September 18, 2005
-
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
What we really need is a complete paradigm shift in traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess. There’s still this notion that we should build big roads everywhere because the car represents personal freedom. Well, that’s bullshit. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars.
–Ian Lockwood
Wired 12.12: Roads Gone Wild
Comments (7)
I’m curious. How would you descibe what he’s saying in your own words?
I think what he’s saying is that we do things because that’s they way they are done. Becuase people are normally resistant to change, we wind up and become trapped in systems that are not optimal and at the end of the day frustrate users and developers alike.
What do you get out of the quote of the week?
So, this guy Ian. He’s having a real bad day, cause he’s late and in traffic. And being the tremendous ass he is, decides, you know, fucking Civil Engineering should be more like programming, and despite the 200 years of rapid growth and development in this country which has produced what we have today, they should have done it differently! As if. As if this asshole has any idea how difficult it is to change an exisiting infrantructure, or to even fathom how the infrastructure developed. The son of a bitch should just get a copy of Sim City…let him sulk in his frustration with that before saying something stupid in a public forum. Poor bastard should have taken the train.
idk…I think he’s making the point that if one could have sat down and thoroughly thought the problem through, we might have a better system…even if it was just providing the scalablilty…
That’s the problem with code. You can’t see the future, but you can reason through unforseen issues if you throughly examine your use cases. Further, while designing the code, you leave things so that you can upgrade to something bigger and better (i.e. encapsulation). Sometimes you have to look at a system and go, “This just doesn’t work anymore.” Ex. Social Security.
Ex. Affirmative Action, Labor Unions. Riddle me this smart-boy, how are you going to sit down and thoroughly think out the problem of something which has yet to be invented on top of 200 years devleopment over an archaic subsystem that you’re not familier with? Let me explain. THERE IS NO PROBLEM at that point, see?
right. But what about keeping in mind that things change, and allowing for as easy of a change as possible in your design?
Sure Tom. You do that.