> With fourth generation nuclear reactors we can create a sustainable energy infrastructure
Nope.
If you break down the CAPEX on a nuclear plant, using a baseline modern design like CANDU6 or ARV, you'll see that about 2/3rds of the total price are in the non-nuclear section. That's the boiler, primary cooling loop, secondary loop, tertiary loop (or dump), turbines, generators, substations, transformers, switchyard, buildings, etc. Those parts are basically identical in 4th gen designs. In fact, they are rather similar to a coal plant, with the exception that there's no radioactivity in the first loop so the overall cost is a lot lower.
Anyhow, the cost of just those non-nuclear portions are about two to three times the price of a natural gas plant that produces the same amount of energy.
So in other words, in order for nuclear to compete with gas, the reactor has to cost negative billions of dollars.
I don't care how advanced you think the 4th gen might be, it will not cost negative dollars.
As it seems you are also pushing the LFTR, I should point out there are dozens of reports on these designs spanning from the 1970s into the 2000s that all show they would be more expensive to build and operate than conventional designs.
Although substation cost-savings are associated with the building of a LFTR in comparison to a traditional uranium plant, the difference in cost, given the current industry environment, remains insufficient to justify the creation of a new LFTR. Thus, it may be cost and time efficient to focus on continuing to improve operational efficiency of the existing nuclear power plants instead.
There are lots of "reports" from the supporters that claim otherwise, but they're basically just overnight costs. And most of them are utterly bogus. The MIT study is the best example; they claim LFTRs will cost half as much as conventional designs. What's most interesting about that statement is that in order to make it cost half as much, it would have to cost negative dollars - due to the infrastructure noted above. And they say most of that savings will be due to the LFTR opperating at low/atmospheric pressure, in spite of the fact that there are many commeecial reactors that do that today, including the CANDUs up the street from me, and they cost more than conventional designs.
This sort of wishful thinking and utterly bogus reporting continues to infest the entire nuclear arena, but no more so than the LFTR "group". While the higher costs have been repeatedly pointed out (even when presented *to their face*, which I have seen), supporters continue claim the reason no one uses them is a vast global conspiracy to do with weapons research. One again has to point out the example of Canada, which doesn't use them in spite of not having a nuclear weapons program and having large supplies of thorium. Or Germany, or Belguim, or lots of places.
> Then it can be - get this - re"cycled" and used in a smaller reactor
A small portion of the fuel can be recycled. It has to be mixed with large amounts of fresh fuel.
Here is an article that talks about how it is actually used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
As you can see, most reactors can run on about 30% such fuel, with the rest being fresh uranium. And as in most cases the price of fresh uranium is less than MOX, the only reason to do this is political. That's why the US doesn't - although everyone seems to invert the political argument. Really, why should the US feds pay reactors to use MOX?
> Toshiba has designed micro-sized reactors that would fit in your fucking backyard
So have lots of people, there are dozens of such designs. However, the price of the units is so high that no one has purchased one, and likely never will.
> no, the nuclear boogeyman gonna git u
If by "the nuclear boogeyman" you mean the high CAPEX of new plants, then yes, it is going to get you.
kWh for kWh, wind turbines are about 1/2 the cost of a reactor, natural gas is even less, and solar is between the two. Which is why NG, wind and PV are the fastest growing power sources in history, and nuclear companies are going bankrupt around the world.
> Within next 10 years, we will have to replace a huge amount of panels that reached end of life.
Except that we install more new panels every year than the number that were installed in every year up to 10 years ago. In 30 years, then we start seeing the wave.
It's commonly *reprocessed*. Whether the results go back into a reactor is very much dependant on the country. This includes the US, where some reprocessing takes place.
> just the US doesn't do it
I believe you are confusing this with the closed-cycle breeder fuel system that Carter cancelled in the 1970s? That is a horse of an entirely different color.
From 2007. Since then both the glass and soldier have moved to lead-free formulations. Here is a more recent reference:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=f9gXDQAAQBAJ
But just the fact that we're arguing points like this demonstrates they won. There's probably 100x lead in a typical nuclear plant - which is dozens of years old on average and filled with wiring - than there is in all the solar panels in the world.
Uhh, but you missed the main one. They are comparing the amount of fuel waste from nuclear with the amount of construction waste from solar.
If one compares fuel waste from both, then solar is infinity times "better" than nuclear.
If one compares construction materials from both, then solar is about twice "as good" as nuclear.
If one compares the later assuming recycling, solar is at least six times better, perhaps as much as twenty times better.
And this all assumes that anyone gives a crap about this as a metric, considering we throw away something like 1000 times either amount in water bottles every year.
> Just because the materials *can* be successfully recovered and reused doesn't mean those > materials *are* being successfully recovered and reused.
Indeed, but had you spend 15 seconds or so in Google you would notice there are multiple programs all over the world doing just that, and in Europe, you already pay for their disposal when you buy them.
Surely it would have taken you less time to Google the facts than write this dumb post.
I can't believe this zombie story is back again. It originates in 2012 in a the now-dead blog called http://thingsworsethannuclearpower.com, run by two MIT grads with plans to take over the world with small nuclear reactors. The article was so obviously bogus that of course it was spread around the blogosphere.
Now here we are five years later and the same basic story is being refreshed. The most basic problem is that they compare THE FUEL of one system to the CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS of the other, and if that's not totally obviously bogus to you then give up now.
California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution. The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides -- it single-handedly has nearly half of the country's solar electricity generating capacity...
> California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It
This happens all the time with any power source. Here in Ontario the spot price for the nuclear plants goes negative through the spring and fall all the time and has for decades. This is a basic concept in grid management - it's a GOOD thing this happens, as it provides a financial incentive to equalize the grid.
> Take Arizona, for example.
Take Arizona, please.
> The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse > gas emissions aren't getting any better due to California's overproduction.
Uhhh... If they're buying solar from Cali, that means they are lowering their greenhouse gas emissions. Duh.
> The Los Angeles Times suggests over-construction of natural gas plants created part of the problem
Meh. NG is a super-good source when mixed with solar, because it's spin-up time is short enough to track clouds on a large basis. Only hydro is better.
> The idea that those who are 80% off grid should in effect be subsidised by those who can't leave
Like the way people without a car still pay taxes for roads? Or they pay for school even though they don't have kids? Of that most places pay the same amount for trash collection even if they have no trash? Or any of the other thousands of examples where everyone pays for infrastructure whether or not they use it?
There are lots of ways to fix this problem, which is essentially a billing issue. Make the wires a public utility and bill on the power separately, for instance.
Atari BASIC had the ability to GOTO/GOSUB on a variable name, so you could GOSUB CLEARTHESCREEN, which helped somewhat. It also let you make arbitrary ON statements like GOTO 1000+(10*COUNTER). The downside was the locations were not cached, so branching performance was very poor.
> it is as slow as molasses in execution speed, and has terrible multithreading capability. So what
Well;
"People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs"
You've just pointed out two perfectly good reasons to use a compiler. The original post is a false dichotomy.
And considering the vast majority of compiles go through CLI tools, notably the entire Linux stack where you actually compile just about everything at least once, that last bit of the OP is just bigotry.
OMG. I trained in physics and recently had to do a little physics again. I found the code I needed in R. It was completely indecipherable. R is basically the PERL of math languages - write-only gobblygook with lots of one-off syntax that does special things so that the original authors could save a couple of keystrokes.
"Apple has struggled to make Siri as smart as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa because of disagreements among its staff and its decisions to limit how long it stores user data, former Apple employees told The Wall Street Journal.'
Ok fine. Now I would personally suspect that if six months isn't enough, then they don't use it much anyway, and I suspect the database will be poor in any event. But, now we come to the conclusion...
"The company unveiled a new version of Siri during its WWDC keynote address on Monday but failed to show the world how it's much better than competing products"
Much better? Why does it have to be "much" better? Isn't "any" better worthwhile? And isn't "any better than before" also an improvement?
"Some former executives, close observers and even devoted customers say Apple's innovative power appears to be waning"
And what does this have to do with how long Siri keeps data? If they are trying to conflate one with the other, fail.
This is, of course, simply a turnabout of how the system worked in the 1950s and 60s, when the British services were so totally infiltrated by the Soviets that the US couldn't trust them with anything at all.
I write Wiki articles about historical science topics. Much of this I get from back issues of magazines like Scientific American (which, for the younger in the crowd, used to be pretty serious) and IEEE Spectrum and similar industry magazines, but also a journal article here and there.
The commercial value of these articles is zero. They are invariably about obsolete systems that are no longer used. In fact, many of the articles, like Mauchly's article on computer storage systems, have fallen into the public domain. Yet they remain paywalled.
Without sci-hub I could not produce the quality articles I write. That is bad for society. That loss is far worse than the zero dollars the journals would gain.
> Just because more vulnerabilities in Windows are known, does > not mean there are less total in Linux.
That misses the point, badly.
The issue is that there is an entire Windows virus ecosystem. Aspiring authors can get everything they need to get started from a huge library of code. WannaCry is a perfect example; the code they added is apparently very simple, and they connected it to a sophisticated exploit.
This market exists because, in the past, Windows was less secure. So the virus writers had lots of easy ways in. MS responded by increasing security but were forced to do so in steps over much more than a decade. With each step, the virus authors had an overlap period in which there were still lots of older systems to infect (as this example demonstrates) while they learned the new system. There may be fewer holes in the current system, but there's more people than ever looking for them.
The same is not true for Linux or the Mac. The "classic" MacOS was even less secure than Windows (as anyone who recalls "nvir" will admit) and was the target of viruses - but in those days viruses tended not to do much and there was certainly no money in it. But then the OS was replaced entirely with what is now macOS. This break with the past meant that everything that used to work simply didn't. There was no continuity, and everyone just left for the PC. Linux is, in essence, the same sort of end result even though the history is different.
So even if the Mac or Linux were to suddenly get all sorts of market share (and iOS has that it appears) it will be more difficult to start up a virus industry for the simple reason that one doesn't exist currently. It's not that it's more difficult to write *a virus*, is that it's more difficult to write *a huge variety of them*, which is what you see on the PC. They would eventually get there, no doubt, but it would take some time during which the companies would be fighting back.
To make the distinction clear, let us consider targetted attacks as opposed to viruses that are spread around. If someone wants into your computer, they'll get there whether it's Windows, Mac or Linux - examples of compromised computers running all three systems are very easy to find - the Dalai Lama's Mac is one example. And that is, as you note, because there are just as many holes - maybe more if you believe some reports.
But the sort of ransomware you see running rampant on Windows is a very different thing - there is a powerful economic model that means you have to make them easily, and to do so you put together existing bits. Those bits don't exist on the Mac and Linux, and the cost of developing them will be huge. Unless there is a leak like the one that led to WannaCry, the cost of building such a system on Linux will be *huge* and the rewards minimal.
I have no reason to be suspect of the first part of that statement, but "mature"? Come on.
Is it just me, or do you all find the recent move to platform-specific languages very worrying indeed? So for anything MS-like we're supposed to be C#, on xOS the new hotness is Swift, and on Android, it's Kotlin (or Go? or Java?).
What's worse is that the only really cross-platform language remains C (there's plenty of real platforms with marginal C++, iOS for instance) and even that's easy to use only within Obj-C, which we're not supposed to like anymore.
> Reducing arguments to simple black and white soundbites
This is precisely why the US so desperately needs a real third party. It reduces but sadly does not eliminate, the tendency to make every binary decision into a political position, and every political issue into a binary decision.
I have yet to see a single high end phone from any company that isn't wrapped in some sort of bumper, and typically a complete 3-side box. And when I hold the phone my hand overlaps some of the screen.
I'm really failing to understand this "feature". Touch-anywhere, yeah I can actually see how that is kinda useful, but bezel-free? Hrm...
Slashdot Mirror
> With fourth generation nuclear reactors we can create a sustainable energy infrastructure
Nope.
If you break down the CAPEX on a nuclear plant, using a baseline modern design like CANDU6 or ARV, you'll see that about 2/3rds of the total price are in the non-nuclear section. That's the boiler, primary cooling loop, secondary loop, tertiary loop (or dump), turbines, generators, substations, transformers, switchyard, buildings, etc. Those parts are basically identical in 4th gen designs. In fact, they are rather similar to a coal plant, with the exception that there's no radioactivity in the first loop so the overall cost is a lot lower.
Anyhow, the cost of just those non-nuclear portions are about two to three times the price of a natural gas plant that produces the same amount of energy.
So in other words, in order for nuclear to compete with gas, the reactor has to cost negative billions of dollars.
I don't care how advanced you think the 4th gen might be, it will not cost negative dollars.
As it seems you are also pushing the LFTR, I should point out there are dozens of reports on these designs spanning from the 1970s into the 2000s that all show they would be more expensive to build and operate than conventional designs.
Here is one recent example:
http://franke.uchicago.edu/bigproblems/BPRO29000-2014/Team10-EnergyFinalPaper.pdf
Let me quote the conclusion:
Although substation cost-savings are associated with the building of a LFTR in comparison to a traditional uranium plant, the difference in cost, given the current industry environment, remains insufficient to justify the creation of a new LFTR. Thus, it may be cost and time efficient to focus on continuing to improve operational efficiency of the existing nuclear power plants instead.
There are lots of "reports" from the supporters that claim otherwise, but they're basically just overnight costs. And most of them are utterly bogus. The MIT study is the best example; they claim LFTRs will cost half as much as conventional designs. What's most interesting about that statement is that in order to make it cost half as much, it would have to cost negative dollars - due to the infrastructure noted above. And they say most of that savings will be due to the LFTR opperating at low/atmospheric pressure, in spite of the fact that there are many commeecial reactors that do that today, including the CANDUs up the street from me, and they cost more than conventional designs.
This sort of wishful thinking and utterly bogus reporting continues to infest the entire nuclear arena, but no more so than the LFTR "group". While the higher costs have been repeatedly pointed out (even when presented *to their face*, which I have seen), supporters continue claim the reason no one uses them is a vast global conspiracy to do with weapons research. One again has to point out the example of Canada, which doesn't use them in spite of not having a nuclear weapons program and having large supplies of thorium. Or Germany, or Belguim, or lots of places.
> Then it can be - get this - re"cycled" and used in a smaller reactor
A small portion of the fuel can be recycled. It has to be mixed with large amounts of fresh fuel.
Here is an article that talks about how it is actually used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
As you can see, most reactors can run on about 30% such fuel, with the rest being fresh uranium. And as in most cases the price of fresh uranium is less than MOX, the only reason to do this is political. That's why the US doesn't - although everyone seems to invert the political argument. Really, why should the US feds pay reactors to use MOX?
> Toshiba has designed micro-sized reactors that would fit in your fucking backyard
So have lots of people, there are dozens of such designs. However, the price of the units is so high that no one has purchased one, and likely never will.
> no, the nuclear boogeyman gonna git u
If by "the nuclear boogeyman" you mean the high CAPEX of new plants, then yes, it is going to get you.
kWh for kWh, wind turbines are about 1/2 the cost of a reactor, natural gas is even less, and solar is between the two. Which is why NG, wind and PV are the fastest growing power sources in history, and nuclear companies are going bankrupt around the world.
> Within next 10 years, we will have to replace a huge amount of panels that reached end of life.
Except that we install more new panels every year than the number that were installed in every year up to 10 years ago. In 30 years, then we start seeing the wave.
> Actually Nuclear waste is normally recycled
It's commonly *reprocessed*. Whether the results go back into a reactor is very much dependant on the country. This includes the US, where some reprocessing takes place.
> just the US doesn't do it
I believe you are confusing this with the closed-cycle breeder fuel system that Carter cancelled in the 1970s? That is a horse of an entirely different color.
> Emissions from PV Life Cycles [mit.edu]
From 2007. Since then both the glass and soldier have moved to lead-free formulations. Here is a more recent reference:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=f9gXDQAAQBAJ
But just the fact that we're arguing points like this demonstrates they won. There's probably 100x lead in a typical nuclear plant - which is dozens of years old on average and filled with wiring - than there is in all the solar panels in the world.
> . I can spot several major flaws
Uhh, but you missed the main one. They are comparing the amount of fuel waste from nuclear with the amount of construction waste from solar.
If one compares fuel waste from both, then solar is infinity times "better" than nuclear.
If one compares construction materials from both, then solar is about twice "as good" as nuclear.
If one compares the later assuming recycling, solar is at least six times better, perhaps as much as twenty times better.
And this all assumes that anyone gives a crap about this as a metric, considering we throw away something like 1000 times either amount in water bottles every year.
> Just because the materials *can* be successfully recovered and reused doesn't mean those
> materials *are* being successfully recovered and reused.
Indeed, but had you spend 15 seconds or so in Google you would notice there are multiple programs all over the world doing just that, and in Europe, you already pay for their disposal when you buy them.
Surely it would have taken you less time to Google the facts than write this dumb post.
I can't believe this zombie story is back again. It originates in 2012 in a the now-dead blog called http://thingsworsethannuclearpower.com, run by two MIT grads with plans to take over the world with small nuclear reactors. The article was so obviously bogus that of course it was spread around the blogosphere.
Now here we are five years later and the same basic story is being refreshed. The most basic problem is that they compare THE FUEL of one system to the CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS of the other, and if that's not totally obviously bogus to you then give up now.
In any event:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/does-solar-generate-more-waste-than-nuclear-no/
California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution. The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides -- it single-handedly has nearly half of the country's solar electricity generating capacity...
> California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It
This happens all the time with any power source. Here in Ontario the spot price for the nuclear plants goes negative through the spring and fall all the time and has for decades. This is a basic concept in grid management - it's a GOOD thing this happens, as it provides a financial incentive to equalize the grid.
> Take Arizona, for example.
Take Arizona, please.
> The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse
> gas emissions aren't getting any better due to California's overproduction.
Uhhh... If they're buying solar from Cali, that means they are lowering their greenhouse gas emissions. Duh.
> The Los Angeles Times suggests over-construction of natural gas plants created part of the problem
Meh. NG is a super-good source when mixed with solar, because it's spin-up time is short enough to track clouds on a large basis. Only hydro is better.
> The idea that those who are 80% off grid should in effect be subsidised by those who can't leave
Like the way people without a car still pay taxes for roads?
Or they pay for school even though they don't have kids?
Of that most places pay the same amount for trash collection even if they have no trash?
Or any of the other thousands of examples where everyone pays for infrastructure whether or not they use it?
There are lots of ways to fix this problem, which is essentially a billing issue. Make the wires a public utility and bill on the power separately, for instance.
> If the FAA was in charge of naming newborns, no one would have names until they were 12 twelve
And the infant mortality rate would be zero.
I'm always amazed when people harp on the FAA for doing their job really well, and express their concern that doing so is complex and time consuming.
"ead, the unused spectrum was reserved for the future expansion of broadcast TV to channels 70-83."
Uhhh, those channels were definitely in use. One of Toronto's big independants was on 79 for years.
Atari BASIC had the ability to GOTO/GOSUB on a variable name, so you could GOSUB CLEARTHESCREEN, which helped somewhat. It also let you make arbitrary ON statements like GOTO 1000+(10*COUNTER). The downside was the locations were not cached, so branching performance was very poor.
> it is as slow as molasses in execution speed, and has terrible multithreading capability. So what
Well;
"People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs"
You've just pointed out two perfectly good reasons to use a compiler. The original post is a false dichotomy.
And considering the vast majority of compiles go through CLI tools, notably the entire Linux stack where you actually compile just about everything at least once, that last bit of the OP is just bigotry.
> would have broken tens of millions of lines of code
PRODUCTION code no less.
> For data science, R is the future
OMG. I trained in physics and recently had to do a little physics again. I found the code I needed in R. It was completely indecipherable. R is basically the PERL of math languages - write-only gobblygook with lots of one-off syntax that does special things so that the original authors could save a couple of keystrokes.
"Does it not realize that answers the question conclusively about which is superior?"
You can have all the data in the world and still suck.
Bing, for instance.
Look at these two statements:
"Apple has struggled to make Siri as smart as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa because of disagreements among its staff and its decisions to limit how long it stores user data, former Apple employees told The Wall Street Journal.'
Ok fine. Now I would personally suspect that if six months isn't enough, then they don't use it much anyway, and I suspect the database will be poor in any event. But, now we come to the conclusion...
"The company unveiled a new version of Siri during its WWDC keynote address on Monday but failed to show the world how it's much better than competing products"
Much better? Why does it have to be "much" better? Isn't "any" better worthwhile? And isn't "any better than before" also an improvement?
"Some former executives, close observers and even devoted customers say Apple's innovative power appears to be waning"
And what does this have to do with how long Siri keeps data? If they are trying to conflate one with the other, fail.
"will go toe-to-toe with existing competitors such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home"
That doesn't appear to be what this is.
It's a JBL OnAir with voice commands. And maybe wifi that doesn't continually disconnect and fail to reconnect.
Not with $350 to me, but I suspect some will want it.
This is, of course, simply a turnabout of how the system worked in the 1950s and 60s, when the British services were so totally infiltrated by the Soviets that the US couldn't trust them with anything at all.
I write Wiki articles about historical science topics. Much of this I get from back issues of magazines like Scientific American (which, for the younger in the crowd, used to be pretty serious) and IEEE Spectrum and similar industry magazines, but also a journal article here and there.
The commercial value of these articles is zero. They are invariably about obsolete systems that are no longer used. In fact, many of the articles, like Mauchly's article on computer storage systems, have fallen into the public domain. Yet they remain paywalled.
Without sci-hub I could not produce the quality articles I write. That is bad for society. That loss is far worse than the zero dollars the journals would gain.
> Just because more vulnerabilities in Windows are known, does
> not mean there are less total in Linux.
That misses the point, badly.
The issue is that there is an entire Windows virus ecosystem. Aspiring authors can get everything they need to get started from a huge library of code. WannaCry is a perfect example; the code they added is apparently very simple, and they connected it to a sophisticated exploit.
This market exists because, in the past, Windows was less secure. So the virus writers had lots of easy ways in. MS responded by increasing security but were forced to do so in steps over much more than a decade. With each step, the virus authors had an overlap period in which there were still lots of older systems to infect (as this example demonstrates) while they learned the new system. There may be fewer holes in the current system, but there's more people than ever looking for them.
The same is not true for Linux or the Mac. The "classic" MacOS was even less secure than Windows (as anyone who recalls "nvir" will admit) and was the target of viruses - but in those days viruses tended not to do much and there was certainly no money in it. But then the OS was replaced entirely with what is now macOS. This break with the past meant that everything that used to work simply didn't. There was no continuity, and everyone just left for the PC. Linux is, in essence, the same sort of end result even though the history is different.
So even if the Mac or Linux were to suddenly get all sorts of market share (and iOS has that it appears) it will be more difficult to start up a virus industry for the simple reason that one doesn't exist currently. It's not that it's more difficult to write *a virus*, is that it's more difficult to write *a huge variety of them*, which is what you see on the PC. They would eventually get there, no doubt, but it would take some time during which the companies would be fighting back.
To make the distinction clear, let us consider targetted attacks as opposed to viruses that are spread around. If someone wants into your computer, they'll get there whether it's Windows, Mac or Linux - examples of compromised computers running all three systems are very easy to find - the Dalai Lama's Mac is one example. And that is, as you note, because there are just as many holes - maybe more if you believe some reports.
But the sort of ransomware you see running rampant on Windows is a very different thing - there is a powerful economic model that means you have to make them easily, and to do so you put together existing bits. Those bits don't exist on the Mac and Linux, and the cost of developing them will be huge. Unless there is a leak like the one that led to WannaCry, the cost of building such a system on Linux will be *huge* and the rewards minimal.
"a brilliantly designed, mature language"
I have no reason to be suspect of the first part of that statement, but "mature"? Come on.
Is it just me, or do you all find the recent move to platform-specific languages very worrying indeed? So for anything MS-like we're supposed to be C#, on xOS the new hotness is Swift, and on Android, it's Kotlin (or Go? or Java?).
What's worse is that the only really cross-platform language remains C (there's plenty of real platforms with marginal C++, iOS for instance) and even that's easy to use only within Obj-C, which we're not supposed to like anymore.
Fantastic, thanks, large natural monopolies.
> Reducing arguments to simple black and white soundbites
This is precisely why the US so desperately needs a real third party. It reduces but sadly does not eliminate, the tendency to make every binary decision into a political position, and every political issue into a binary decision.
I have yet to see a single high end phone from any company that isn't wrapped in some sort of bumper, and typically a complete 3-side box. And when I hold the phone my hand overlaps some of the screen.
I'm really failing to understand this "feature". Touch-anywhere, yeah I can actually see how that is kinda useful, but bezel-free? Hrm...