It is already competitive with plastic injection-moulding for runs of around 1, 000 items, and this figure will rise as the technology matures.

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Longer-term, as the technology matures, we can expect to see more GTL plants pop up, particularly the smaller ones costing in the hundreds of millions rather than tens of billions.

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But as the software technology matures, it will increasingly be able to lash together thousands of low-cost computing nodes and create a flexible, high-performance corporate data center.

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But as an industry matures, the technology improves.

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Thankfully, as technology matures this modern phenomenon is hopefully on the decline.

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