywhere makes me so angry, and I wish I could just open these ignorant people's eyes, hearts & minds.

There's a good reason I have little interest in the rambling, detached kooky political and economic opinions of luminaries from the tech world. Stick to hacking code and making entertainment software, and stay out of running the real world.

I'd like to see a quality open source Basecamp clone put up on Github. Written in Rails of course, ironically. There certainly are enough Rails devs driving open source projects to make this happen.

That's the peril/blessing of embracing open source—given enough time, no matter how good you are, you will end up competing with free and/or a free clone of yourself!

Then let folks just arrange for their own hosting(Heroku could become perfect for this), or host it locally, and install & run it themselves. What if many, many more companies would use a Basecamp-like app if they could run it inside their corporate firewalls?

Basecamp is not rocket science. Its core is a dozen pages give or take, and a bunch of standard CRUD. It does look polished, very well designed and thought out, and is highly usable. It's a showcase example of what a great web app should be. Yet almost all of these unconventional parts that seem like they would need heavy lifting configuration could be automated away.

Sure it's a bit of a dick move to make a white room clone, even though it happens all the time, and is almost the very definition of the majority of popular open source software. However, after several years, once some innovative software becomes mainstream, can it still claim exclusive right to the ephemeral methods of implementation? Once the knowledge of those methods, and the usage patterns are learned and spread throughout a community, the value of the knowledge plummets. Before it became obvious to everybody, sure, it would have been enormously difficult to create Basecamp from scratch. But after everyone has seen Basecamp and used it, it's funny that it now seems obvious that is how it should be done. It's like the software patent issue essentially.

I'd be curious to know the true cost of each Basecamp user in terms of hardware, network and storage cost. What if it's oh say $1.00 on average? Then it would be profitable for some company like Heroku who specializes only in streamlined, small Rails app hosting to butt in and sell hosting for a cheap price like $5. The software is free, the hardware is not, to steal a page from the Apple play book. That would bleed 37signals' profit margins. Isn't it fun to play race to the bottom pricing of software as it crystalizes into a commodity over a few years? Sure a few years ago, Basecamp would be difficult to make. But 2 years from now? I don't know if the assumption holds that 2 years from now it will still be non-trivial to clone Basecamp in such a way we haven't even thought of nor seen on the web. Markets move quickly, especially in software. Everyone knows competition is a bitch, especially when the goal posts keep moving, and while the technology playing field itself undergoes rapid, constant geologic & volcanic upheaval.

The workflow in Basecamp itself is a great template for creating other kinds of web apps outside of project management and address books. Many other kinds of businesses have similar workflows that could be represented in a souped up Basecamp without too many modifications. An open source clone could also serve as a good boiler-plate starter app for developing more customized Basecamp-like apps. What if the value of that is more profitable than selling Basecamp itself?

How can the present state-of-the-art in NLP ML be more than a toy having limited scope if the most interesting, and truly useful real-world applications require impossible amounts of hardware resources, along with algorithmic running times that will take until the heat death of the Universe?

Mainly I'm talking about the topics in and related to the famous paper What Computers Can't Do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Computers_Cant_Do

Before I get nitpicked for generalizing NLP/ML to all out "Hard AI", I would like to note that almost all of the most trivial language processing tasks we meatsacks perform a billion times per day in our daily lives involve the semantic interpretation of abstract representations. It would be trivial to sit down and begin enumerating specific types of word and association problems that a child could perform, but which no supercomputer with a 1,000 engineers toiling it on could solve in the general sense.

By no means am I saying that everyone in the field should not full court press ahead on the state of the art, as we'll never get there unless we try. I am asking about the extent that real-world NLP/ML use is constrained enough so as to be nearly worthless hokum buzzwords. (i.e. analytics, recommendation engines for pre-conditioned, overtrained and context-free representations, behavioral profiling for ads, statistical models of dynamical systems, etc.)

I hope this doesn't come off as being negative, as I'm really more interested in the question of Hard AI and how it relates to computational linguistics problems we can solve today or in the near future without some kind of unforeseen "singularity" level break through in AI. Or is the general state still as bad as when Minksy demolished perceptrons, causing the "nuclear winter decade" in AI?

I don't have a PhD, just a pure math undergrad with a high motivation to have kept going at it, and this topic itself is so obscure & difficult that it's not often one has the chance to ask someone who knows, so I am very interested in the perspective of present day researchers.

Maybe it's just me, and maybe I'm wrong or over-thinking it, but this question bugs me. I think this is a trick question, because there is no single right answer unless the question is prefaced with "in [language X], define polymorphism." I've lost track of the number of times I've been interviewed and had that awful question tossed at me.

Without fail, every single interviewer in my experience was looking for an answer strictly in terms of whatever language(s) they're using at the company, or whatever language the interviewer is most familiar with. If you stray outside of what they know and what they're looking for, they have no idea what you're talking about.

Polymorphism in Java is slightly different than for Ruby than for C than for Haskell than for yadda, yadda. No matter what, it's always going to be somewhat arbitrary and tied to some kind of language dependent implementation or feature. If your language doesn't even have classes, the answer is different, if your language doesn't have functions, it's different, etc, etc.

I suppose the closest thing to a right answer would be to define it in pure mathematical terms using Turing machine notation, so as to make it universal. However I have no idea if such an answer even exists. If anyone has seen such a thing, please do share it.

A better version I would ask would be: define polymorphism using x86 AT&T assembly. or: define what polymorphism represents

Never.

There are defeats more triumphant than victories.

—Michel de Montaigne

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

—Thomas Edison

You do have a point there.

I've read that the last Universal mathematicians we've had were Chebyshev and Poincare, who could claim to know "all of math", and who were active in research in nearly every sub-field. It's been over 50 years since their time, and much like the fabled Renaissance Man, that frontier is now closed.

Look at the dropout rates. In undergrad, nationally, and historically, 50+% do not complete the 4 years to obtain a bachelors degree. Of those who go on to grad school, again, 50%+ withdraw without completing their Phd/Masters.

If we as a society are contributing money and other collective resources to make higher education possible, yet more than half of the young people dropout, then it's pretty clear that most of them do not have the "abilities" to succeed at higher ed. However, it is far more likely that higher-ed itself is structured completely wrong. If the system fails most people, then most people are not failures, but rather it is the system itself that is the failure.

Granted it is highly debatable what "abilities" refer to, and what "success" entails. Both are mostly arbitrary markers which will be wildly different for everybody.

I tend to view things from a different perspective—I'm a cheerleader for the notion of the classical Liberal Arts education, and learning for the sake of becoming a Better Fucking Human Being, not for the purposes of some phony job in a phony society performing whatever phony crap those in power have commanded.

By disengaging education from mere financial concerns, my biggest problem with all of this is not that we have thousands of massively underemployed people, but that we have the social expectation that the most educated deserve to be the big shots, manage everything, do little real work, and collect most of the profit just for showing up. Sorry, in this society, you only get those entitlements by luck of birth, inheritance or marriage. Just going to fucking college and earning a piece of paper does not automatically grant it to you.

Entitlement is really what this article is about, but the author can't just come out and say it, because that would piss off his audience even more than his Bell-Curve innuendo. (Don't even get me started on why some of the most entitled people are incapable of acknowledging it, and pretend otherwise). Many academics are outraged that their so-called highest achievements don't guarantee a high status role in society outside of academia. But the truth is that the value of education and learning is insignificant if you're measuring it by economic metrics. And society at large worships wealth and fame. Just because you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Proust doesn't mean you deserve jack shit from society. Even though there is no way in hell anyone could read Proust and not be enriched and transformed as a person in incalculable ways.

This whole article and debate is really an Apples-versus-Oranges false dichotomy, and I'm not sure why I got suckered into writing this long reply. :P

tldr; Being really smart and highly educated should have little to no correlation to your social & financial status in society.

"Which is ye surest character of a true Mathematical Genius, learned these of his own inclination & by his owne industry without a teacher."

— Isaac Newton

In many respects, math has a totally unfair advantage over every other subject you could possibly study in college because it can be learned almost without needing any other people. Well, living people that is, as you do need the books of long deceased thinkers. (I'd say this also applies to philosophy, and hardly anything else). You just need to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time alone in contemplation reading.

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

— Blaise Pascal

There's also a very limited social component layer such as you would find in medicine, law, politics, economics, et al. To become a doctor, or any kind of "professional", sure, it requires a massive social apparatus on top of a high degree of actual learning. You have to have connections, know the right people, say the right and popular things to them, be supported and credentialed by the leadership and their agenda, and basically imposture one's self into mimicking whatever behaviors and traits are specific to and dominant in whatever professional field you're studying. Eventually your identity morphs into this set of learned behaviors, and it's almost entirely built upon your position in some type of social hierarchy.

Not so with math. You either know some theorem and the proof, or you don't. How much you know and how advanced you are is entirely dependent upon what you have worked through on your own. What new stuff you can create only comes from what old stuff you already know. None of this has anything to do with interacting with people. Sure, you can benefit by talking to other mathematicians, attending lectures, conferences, teaching others, etc, but at the end of the day, at some point, you still have to sit down and learn the material by yourself. And if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how much of a social butterfly you are—you can't be a mathematician.

No man is an island, but I imagine a Robinson Crusoe type figure would have no such problems becoming a mathematician on a desert island, given enough math books(and some kind of Internet connection).

That's kind of what happened in the plot of Sagan's book(and film) Contact.

I agree, as I think Disney is the only other company on the planet that in many ways is a mirror of Apple.

Let us compare: Founded by a charismatic visionary, check. Highly aesthetic products, check. Fulfilling dreams of fantasy and the future, check. Communities of cult followers, check. Popularity driven by youth culture, check. Spare no expense nor detail to achieve perfection in design, check. I could keep going...

Wait, think about what you're complaining about—do you want your police to be low paid so they are more susceptible to bribes and corruption? Like they are in many other countries? And California is on the border with Mexico where massively funded global drug cartels operate.

If the average cop salary is set at some X amount higher than non-cops, then they are Y percent less likely to be on the take. If our police are a lot less corrupt, then overall, society pays more, but in theory receives an equal yet intangible benefit from better law enforcement in general.

It's not just about eigenvectors, though that is the coolest part of it. The "magic" part is that PageRank is also about stochastic processes, which use the Ergodic theorem to show that their PageRank exists at an arbitrary scale. Therefore it doesn't matter how big or complex the link structure on the web gets—it will scale.

See this:

"For any matrix A = [cP + (1-c)E]' where P is an n×n row-stochastic matrix, E is a nonnegative n×n rank-one row-stochastic matrix, and 0 =< c =< 1, the second eigenvalue of A has modulus less than or equal to c. Furthermore, if P has at least two irreducible closed subsets, the second eigenvalue is equal to c.

This statement has implications for the convergence rate of the standard PageRank algorithm as the web scales, for the stability of PageRank to perturbations to the link structure of the web, for the detection of Google spammers, and for the design of algorithms to speed up PageRank."

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/379557.html

I have thought about this too. It would be bizarre if all of us thinking "they're working on that" had some kind of society-wide placebo effect to actually cause people to live longer and healthier.

Now that's a self-reinforced feedback-cycle I can get behind!

I think this way of thinking is rather new, especially considering how many more people believe this than 100 years ago. Back then modernity was in full rising force, so there certainly was a social notion of progress happening to everything on a wide scale, and expectations of Western civilization's eventual achievement of some kind of utopia. But back then they were so limited by what they didn't even know about, so their vision of what modernity would become pales in comparison to what post-modernity actually has been.

So this guy sounds like some office granny scolding the interns over trifles of etiquette. He summed up his 12 years of working at Microsoft with a bunch of smarmy anecdotes typical of office gossip & politics. Not a single mention about software or technology in general. No penetrating insights about the industry, products, the future.

I wonder about Microsoft's financial future if this is what their corporate culture has been reduced to. Everyone is so high on themselves and on playing Soap Opera over in Redmond that nothing truly new gets shipped.

Like a wise person once said: Interest is aptitude

All of the nature/nurture constructs built around males to interest them in the autistic endeavors like math, physics, computer science are very different for females. It's not that woman can't do math, rather it's that they choose not to. I like that researchers are drifting away from attempts at neurological gender difference explanations, and towards a gestalt of social conditioning.

Why not make this idea itself into a crowd-sourced startup idea generator website? It is somewhat ridiculous that so many folks think an idea itself has value apart from circumstance, context and execution. Perhaps by getting everyone to share as many ideas as possible, then everyone can see that there are so many good and similar ideas that they have little individual value.

Just a simple UI. One leader board page where crowds vote up/down ideas just like these. At any given time you can scan the whole list of all the wild and crazy ideas people have come up with. Ideas that have been implemented or which are similar to existings site get pointed out. This could also serve IP prior art discovery purposes. And whatever ideas have the most votes could be products worth making.

To see that we will need some healthy competition in the ad and search space. I actually hope Bing does well just for serving this purpose. Google's search page was nearly the same for 5 years, Bing comes out and adds a few more dynamic ways to search and Google had to re-vamp their entire home page over the course of 2 years. It is ironic to be in a situation where Microsoft's relentless and battle-hardened strategy of copy-cat is the most powerful thing keeping Google from doing evil.

Share it on Bit Torrent! Large, accurate real-world datasets are difficult to find for the purposes of testing and experimenting with various machine learning algos.

I haven't (yet) researched this topic very much, but if it is only legal to trade on public information, then how are all of the private investment banks on Wall St. legally allowed to develop astronomically sophisticated and proprietary, automated securities trading platforms using data from private commercial sources?

Is this pattern going to become one of Google's weakest links? Analogous to the way Microsoft ignored the web until it was too late, and that gave Google a foot in the door.

So the formula to overtaking Google is blindingly simple: change the game to make everything as unrelated to search as possible.

One could say Facebook is doing the exact same thing, but instead the mechanism hold a lock on is social, not search.

Craigslist.

Take the 10+ billion web pages out there, zoom in on the top 100 by traffic, which one is effectively used by the maximum number of people for non-trivial tasks?

Craigslist is at or among the very top of the list. I don't count Google, which is meta—they are a "portal" of the web. I discount Facebook for the same reason, as well as being 99.999% used for trivial tasks(teenagers sharing stupid photos, etc).

Think of web users as a strictly economical force, and ask which web site has the most real-world impact? Craigslist is 99% about real-world money changing hands. Buyer, meet Seller. Google, Facebook, the Silicon Valley Bubble Chamber, and almost all the biggest web properties/brands on the web are derivative products. Their value is based on the value of something else, or the value of a collection of something else.

I often wish Craiglist would add a simple counter to their site displaying a total value of good exchanged, similar to what many new sites show. Even if only a fraction of commercial exchanges could be tracked through some half-hacked manner, I bet that dollar amount would be a very large and surprising number.

Craigslist loses all design awards. This is true. It is an eternal relic enshrining HTML web design circa 1999, it has a hideous, redundant UI, it mercilessly makes users do too much work to sift and sort through what's out there, and provides no tools to lessen at least some of the work. And there's no way to extend or scale it it beyond doing individual, in-person transactions. Yet Craigslist blithely meanders on its merry way in 2010 without needing to partner or integrate with any other major web properties, any "Tech Coast" corps, any telecoms, nor are they beholden to Wall St in any way.

Name one other site that defeats this same set of constraints?

As for how this relates to design proper, the best designs are those you don't even see, and which optimize some set of material constraints that you don't even know about.

I'll chime in with a rant about the URL bar because I've spent so much time thinking about how much I hate it.

First, slapping a simple breadcrumb menu over the text URL bar wouldn't be so hard, so it's a worthwhile experiment, at least just to see it in action. I'm all for experimental software. Consider how much of the web already use sitemap.xml? It's not much further of a leap to adapt sitemaps into a better description of whatever menu structure your web site uses. Browsers have always been vehicles for UI, and users have always suffered a million different web UIs. The web has become "Mystery Meat Navigation" all over. http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html

I say kill the URL bar. The raucous against the "breadcrumb bar" seems to be mostly from technical types who are not so good at thinking from the perspective of non-technical end-users. It's difficult to go along with change, and throw out our floppy drives, I know this, but it must be done.

The URI bar belongs in text-mode UI land for one. As one who lives inside a Unix terminal, I'm generally biased against anything that exposes text-mode UI to users. Users just don't do text-mode. At least not since the days of DOS. They are already struggling with a graphically-based conceptual model of computers and the Internet, so showing them a flashing console cursor where they can type dozens of commands is just too much of a mind-blowing conceptual leap. It can often be difficult for technical & engineering brains to look at something complex and rather than figure out how it all works, all the way down to the bare metal, most users just want to follow the minimal path of effort to use their computers.

Using a single interface to represent both a graphical and text based input is generally a UI mistake. An error, a goof. The vast majority of users have no idea what a URL is, nor do they want to know, so they won't. Thus all the benefits of a text-based input is entirely lost to them. That URL bar space then becomes unused screen real estate. It's never good to waste limit screen space, and there are so many other redundant UI elements across every single web page nowadays, so it makes perfect sense to do something else with that space. How about let's take something users will never learn to use, and give them some other UI feature which they will love?

Also, the URI bar is why we have so many users typing Facebook into Google search, going to the first result and then flooding whatever random forum with complaints about "the new Facebook", without realizing they weren't even logged onto Facebook's site. Most people don't know what a web page is, and they lack the conceptual model of linked documents, not to mention they will never know about DNS or Internet protocols.

The URL bar contributes to a lot of confusion amongst basic web users. We recently saw the Google Chrome video asking pedestrians to explain the difference between a browser and an OS, where none of them them could do so. The average Internet user will never know what a browser really is. Face it, this is the horrible, sad truth you must face if you're making web browsers. Users know just enough of the rat-box tricks, which levers to push or pull and where to move, in order to use the web in the most basic way. And the simple UI they use for interacting with the web becomes identical to their conceptual model of the web. I would argue that this reveals a point of failure of web browser design. Web browsers have a long ways to go to perfect their UI. From a design perspective, it is an impressive achievement to take something as incomprehensible as the Internet, and reduce it down to a handful of learned behaviors that become the lowest common denominator of usage.

We programmers instinctively think "oh the web, it's just tcpip, routers, port 80, a web server, a path to the document resource, http headers back and some plain text to be interpreted and rendered." Contrast that with what the average end users thinks: "oh the web, I have no idea what a browser is, so let's open the Internet, it's here on my desktop, type in some text for Google, now surf around clicking links." You think these users are using browser tabs? Bookmarks? Customized home pages? Any kind of content aggregation, RSS, etc? We developers need to face it—the majority of the "gee-whiz" amagical tech just waiting to be done on the web is only going to confuse users unless we can whip browsers into better UI shape.

And that means moving as much redundancy from web sites into stand-alone UI elements in the browser itself. Let each site have it's own browser chrome if it wants. It would be fantastic to have an API that allows integration between sites and the browser "chrome" itself. i.e. context dependent behaviors, menus, buttons, login, status updates, etc.

Big fan of the Exile here too. They had really great writing in a way, one moment they're talking about some business scheme in some remote part of the world, then it's about a point a classic Russian writer once made, then it's onto some other topic. It was a glorious, anarchic splatterball of writing and it was great!

And the the way they built themselves and their motivations to keep it going are so far out as to be mythical. I still wonder if maybe they weren't a classified spook project, because no way could any normal business get away with writing about what they did from inside Russia! Someone had to have pulled some strings on their behalf.

I used to be a developer at Ticketmaster, and all I can say is kudos, great job!

It took TM/LN an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to build their own half-assed interactive seating charts, and yours beats all the big guys. Don't worry about them shamelessly copying your version—they literally won't be able to, even if they wanted to copy it wholesale, trust me(complicated data issues). :P

Incidentally, where'd you get your venue data? I always thought venue seating maps should be publicly available, like open street data.

Everyone has known for years that Paypal is awful, regularly steals large amounts of money held by perfectly legitimate customers, and does it all through inscrutable, unfriendly, customer-service processes.

I know this, man.

Yet Paypal is bigger than ever, and there's no glimmer of improvement on the horizon.

So either we assume Ebay, the parent corp, is so clueless about milking Paypal for profit while reinvesting as little as possible back into it, or we assume Ebay has a reason for not improving Paypal in any significant way in the past 5+ years.

I'm starting to suspect there's a great financial reason for Ebay to keep doing this. And it might be a similar financial strategy that Amazon has famously used from day 1. Amazon collect payments immediately, yet ships items much later. This means their cashflow is always more than their inventory expenses at any given moment. For however much time there is until that gap closes, Amazon is in a great position—essentially getting a short term loan, and if you consider their volume of transactions, that is billions of cash being held in floating pools.

What if Paypal provides a similar benefit to Ebay's bottom line? Paypal isn't a bank, so they can do whatever they want with the held funds. I suppose what actually happens to the held funds is a corporate secret they guard carefully. But I bet it props up Ebay's cashflow in a major way. If Ebay changed ways and forced Paypal to provide better guarantees, much like a bank, then their cashflow would take a hit.

Good idea or am I off?

Well I guess I won't be doing anymore business with Rackspace, since their idiot executives who cleared this decision clearly do not respect the rights given by the American constitution, nor understand the point of net neutrality, nor any of the rights they themselves benefit from as a common carrier. It's tragic that the FCC does not have the authority nor the clear legislative framework to prosecute violations of net neutrality.

This is absolutely outrageous coming from one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. They are supposed to lead by example here. Rackspace has no business censoring any of their customers content just because the don't like what it says, and are scared others won't like it. And who the fuck cares about their TOS/AUS—more than half of it goes well outside the boundaries of what any court would allow to be legally binding. If I put in my TOS that "I can revoke your account anytime because I don't like you", I cannot legally get away with it. At least in circumstances and for business contracts that matter—perhaps not web hosting.

No laws were broken. No law enforcement or court orders were submitted requesting the site be taken offline. Rackspace pulled the plug just because they didn't like their customer's content and feared backlash by association.

The entire reason this matters is because it leads to a slippery slope that becomes the exact opposite of the Constitutional principles upon which America was founded. Where does the slippery slope stop? Can the electric company shut off this pastor's account because they don't want to be known as "his electricity provider"? Can his bank cancel his home loan too? Why stop there—can every entity he does business with in the public market do likewise, and turn this man into a true outcast and force him to live off the grid? Is that what the American constitution says can happen with freedom of speech? No, it doesn't.

First they came for the religious holy book burners, next they came for..., then they came for me etc, etc.

So the line must be drawn somewhere, and online public speech is a pretty damned good and early enough spot to draw it.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Incidentally, many of the communities on these under the radar, non-Craigslist sites are now bracing for the equivalent of the Eternal September, like when AOL opened up access to Usenet and an ocean of newbies destroyed the careful equilibrium of a community which the general public mostly didn't know even existed. I worked for one of the bigger sites(in the top 5), and let me tell you, the amount of traffic they all get, the number of users and the number of women posting would absolutely shock folks. The entire online prostitution industry is much, much bigger than everyone realizes. It's just all under the radar, and for good reason!

Craigslist has always been the AOL of the industry, as the lowest hanging fruit, with the most blatant crime, spam, cops and worst behaved prostitutes. But at the same time, their traffic amounts were a high multiple of everyone else combined. All the AGs have accomplished is to redirect hundreds of thousands of posts and millions of hits elsewhere on the Internet. :P

The AGs surely must be grand-standing, or else I am vastly underestimating their intelligence and understanding of how the Internet works. They surely know damned well they stand no chance of going after the dozens upon dozens of other sites out there, wrangling each one through the courts, and shutting each down one by one. All it will take is one legal fuck up in one case against one site that gets thrown out or won to set the precedent, then the flood gates open and we're all back to where we started: the general public has a fundamental base level of protected free speech online, and online prostitution continues as it always has.

Also, the AGs have just made the jobs of the cops infinitely harder to go after prostitution. This is actually a law enforcement disaster—when you can't stop all the crime, the next best hope is that you can at least have an evidence trail for the worst crimes that you must go after. It's a triage system, as applied to law enforcement. Now the cops don't even have that. Before, with CL being the hub, the cops make one phone call and get IPs, credit cards, and post history—it was a nearly automated process that would shock most people how easy it was. Now, as the user base fractures amongst sites all over the world, the cops are going to have a much harder, less user-friendly way of getting any investigative information. So when some criminal fool posts on some board that they have a basement full of 12 year old Eastern European girls chained to the wall, or whatever extravagent crime you want to imagine, the cops won't be able to hit the ground running after one phone call. It could take weeks just to locate where the poster originated. Nice job AGs!

Not to mention that when women can't easily post online, their next best alternative is to work as street walkers, and that is a public safety disaster. You could even argue that in the past decade Craigslist has helped society by moving prostitution off the streets and onto the web.

Besides, many of the big sites are not even hosted nor incorporated in the US and are quite untouchable.

Basically it all boils down to this:

AGs: it's an election year, we need to drum up PR, sex & prostitution moves our political base, so it cannot possibly backfire, it's illegal, it has all moved to the Internet, so let's stop the Internet!

Internet: lol wut?!

I don't think it's such a great thing that the freshmen linear transforms for 3d manipulation are finding their way into the top-most level of the web stack(Javascript + CSS)

These transforms are already built into the the lowest level in the video hardware and accessed directly through specialized drivers.

While the imaginative side of me wants nothing more than to see web designers go buckwild with 3d, the engineer side of me want to congratulate everyone on slowing down the web even more.

First, college material is only ~25% of society. The banks would cry screaming to their congress-critters if suddenly loans and credit were only allowed to college grads. What's next, only those holding degrees in econ are allowed to receive loans? Second, most folks getting loans by definition won't be college material. Third, there's then a required level of protection from themselves that must be in place in any Decent Society.

In the Randroid Universe, sure, every adult is logical, educated in accounting & finance, has a grasp of the market economy, is not socially nor financially desperate, and possesses enough self-restraint to not ever make such a blunder of a decision and accept a loan that is too big for them to ever pay off.

But here in the real world, we have extensive laws and regulations to stop just that from happening. Why? Because if those laws didn't exist, the banks would just steal everything that isn't nailed down, and turn everyone into a nation of debtors. This isn't the first time it happened in history either—I recommend reading some history about the economics behind the expansion of the rail roads and their collusion with banks in America just around the time of the closing of the Western frontier.

Thanks for the clarification!