Saudi Arabia is to modern Olympics what the US et al. would be to Ancient Olympics...

Allegedly gave his two cents. I see people even today saying "this is not a legal advice, hire a lawyer" like all the time. I'm pretty sure it applies to ancient prose even more.

Except that you are referring to classic multiple star systems that have a dynamic hierarchy of a binary tree. I don't recall what was the specific description of the arrangement of stars in Asimov's story, but it may have been different than that, either in explicit description or the by implications of the conditions on the planet's surface.

Obligatory Norvig reference...

You can run native apps on Chrome OS out of the box, and you don't need any silly censored app store to do that.

So...the rules designed to prevent spending more money than necessary that would end up in the pockets of people who'd have no business getting their hands on it in a sane world...cause more money than necessary being spent and ending in the pockets of other people who'd have no business getting their hands on it in a sane world? *double facepalm*

Engineers produce applications, not languages. I'd argue that engineers provide quality apps for iOS despite Objective-C, and not because of it.

Except the "old thing" is practically from the 1980s. And even back then, there were even better languages than the chimeric mixture of C and Smalltalk. This is not some "juvenile game", e.g., Google is abandoning C++ for basically the same reasons why Objective-C is crap. The compilers are never going to be fast as long as every file #includes tens of thousands of lines of code dozens of time. The code that will have to extract knowledge from the files instead of from reasonably formatted separately-compiled module metadata (a thing solved back in the 1970's, for gods' sake!) to assist the editors and the ancillary tools like code analyzers will have the same problems. I hate to say it, but even Microsoft's .Net is technically better than that. And I don't even like .Net! But there it is, I've said that...

And the devices don't work anywhere else, of course...

Yes, because people not even being ever confronted with programming before enrolling into a university course is the optimal approach to STEM promotion.

Apple hasn't been able to provide programmers with a decent consistent and modern language for over a decade. That alone means that the Apple stuff doesn't set a bar of any significant height to leap over.

Porn is viewable in the browser these days. No hacker tools is a major crippling factor in iOS in any educational settings. No in-process compilation => no JIT-equipped programming learning environments, no LuaJIT, no hosted Oberon or any similar environment, no nothing. Programming tools only for iOS? Only on an expensive Mac. How do you run your own apps on your device? You pay $99/year on every device you want to run them on?

Compared to the technical capabilities of Android and Chrome OS, iOS is the crapfest of the century.

For one thing, Google doesn't limit you with what you can technically do on the machine to the extent that Apple does.

Most certainly, once someone takes his time to build one.

You'd have to ask Autodesk or Adobe about that, respectively.

You really think your ignorance of the range of possible Chrome OS configurations is bliss?

Don't worry, It should be perfectly possible to compile TeX for Chrome OS. ;-)

If the hardware is sufficiently general, wouldn't it be possible to use in other airplanes, or even in remote drone control? That is, if economy of scale is the problem.

Why wouldn't a person want that? It's effectively the same thing as an ordinary PC, only with a declarative language for UIs, a dynamic, high performance language as the go-to systems language, the ability to run legacy code or code from whatever environment you use in the more static PNaCl environment, and a lot of rather neat things, all that with strengthened inter-app security, if I understood it all correctly. The one fundamental limitation is that you can't run the topmost high-end applications such as resource-demanding CAD systems on it (basically stuff that needs native multi-core speed with a single large address space), but that's about it. And even that might be possible if PNaCl improves, at least to some extent. Other than that, there are no other theoretical limitations, unlike with iOS. Beyond that, all that matters is how good you are with your tool.

Unlike the Apple iOS devices where whole classes of applications were banned outright by Apple even before it got into the admins' hands, not matter who buys them...