Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
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Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 1
Probably because now-a-days, the buildings that people have the most exposure to are basically cookie-cutter type structures. Houses especially, many retail stores, etc. Most houses are built without an architect being involved. Even office buildings, which might greatly vary in appearance from the outside, once you're in the cubicle farm or whatever, it's generally all the same stuff. Sadly, economic concerns often preclude commercial interior design from becoming much more than picking carpet patterns.
But when you're doing something a little different, something original, you very often end up having to change things while under construction. Either what you drew doesn't exactly work, or the contractor can't figure out how to build it, or maybe in the year since you designed it before building started, the price of copper has gone up 150% and now you can't afford it. It might just be that once you start putting the millwork in, the owner decides he likes it, and now he wants three times as many cabinets. The architectural design process is often very dynamic.
Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
on
Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I design buildings for a living, and I've dabbled in programming, and I think architecture and software development have a whole lot in common.
Your step one in "building a house" can go through all 6 of the steps that you have listed for software development. We get hired by clients, sometimes they have a good idea what they want, sometimes they don't. Sometimes what they want is feasible, sometimes it isn't. It's not unusual for even smaller projects to drag on for years, because the client keeps changing his/her mind. Many projects that cross our desks will never be built.
Many projects are not the traditional design phase ->building phase. They often overlap, and it's pretty messy.
I could go on for paragraphs with the similarities that I see between software design and architecture, but I'll save that for another post.
Whether or not people choose free software is not particularly important to me, but I'm very eager to see the dominance of Windows fade. For a number of reasons.
As other software platforms become more popular, I hope that more of the software specific to my profession will become available on platforms other than windows, so that I don't have to keep a windows box at home on top of my preferred computer. I wish that my mom's job didn't require her to own a windows machine, because I didn't enjoy giving her tech support over the phone for all the stupid problems she had. It'd be nice if there were a few less compromised computers out there sending me lots of spam.
I don't use windows as my primary OS, I don't do tech support for a living, yet I have to deal with windows problems on almost a daily basis.
You're right! Your question could not have possibly implied anything at all! You said something stupid, but since it's mildly ambiguous, no one can justifiably comment on it!
In fact, here's a comic someone made that touches on this point:
I know if I was an editor of a website read by a few hundred thousand people each day, I wouldn't bother proof-reading a whole five sentences when I posted an article either.
I think it's really a matter of unrealistic expectations. Something completely new is likely going to take some time to build up the critical mass/mind-share needed to really take hold in the mind of the public and become the next big thing. The problem with games is that that there's such a quick and constant flow of new games that any new game is yesterday's news just a couple months later.
If you understand that reality, then it becomes a question of how do you work around it. There are a couple ways. One, you start small, sharing your idea in a more limited, cheaper to develop way. Then as things get going, you expand and improve and eventually you get closer to your original grand vision. A lot of MMO's seem to be working this way. There's only one WoW, selling 6 zillion copies on the first day, but there are dozens of other MMO's with stable and profitable fanbases. Another option is to somehow connect your game with some already existing mindshare. Nintendo does this by sticking new game types into existing franchises. I'm much more likely to take a good look at Mario Ice Hockey than at a cartoony hockey game with random anime characters or whatever all other things being equal, because I'm familiar with the Mario universe and I've enjoyed those games before. (Also because I'm a nintendo fanboy, but it would work with some non-nintendo franchises as well.)
Dev cheating can take forms that cannot be tracked by the game, and can mostly take place outside of the game itself. Having advanced knowledge of upcoming changes (new ship abilities, upcoming nerf of an expensive item, change in significant play mechanic) can allow one group to prepare ahead of time, and purposely benefit from these changes in a way that no one else could outside of luck.
In the EVE universe, there's a whole lot of alliance politics, it's as much a part of the game as blowing up spaceships is. Knowledge is more valuable than in-game currency, and there are lots of ways for knowledge to be shared without leaving any sort of trace within the game itself. The advantages might be subtle, but in a game as cut-throat as EVE, it's a big deal.
If engineers want to call themselves system architects, or chip architects, or something like that to try and pretend that they're somehow better than normal engineers, whatever. But don't refer to them with the title of Architect followed by their name. To design buildings and sign your name as a licensed architect has real legal implications, and a long and expensive process is required to get to that point.
It's very similar to the term Doctor, which you generally should not go around referring to yourself as unless you truly are a doctor. Just because architects aren't as well paid or respected as doctors in our culture doesn't mean it's ok to steal the title.
I guess the issue at hand is really how you define "TV". Is there a difference between watching "television" and watching something on the TV screen? When I'm playing Nintendo, I'm using the TV as a display, but I wouldn't say I'm watching television. If you wire up your living room so that your computer displays YouTube videos on your TV, I wouldn't say you're watching television, I'd say you're just using the TV as a monitor. I guess I define television as basically non-interactive, scheduled programming. If you start making it interactive, in my mind at least, it ceases to be television, even if you're using the TV screen as part of the process.
There are four things that I see changing about TV specifically, all of which have already started happening, and only one of which has much to do with the internet.
1) Bigger screens become more affordable and common. 2) Picture quality increases to make those bigger screens worthwhile 3) DVR's freeing people from normal scheduling 4) More content becoming available (this benefits the most from the internet)
Now, there are a lot of other things happening in the rest of the world, providing alternatives to TV. I think it's more that the average person's methods of media consumption will continue to change, and the average portion of time spent on "television" will continually decrease, as more cool stuff competes for time and attention.
Now that I think about it more, I guess the big change could be things becoming almost entirely on-demand, but I think there will always be a market for quality scheduled programming. Shows like Lost or Heroes, and even a lot of the reality shows are as much about people discussing them between episodes as they are sitting down and watching them. The schedule becomes very important.
Actually, people melting them is what all of this really is about. It sounds silly, like it'd be a lot of work, but people are weird. There are people out there who will go through a whole lot of effort to avoid getting a "real job". There are people in this city who put so much time and effort into "scavenging"; if they applied that energy to even an easy job, they'd make way more money, and not getting into activities of questionable legality.
In my town, people are tearing metal roofs off of destroyed buildings in the middle of the night, risking their safety and arrest for a few hundred dollars worth of scrap metal. The going price for legitimate demolition is significantly higher, so doing things the right way is very profitable. Everyone is hiring, salaries are good. People are just strange, and do strange things. I have no doubt that their are lots more people out there than you think, scheming up ways to melt down coins.
Prices on raw materials fluctuate unpredictably over time periods that are much shorter than the lifetime of a coin. The price of copper, for example, has fluctuated significantly over the past couple years. Look up some copper price graphs on google. The london metal exchange graph that I'm looking at right now had copper tripling in price over the course of a year, peaking around the middle of 2006, but now down to only around twice the 2005 price.
I think I read that the average coin lifespan is around 30 years. They could stop producing pennies today I guess, but there's still probalby billions of them out there.
Except not really. In some very abstract and particular sense maybe (as you progress through the world, you're able to interact with larger and larger objects), but that leaves out how you interact with them, which can be abstracted into two very different methods (you use analog sticks to roll over/into things with a giant ball vs. you use a pointing device to lock onto objects, then physically move that pointing device to impart momentum to objects).
The graphical style of both games is similar due the cartoon-ish simple shapes and colors, but the game play is very different. The differences between the controllers used for each game illustrates that plainly enough. (Although you could probably come up with a workable control scheme for katamari with the Wii)
Have you tried a Wii? Have you heard anything about the controller that it comes with? Creativity is the least of Nintendo's problems.
I really don't get this whining about Nintendo and their franchises. They aren't just churning out incremental sequels as fast as possible just to make a quick buck. Nintendo takes good care of their franchises, and almost always creates high quality games. They might make 100 different games that take place in the mario universe, but there will be at least 80 different types of gameplay among them, and even the ones that just build on an earlier game are still going to be well designed, polished, and likely bring at least a few new good ideas to the table.
It takes a lot of time and effort to create a new "universe" in any type of media. Nintendo has managed to create a whole bunch of great ones. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Starfox, etc. These franchises make up one of Nintendo's greatest strengths. They allow Nintendo's game designers to take an idea, and extend it in ways that wouldn't make any sense outside of some greater context. These different game universes that Nintendo has to choose from creates that context. A soccer game where you throw red turtle shells at someone before you steal the ball from them is a pretty random and stupid idea on its own, but in the Mario world it makes perfect sense; so Nintendo can create a bizarre soccer game without having to subject the gamer to all the storyline and background that would be required to make it coherent otherwise.
Of course, when they've disproved the myth that smashing these subatomic particles together will create a miniature black hole that will proceed to devour the entire earth, they'll have to modify the experiment so that it does actually create said black hole. Or at least pack the entire 16.7 mile tunnel with dynamite just to see how what the explosion looks like.
Exactly. There are some people who've had the mixture of talent, time, and luck with SL, and have managed to make some money through the game. For many of those people, as their SL bank account grew, so did their ego. And so they make a big deal about themselves, it gets picked up by some of the media because it's kind of a strange story, and some lazy people with free time think they can maybe get in on that action.
These people are only fooling themselves, making money in SL requires time and effort just like in real life. If you want it to provide income, you're going to have to treat it like a job. A job in a bizarre and very unpredictable economy, but still a job.
The really sucky part about this whole phenomena is that as these people gain publicity, their clout with the SL developers grows, and so the whole setup starts shifting in the favor of those who treat it as a job, at the expense of the majority, who treat it as some sort of a game. Linden Labs needs to be very careful with how they balance those two sides, because if all the "gamers" leave, then the bottom of the economy falls out, and all those virtual moguls won't be able to save SL.
The stuff that's boring is often the stuff that will tell future historians how most of us lived our day to day lives. Look back at history, we've got pretty good records of a lot of the big political events that shaped nations and such, but far less about what average life was for someone, say 800 years ago.
This is even more important now, because things are changing so incredibly quickly. I'm not a historian, but from what I have read, day to day life 800 years ago for your average person wasn't likely to be much different than day to day life for a person 900 years ago. But when I compare what myself or my coworkers/friends/etc. deal with every day compared to what my grandparents had when they were my age, the changes are immense, fascinating, and worth documenting.
My chosen career path is architecture, not engineering, but there's a lot in common. My education was very theoretical, much more concerned with spatial theory, aesthetic concerns, useability isues, etc. We very lightly brushed on the physical realities of architecture (structures classes were a joke, materials and methods stuff was very simple). I enjoyed it, and learned a lot, but when I got a job in the profession, I was very unprepared for the day to day stuff that I have to handle. Basically in school I really only learned how to design buildings at a more schematic level, while the majority of real architecture work is much more technical, detailed, and client oriented.
I found it very frustrating while in school, and it's definitely been annoying to have to learn so much just to be useful in my job. Hopefully one day I'll get to design a museum or something, and more of my education will be useful. Basically, it felt like they were teaching us like we'd all end up being superstar designers, the ones who just sketch out crazy shapes and have their underlings turn it into a building. In the real world, that's not how most architects work, and I wish I had been a little more prepared for what I do all day now.
It would also put new graduates in a better position than being basically worthless to a firm at the beginning, and maybe let them demand a more reasonable salary.
There's no such thing as a perfect mirror, so a big enough laser would still burn through it. Also, there are other ways to take out satellites besides lasers. But even if lasers were your concern, and you had a perfect mirror, how would you implement it and still have a useful satellite? The mirror would need to protect the satellite from every angle reachable from earth, and once you do that, then how does the satellite point any spy equipment or whatever at the earth through that mirror shield? How would that mirror effect communications with the satellite?
I'm no space engineer, but it seems like a more useful solution would be to make smaller, stealthy satellites, ones that are harder to find a shoot down. Put enough of those in orbit, and you'll probably be able to destroy the anti-satellite weaponry before it can take out all of your eyes.
While renovating a house might not be as easy a way of making a buck as buying Microsoft stock 20 years ago was, if you're careful about what you're doing, you can make some good money flipping property. Particularly when the housing market is going the right way, you can get some significant profit reasonably quickly. It'll take some initial capital, and possibly some manual labor by you, but it doesn't have to be miserable crippling work by any means.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people enjoy designing, sweating, building, and creating. Gut an old bathroom, design a new layout, re-build most of it yourself... you'll feel damn accomplished when it's all said and done. And if it increases the value of your house a little bit more, all the better.
A house is not just a place to live. For many people, including the guy who built this theater, it's something to take pride in. For others, it's both a home and an investment. For some, it's probably just a place to sleep and store their clothes in. All of those points of view are valid.
The thing is, they have a plot device (the stargate), that makes just about any other plot feasible. While the longer story arcs are interesting, I've often more enjoyed the occasional one-off episodes that have no bearing on the continuity of the series.
Instead of epic battles between good and evil with the fate of the whole galaxy in the balance, how about just a group of explorers traveling to a planet that they know nothing about. Maybe it takes an episode or two to tell the whole story, but whatever happens doesn't have to fit into some larger arc. The long-term development happens more within the characters themselves than within the plot-line of the fictional universe. I know that serial episodes with lots of twists and cliffhangers are all the rage right now, but that's not the only way to run a show.
If I want to watch a show about fancy new technologies being invented at the last minute to save the day, there are years of star trek I can go through. Stargate is much more interesting when they don't try to copy that, and instead when they show a group of people from our time and culture exploring weird things, and interacting with stuff they don't understand.
So you're saying that everyone is born with exactly the same social abilities, but that different experiences cause some of us to lose particular abilities?
So the reason I don't like going to the mall is because I mostly behaved back in grade school?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because now-a-days, the buildings that people have the most exposure to are basically cookie-cutter type structures. Houses especially, many retail stores, etc. Most houses are built without an architect being involved. Even office buildings, which might greatly vary in appearance from the outside, once you're in the cubicle farm or whatever, it's generally all the same stuff. Sadly, economic concerns often preclude commercial interior design from becoming much more than picking carpet patterns.
But when you're doing something a little different, something original, you very often end up having to change things while under construction. Either what you drew doesn't exactly work, or the contractor can't figure out how to build it, or maybe in the year since you designed it before building started, the price of copper has gone up 150% and now you can't afford it. It might just be that once you start putting the millwork in, the owner decides he likes it, and now he wants three times as many cabinets. The architectural design process is often very dynamic.
I design buildings for a living, and I've dabbled in programming, and I think architecture and software development have a whole lot in common.
Your step one in "building a house" can go through all 6 of the steps that you have listed for software development. We get hired by clients, sometimes they have a good idea what they want, sometimes they don't. Sometimes what they want is feasible, sometimes it isn't. It's not unusual for even smaller projects to drag on for years, because the client keeps changing his/her mind. Many projects that cross our desks will never be built.
Many projects are not the traditional design phase ->building phase. They often overlap, and it's pretty messy.
I could go on for paragraphs with the similarities that I see between software design and architecture, but I'll save that for another post.
Whether or not people choose free software is not particularly important to me, but I'm very eager to see the dominance of Windows fade. For a number of reasons.
As other software platforms become more popular, I hope that more of the software specific to my profession will become available on platforms other than windows, so that I don't have to keep a windows box at home on top of my preferred computer. I wish that my mom's job didn't require her to own a windows machine, because I didn't enjoy giving her tech support over the phone for all the stupid problems she had. It'd be nice if there were a few less compromised computers out there sending me lots of spam.
I don't use windows as my primary OS, I don't do tech support for a living, yet I have to deal with windows problems on almost a daily basis.
You're right! Your question could not have possibly implied anything at all! You said something stupid, but since it's mildly ambiguous, no one can justifiably comment on it!
In fact, here's a comic someone made that touches on this point:
http://www.xkcd.com/c169.html
Why are people talking about alternative fuels? Why do people worry about a sustainable future? What's wrong with sticking with oil?
Why are so many people fascinated by space travel? Fuck going into space. What's wrong with Earth?
Why are so many techies talking about new hardware? What's wrong with the computer you have? What more you could possibly want?
You're right. Today is perfect. I hope nobody ever events anything new ever again. That wouldn't be cool at all.
What's the matter with you?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the likely response you'll get from the editors will be very similar to the text of your sig.
I know if I was an editor of a website read by a few hundred thousand people each day, I wouldn't bother proof-reading a whole five sentences when I posted an article either.
I think it's really a matter of unrealistic expectations. Something completely new is likely going to take some time to build up the critical mass/mind-share needed to really take hold in the mind of the public and become the next big thing. The problem with games is that that there's such a quick and constant flow of new games that any new game is yesterday's news just a couple months later.
If you understand that reality, then it becomes a question of how do you work around it. There are a couple ways. One, you start small, sharing your idea in a more limited, cheaper to develop way. Then as things get going, you expand and improve and eventually you get closer to your original grand vision. A lot of MMO's seem to be working this way. There's only one WoW, selling 6 zillion copies on the first day, but there are dozens of other MMO's with stable and profitable fanbases. Another option is to somehow connect your game with some already existing mindshare. Nintendo does this by sticking new game types into existing franchises. I'm much more likely to take a good look at Mario Ice Hockey than at a cartoony hockey game with random anime characters or whatever all other things being equal, because I'm familiar with the Mario universe and I've enjoyed those games before. (Also because I'm a nintendo fanboy, but it would work with some non-nintendo franchises as well.)
Dev cheating can take forms that cannot be tracked by the game, and can mostly take place outside of the game itself. Having advanced knowledge of upcoming changes (new ship abilities, upcoming nerf of an expensive item, change in significant play mechanic) can allow one group to prepare ahead of time, and purposely benefit from these changes in a way that no one else could outside of luck.
In the EVE universe, there's a whole lot of alliance politics, it's as much a part of the game as blowing up spaceships is. Knowledge is more valuable than in-game currency, and there are lots of ways for knowledge to be shared without leaving any sort of trace within the game itself. The advantages might be subtle, but in a game as cut-throat as EVE, it's a big deal.
Architects design buildings.
If engineers want to call themselves system architects, or chip architects, or something like that to try and pretend that they're somehow better than normal engineers, whatever. But don't refer to them with the title of Architect followed by their name. To design buildings and sign your name as a licensed architect has real legal implications, and a long and expensive process is required to get to that point.
It's very similar to the term Doctor, which you generally should not go around referring to yourself as unless you truly are a doctor. Just because architects aren't as well paid or respected as doctors in our culture doesn't mean it's ok to steal the title.
I guess the issue at hand is really how you define "TV". Is there a difference between watching "television" and watching something on the TV screen? When I'm playing Nintendo, I'm using the TV as a display, but I wouldn't say I'm watching television. If you wire up your living room so that your computer displays YouTube videos on your TV, I wouldn't say you're watching television, I'd say you're just using the TV as a monitor. I guess I define television as basically non-interactive, scheduled programming. If you start making it interactive, in my mind at least, it ceases to be television, even if you're using the TV screen as part of the process.
There are four things that I see changing about TV specifically, all of which have already started happening, and only one of which has much to do with the internet.
1) Bigger screens become more affordable and common.
2) Picture quality increases to make those bigger screens worthwhile
3) DVR's freeing people from normal scheduling
4) More content becoming available (this benefits the most from the internet)
Now, there are a lot of other things happening in the rest of the world, providing alternatives to TV. I think it's more that the average person's methods of media consumption will continue to change, and the average portion of time spent on "television" will continually decrease, as more cool stuff competes for time and attention.
Now that I think about it more, I guess the big change could be things becoming almost entirely on-demand, but I think there will always be a market for quality scheduled programming. Shows like Lost or Heroes, and even a lot of the reality shows are as much about people discussing them between episodes as they are sitting down and watching them. The schedule becomes very important.
Anyone can do that. Being an analyst means you somehow convinced someone to pay you to do it.
Alright, I get what you're saying now. That makes sense.
Actually, people melting them is what all of this really is about. It sounds silly, like it'd be a lot of work, but people are weird. There are people out there who will go through a whole lot of effort to avoid getting a "real job". There are people in this city who put so much time and effort into "scavenging"; if they applied that energy to even an easy job, they'd make way more money, and not getting into activities of questionable legality.
In my town, people are tearing metal roofs off of destroyed buildings in the middle of the night, risking their safety and arrest for a few hundred dollars worth of scrap metal. The going price for legitimate demolition is significantly higher, so doing things the right way is very profitable. Everyone is hiring, salaries are good. People are just strange, and do strange things. I have no doubt that their are lots more people out there than you think, scheming up ways to melt down coins.
Prices on raw materials fluctuate unpredictably over time periods that are much shorter than the lifetime of a coin. The price of copper, for example, has fluctuated significantly over the past couple years. Look up some copper price graphs on google. The london metal exchange graph that I'm looking at right now had copper tripling in price over the course of a year, peaking around the middle of 2006, but now down to only around twice the 2005 price.
I think I read that the average coin lifespan is around 30 years. They could stop producing pennies today I guess, but there's still probalby billions of them out there.
Except not really. In some very abstract and particular sense maybe (as you progress through the world, you're able to interact with larger and larger objects), but that leaves out how you interact with them, which can be abstracted into two very different methods (you use analog sticks to roll over/into things with a giant ball vs. you use a pointing device to lock onto objects, then physically move that pointing device to impart momentum to objects).
The graphical style of both games is similar due the cartoon-ish simple shapes and colors, but the game play is very different. The differences between the controllers used for each game illustrates that plainly enough. (Although you could probably come up with a workable control scheme for katamari with the Wii)
Have you tried a Wii? Have you heard anything about the controller that it comes with? Creativity is the least of Nintendo's problems.
I really don't get this whining about Nintendo and their franchises. They aren't just churning out incremental sequels as fast as possible just to make a quick buck. Nintendo takes good care of their franchises, and almost always creates high quality games. They might make 100 different games that take place in the mario universe, but there will be at least 80 different types of gameplay among them, and even the ones that just build on an earlier game are still going to be well designed, polished, and likely bring at least a few new good ideas to the table.
It takes a lot of time and effort to create a new "universe" in any type of media. Nintendo has managed to create a whole bunch of great ones. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Starfox, etc. These franchises make up one of Nintendo's greatest strengths. They allow Nintendo's game designers to take an idea, and extend it in ways that wouldn't make any sense outside of some greater context. These different game universes that Nintendo has to choose from creates that context. A soccer game where you throw red turtle shells at someone before you steal the ball from them is a pretty random and stupid idea on its own, but in the Mario world it makes perfect sense; so Nintendo can create a bizarre soccer game without having to subject the gamer to all the storyline and background that would be required to make it coherent otherwise.
Of course, when they've disproved the myth that smashing these subatomic particles together will create a miniature black hole that will proceed to devour the entire earth, they'll have to modify the experiment so that it does actually create said black hole. Or at least pack the entire 16.7 mile tunnel with dynamite just to see how what the explosion looks like.
Exactly. There are some people who've had the mixture of talent, time, and luck with SL, and have managed to make some money through the game. For many of those people, as their SL bank account grew, so did their ego. And so they make a big deal about themselves, it gets picked up by some of the media because it's kind of a strange story, and some lazy people with free time think they can maybe get in on that action.
These people are only fooling themselves, making money in SL requires time and effort just like in real life. If you want it to provide income, you're going to have to treat it like a job. A job in a bizarre and very unpredictable economy, but still a job.
The really sucky part about this whole phenomena is that as these people gain publicity, their clout with the SL developers grows, and so the whole setup starts shifting in the favor of those who treat it as a job, at the expense of the majority, who treat it as some sort of a game. Linden Labs needs to be very careful with how they balance those two sides, because if all the "gamers" leave, then the bottom of the economy falls out, and all those virtual moguls won't be able to save SL.
The stuff that's boring is often the stuff that will tell future historians how most of us lived our day to day lives. Look back at history, we've got pretty good records of a lot of the big political events that shaped nations and such, but far less about what average life was for someone, say 800 years ago.
This is even more important now, because things are changing so incredibly quickly. I'm not a historian, but from what I have read, day to day life 800 years ago for your average person wasn't likely to be much different than day to day life for a person 900 years ago. But when I compare what myself or my coworkers/friends/etc. deal with every day compared to what my grandparents had when they were my age, the changes are immense, fascinating, and worth documenting.
My chosen career path is architecture, not engineering, but there's a lot in common. My education was very theoretical, much more concerned with spatial theory, aesthetic concerns, useability isues, etc. We very lightly brushed on the physical realities of architecture (structures classes were a joke, materials and methods stuff was very simple). I enjoyed it, and learned a lot, but when I got a job in the profession, I was very unprepared for the day to day stuff that I have to handle. Basically in school I really only learned how to design buildings at a more schematic level, while the majority of real architecture work is much more technical, detailed, and client oriented.
I found it very frustrating while in school, and it's definitely been annoying to have to learn so much just to be useful in my job. Hopefully one day I'll get to design a museum or something, and more of my education will be useful. Basically, it felt like they were teaching us like we'd all end up being superstar designers, the ones who just sketch out crazy shapes and have their underlings turn it into a building. In the real world, that's not how most architects work, and I wish I had been a little more prepared for what I do all day now.
It would also put new graduates in a better position than being basically worthless to a firm at the beginning, and maybe let them demand a more reasonable salary.
There's no such thing as a perfect mirror, so a big enough laser would still burn through it. Also, there are other ways to take out satellites besides lasers. But even if lasers were your concern, and you had a perfect mirror, how would you implement it and still have a useful satellite? The mirror would need to protect the satellite from every angle reachable from earth, and once you do that, then how does the satellite point any spy equipment or whatever at the earth through that mirror shield? How would that mirror effect communications with the satellite?
I'm no space engineer, but it seems like a more useful solution would be to make smaller, stealthy satellites, ones that are harder to find a shoot down. Put enough of those in orbit, and you'll probably be able to destroy the anti-satellite weaponry before it can take out all of your eyes.
While renovating a house might not be as easy a way of making a buck as buying Microsoft stock 20 years ago was, if you're careful about what you're doing, you can make some good money flipping property. Particularly when the housing market is going the right way, you can get some significant profit reasonably quickly. It'll take some initial capital, and possibly some manual labor by you, but it doesn't have to be miserable crippling work by any means.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people enjoy designing, sweating, building, and creating. Gut an old bathroom, design a new layout, re-build most of it yourself... you'll feel damn accomplished when it's all said and done. And if it increases the value of your house a little bit more, all the better.
A house is not just a place to live. For many people, including the guy who built this theater, it's something to take pride in. For others, it's both a home and an investment. For some, it's probably just a place to sleep and store their clothes in. All of those points of view are valid.
The thing is, they have a plot device (the stargate), that makes just about any other plot feasible. While the longer story arcs are interesting, I've often more enjoyed the occasional one-off episodes that have no bearing on the continuity of the series.
Instead of epic battles between good and evil with the fate of the whole galaxy in the balance, how about just a group of explorers traveling to a planet that they know nothing about. Maybe it takes an episode or two to tell the whole story, but whatever happens doesn't have to fit into some larger arc. The long-term development happens more within the characters themselves than within the plot-line of the fictional universe. I know that serial episodes with lots of twists and cliffhangers are all the rage right now, but that's not the only way to run a show.
If I want to watch a show about fancy new technologies being invented at the last minute to save the day, there are years of star trek I can go through. Stargate is much more interesting when they don't try to copy that, and instead when they show a group of people from our time and culture exploring weird things, and interacting with stuff they don't understand.
So you're saying that everyone is born with exactly the same social abilities, but that different experiences cause some of us to lose particular abilities?
So the reason I don't like going to the mall is because I mostly behaved back in grade school?