CanadaPlus

D'oh! I think I stopped reading and responded early. I hate it when people do that, my bad.

There are cases where whatever business just has a residence in an otherwise private area. Or at least have been. OP didn't specify either way about the surroundings, though.

OP specified actual, real currency.

Depends what your cost of living is, and how good you are at saving.

If it's located in Lilongwe, congratulations, the cost of decent food is going to be like $2 a day, so if your utilities and security are covered, you're going to have a considerable disposable income to play with.

Lots of people work for $15 an hour, in the West, and get nothing extra covered. That is a bit of a trap.

I mean, economically speaking, that boils down to if you could earn $15 + the cost of renting those things, with roommate, on your own.

Other variables could effect the answer pretty strongly, but they're not specified in the question. And, I guess, if you just don't care about amenities.

I'll admit I don't know tons about Star Wars, but isn't is a bit of a lawless universe? Not quite Mad Max, but, like, on it's way. Dotted with wretched hives of scum and villainy and all that.

So, control is loose enough to allow things like breaking copyright law, and the tradeoff is there's a lot of less sympathetic crime going on. Basically, you can have freedom, or you can have order, and both are double edged swords. People seem to spend a lot of time asking for more order, because even in very safe Western society they're afraid. Maybe they shouldn't do that.

PS: I think stories need to be larger than life to attract the audiences attention. It’s the same recipe since ancient Greece’s theatre works. Because people are people and they want what they always wanted.

Yep. even if you take danger out of the equation,

Which work was that in?

No, but you did talk about the internal logic of the Star Wars universe, and people like Star Wars. So, I launched into a small rant. My bad!

I meant 1984 the novel FWIW, where everything is really centrally controlled.

Probably, for there to be scraps you can easily turn into C-3PO, the official droids are also built up from standardised, open-source parts. Like, I've reused screws or bolts in an unintended context before, since they match that description, but how much could you build from a dead IPhone?

If the Empire kept more careful control over their education and production, they would probably have an easier time. It's just that a North Korea-type space opera, where the rebels have no ships, and can only get radios that continuously play Empire propaganda with no off switch, wouldn't make for good action sequences.

Although, nobody ever asks Gandalf to fix their printer or build their app. He gets to dine with kings.

Sort of?

Open source was the historical default. The settings on your radio are just the settings on your damn radio, nobody "owns" that. Ditto for mechanical looms a century earlier. Intellectual property for records, works of literature and (very relevantly) player piano scrolls anticipated software, but in all cases that was down to an aspect of being a kind of performance, rather than purely technical. Patents have their own weird history, but they evolved directly from mercantilist/feudal government-granted monopolies, rather than from them being a kind of product.

The earliest computers were bespoke, so the teams responsible for building and maintaining them also programmed them. Open vs. closed isn't really a relevant question for the programs themselves, then. The algorithms you might use in the programs made their way around through academic publications, or word of mouth.

AFAIK, the Apollo missions were the first time large-scale software engineering happened, the way we're used to. Lots of effort was put into the hardware, but then the overlooked software part became an unexpected grind. It was all in assembly, people weren't talking to each other, and the wheel was reinvented many times. To everyone's surprise, it was the money pit and source of delay, and the finished product ended up having issues during the flights, as well.

Obviously, from there, proprietary software became more and more prevalent. It was the era where businesses were buying up mainframes and minicomputers, and software companies could be just another contractor component sold in whatever smoke filled boardroom. I don't know if open source would have been practical, when you only have 50 users, but still a sizeable, ugly code base that does everything from scratch.

Once you move into the personal computer era, you start to see open source as we know it grow back, and very slowly start winning. Since you can copy software easily and infinitely, whatever collection of volunteers turns out to be enough. There's no scarcity to drive an actual market.

Which people love in Star Wars, but then they want their real life to be, like, a slick, nonviolent, white-picket version of 1984 (edit: the novel). I get the psychology, but man, it's weird. A modest amount of risk seems worth it for, I guess, basic honesty.

It would have to be a large number of languages per module, but the universe was written in a 20th century kind of way where hardware is single-purpose.

The actual answer is of course that Star Wars isn't believable, but ignoring that...