"Having never lived in a truly big city I don't really understand why would anyone walk to anywhere, as such more density necessarily means more traffic".. Ok I filtered a bit with what I actually understood... still, you should try living in a really big city, preferably outside of north-america and see what "walkability" really means in it's natural environment.
Boston/Cambridge is one of the most walkable cities in North America–it's much closer to the European model than the typical North American city.
I still don't get what the grandparent is on about though. I live in Boston, and it's pretty great. I feel free to live my life the way I want here, as opposed to being forced into owning a car and drive it everywhere.
The neighborhoods and downtown in Boston can be nice and walkable. But if you want to get around to places around the city, the Boston T has an average speed of about 10 mph [1]. A decent subway system can take you to places at more like 30 mph. NYC subway does about 15 mph [2]. D.C. metro does 30 mph [3].
(Not talking about the train top speed, but the average speed, including stops and acceleration, along the whole line.)
No doubt the T could be better, but comparing the green line is very misleading. It's an above ground street trolley for a lot of its route, and it's much older than any of those other systems. The other Boston subway lines are proper light rail systems that move much faster.
The red line e.g. runs at 20 mph[1]. The problem with the red line are the age of the rolling stock and signal equipment and their tendency to catch on fire.
We had a similar service 20-30 years ago operating mostly out of Quebec and Ontario (Canada). Sadly regulators did not see it very kindly (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/province-stops-allo-stop-1.211...). Story does not say though how thik was the kraft envelop that was exchanged, if there was ever such exchange, or was just an overzealous civil servant. The service had been operating for some time already and was quite successful and popular. That decision came out of nowhere and the service was forced to stop operations. All this well before smart phones apps and the web... well technically the web was present but the service had started well before that and was mostly operating with phone calls to an actual office and bulletin boards and such.
For Allo-Stop yes there was exchange of money but the amounts were such that it would be barely more than the split expenses for gas for the trip.
Wonder if this will be allowed, seeing how Uber is being forced to get taxi licences and such for it's drivers, I doubt this will go very far around here.
>The board found the Montreal-based company was illegally competing with the Voyageur, Greyhound and Trentway bus companies.
>Felix D'Mello is with the Ontario Highway Transport Board, which controls passenger transportation in the province. He says because money is exchanged, it's a public transportation service, and that breaks the rules.
What a revolting crock of crap - politicians outright protecting established business interests. I guess in such locations Google can still implement a free service, and let users settle the price themselves, it's suboptimal but regulators can't outright kill it, unlike Uber.
Porn and spam don't have an incentive structure to redistribute wealth weighted towards the earliest adopters -
they're otherwise not really comparable unless you narrow in on one point, such as energy use.
I lock my keyboard away when I leave... I'll sleep better knowing nobody made it off with my 200$ mechanical clacker. As a side bonus I don't get mystery things locked when I arrive the next morning.
If you annotate your types in python with the appropriate type hinting comments I find I get quite satisfactory code completion and error detection from my IDE (pycharm). Perhaps not as much as VisualStudio might do for me with C#, true, but then again I don't use them for the same thing either.
Each task has it's set or preferred tools, to write a quick command line tool to bridge a gap between two systems and automate our workflow a bit further python is just perfect for me and much more productive than C#. However to create a system with a team of dozens spanning the whole skill gamut I feel much more comfortable having the compiler as an active member of my team policing the architectural vision for us. In which case C#/Java will win hands down.
If however speed and responsiveness are prime worries then I'll roll up my sleeves and bring C/C++ in. sure my productivity will take a hit, it will likely be harder to maintain as well but if this effort makes the difference for my customers in their productivity then it's well worth the investment.
Often times the final system will be a mix of all these technologies, each used where it's strength shines to maximise their impact.
Yet the technology is worthless when faced with inadequate code structure and system architecture. Coupled convoluted code will be a PITA no matter the language used.
Given the choice between trial and error engineering and science backed engineering I much prefer the latter. That does not mean doing engineering without the science is impossible just so much harder. They both go hand in hand, nothing mythological here. Advancements in one leads to ideas in the other and vice-versa.
"Given the choice between trial and error engineering and science backed engineering I much prefer the latter."
That's not the question; the question is, are we forced to give up engineering if we don't have "the science" yet?
And the answer is an objective "no", from abundant past human history. There's this myth sold that science always precedes engineering that is very, very popular. I'm not even sure where it's coming from. Oral history in primary education, maybe. But it's a myth that engineers themselves can ill afford.
The vast majority of practical programming is programming running way, way ahead of the "science", which occasionally takes point samples of how 10 college sophomores behave under a certain limited experiment.
We just overbuild until we have the science and the manufacturing capacity to back it up. Every once in a while I hear some civil engineering fan comment about how the roman aqueducts are still standing because they built a huge margin of safety into them (because they couldn't do the calculations, not because they wanted them to last a thousand years)
Maybe it's because for instance there were exactly zero engineers working with radio waves before Maxwell and Hertz, or zero engineers working with semiconductor transistors before, basically, Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley. Electromagnetism and electronics happen to come straight from science labs. You could check also Idk... chemical synthesis, polymer science... nuclear physics?
I don't understand why would you come up with such "objective" statements unless you really think it's not necessary to know anything about the history of science and engineering to have a strong opinion about them.
> Maybe it's because for instance there were exactly zero engineers working with radio waves before Maxwell and Hertz
Well, humans have been crafting optical lens way before Maxwell ;). And even way before [1] Descartes and Newton decided to study light.
For everything out of reach of our senses, like the examples you gave, we need formal science. But for everything humans can see, smell or touch, we're pretty good with empirical observations : chemistry, fluide dynamics, genetics and mechanics where comonly used way before formal science was even a thing.
