According to that 2008 source (which appears to be pro-railroad) freight rail is up to four times more fuel-efficient per ton of freight delivered than freight trucking.
Adblock does not allow you to dodge the paywall, from personal experience.
There is an easy way to escape the paywall: After a new page opens, wait for the text to load, then after the text is loaded but the rest of the site's infrastructure is still loading, hit Escape to stop loading. Whatever code is responsible for summoning the paywall GUI never finishes loading.
This solution does not work well when trying to open multiple NYT tabs, however.
What a great article! I have similar ideas to those thinkers (Brain and Ford), but I've been inspired mostly by reading way too much science fiction! Feels great to learn I'm not just simply crazy.
Where do you find the 'personalized information' about hiring managers etc? You mention it's important to customize your approach, but don't give any hints about where we're supposed to get that kind of information. Or do employees at the companies you deal with put the entirety of their company's structure into Linkedin or something?
Netscape's death throes began in 1998. The 90s tech bubble finally collapsed in early 2000.
Assuming this year marks the beginning of Facebook's death throes and extrapolating from recent history: Until 2013, let the (tech startup) good times roll!
From my defense software experience with Ada 83 and Ada 95, Ada's concurrency features made it much easier to work with than C. Tasks/processes were a top-level feature of the language, like classes in Java, and the "protected" keyword functioned somewhat like "synchronized" in Java (an implementation of the monitor pattern).
Our compiler package also came with an extensive concurrency API that offered a variety of threadsafe containers comparable (again) to java.concurrent - and this was software from the late 80s/early 90s!
What was bad about Ada was Ada 95. It strove to make Ada into an object-oriented language, but did a poor job of it with some very tortured syntax. edit what Masklinn said - "bolted on" is a perfect way to put it.
Graded homeworks might be used as checkpoints verifying that students are learning key concepts, prior to the exams that are a larger component of the grade. Without these graded checkpoints, lazy students given only voluntary homeworks might reach the exam with little preparation
(lazy student speaking from personal experience. being graded on the homework 'encouraged' learning the concepts!)
Prosper's certainly not making any money itself. What happens when Prosper is out of business? You should try LendingClub instead-they're finally moving toward profitability, and most lenders at LendingClub actually make money on their loans.
LendingClub is hardly flawless, for example verification of potential borrowers' income as presented to lenders is voluntary for borrowers, but the platform allows lenders to question potential borrowers and pressure them to verify income.
the blogger closed discussion before I could reply so I'll reply on here for what good it does me.
Whether a technological singularity is desirable is debatable. Whether development of human-equivalent AI would lead to technological singularity is debatable. On the other hand, human-equivalent AI seems inevitable to me. Author asserts some things without much in the way of proof:
"You could take a precise reading of the structure of the human's brain and simulate that brain inside a computer. But taking this initial reading is impossible in practice right now, and may remain so indefinitely, and computers need to be, conservatively, ten orders of magnitude more powerful before the simulation step becomes possible."
Why would this remain impossible in practice indefinitely? It's only a matter of time and effort until the human brain's goings-on can be reproduced outside a human brain, no matter how many orders of magnitude "more powerful" thee equipment needs to be. Unless there is truly some human-inaccessible spiritual process that goes on alongside physical processes in the human brain to produce human intelligence, there's no reason purely physical processes can't be reproduced outside a human brain.
According to that 2008 source (which appears to be pro-railroad) freight rail is up to four times more fuel-efficient per ton of freight delivered than freight trucking.