Hmm. Maybe your Apple ID is associated with some magic sentinel value, like NULL. :-D

File a bug report at bugreport.apple.com.

Don't listen to these ass clowns saying "Go with Obj-C". If they had any clue they would know that introducing Swift was the first step towards obsoleting Obj-C.

Here's why you should learn Objective-C first:

• There are billions of lines of production Objective-C code out there, and remarkably close to zero lines of production Swift code out there. If Swift is the first step towards obsoleting Objective-C, then the second step must be waiting fifty years for all the Objective-C code out there to get rewritten.
• Swift isn't finished. From what I've read, they expect to make syntax-incompatible changes. Although they plan to have translators to move old code forward, do you really trust automated translators enough to run them on huge chunks of production code?
• There's no assurance that Swift has staying power. Over the years, Apple has released bridges to many different programming languages over the years. Java? Check. Perl? Check. Ruby? Check. Python? Check. Now ask yourself how many of those bridges are still supported by Apple. If you only have time to learn one language, it should be the one that you know will still be popular in ten years.

• Swift is designed to make it easy to build apps that include a mix of Swift, C, and Objective-C. Therefore, there's no reason to believe that it won't be possible to write fully capable apps for iOS and OS X in Objective-C for the foreseeable future. And even if, God forbid, Apple decides to be a bunch of a**holes and starts shipping a bunch of Swift-only classes in a reckless and desperate attempt to pressure developers to switch to Swift, you'll still only be a tiny bit of glue code away.

That's not to say that Swift isn't interesting. The ability to test code on the fly is certainly cool, and if Swift proves to be a long-term-viable language, I'd imagine it will eventually (over a couple of decades) become the dominant language for OS X and iOS development. However, there's plenty of time to learn Swift. If you want to start writing real-world code today, you're better off learning Objective-C, because there are orders of magnitude more examples, you'll be more likely to find employment (there's way more Objective-C code out there to maintain), and more people can help when you run into problems.

Ask again in five years, and the answer might be different, but for now, IMO, Objective-C is the clear choice unless you don't already know any C-based language, and probably even then.

I didn't think it was "legal" to target an App Store-bound iOS App in anything but Obj-C and now, Swift. Could I hypothetically write an iOS App in ARM Assembly?

I don't see why not. AFAIK, Apple removed the restrictions on developers' choice of programming languages just five months after they added them—probably in response to developers with pitchforks....

I'm not sure what the DOJ did over the past few months, but whatever it was must have been seriously heinous to get Apple and Google to work together against them. I mean, we've only been demanding encrypted email communication for what, twenty years? And all of a sudden, Apple's DOJ abuse canary comes down, and Apple and Google are scrambling to encrypt everything.

Why do I have a feeling that Eric Holder's resignation is just the tip of the iceberg?

I live in the U.S. When I go to Check Order Status in my Apple on-line account (store.apple.com), I find hundreds of orders, none of which are mine, coming from all over Western Europe, dating back to July of this year. I see the items ordered, order numbers, mailing and shipping addresses and e-mail information for them all. I can track shipments, but I can't cancel orders.

Somebody with a volume purchase plan account probably made a typo when adding administrator email addresses or something.

Go here and see if it lets you sign in. If so, contact Apple Store support from within the VPP site and let them know that your Apple ID is incorrectly associated with a VPP plan.

smh

By that standard, asking why the universe exists is equivalent to asking, "What information would have enabled me to predict that the universe exists without being in it." So even if we accept your meaning of "why" (which IMO stretches the actual meaning of "why" considerably), asking why the universe exists does posit the existence of the person asking the question (which goes without saying anyway unless you're in a philosophy class), but it does not posit the existence of a creator, as you seem to be claiming.

Q.E.D.

The timing of this BusinessWeek story is quite amusing. It tells about a startup founder who is hiring mostly women because they're cheaper.

So there you go.

Perhaps the GP meant 2000. (The Cube and the early iMacs were fanless.)

Or perhaps the GP meant that (by default) the first MacBook Air's fans ran too slowly to keep the machine from overheating and throttling the CPU when under significant load.

I think you missed the GP's point. Big corporations exhibit almost insatiable greed, and will do just about anything to save money, from H1Bs to outsourcing. Yet they don't hire women more than men. There are two possible explanations:

• They're ignoring their primary driving force—profit—in favor of hiring more men because they incorrectly believe that men are cheaper, when in fact women are.
• Men really are cheaper, in spite of the higher base wages.

In theory, they are both equally plausible. And in practice, that's also true, at least up until the first study was published. But these days, given the sheer number of studies that all say that women are cheaper, you'd expect a significant number of the more forward-thinking execs to take it to heart and hire mostly women as a cost-saving measure. If that is not happening, it suggests the possibility that they have studied those cost differences internally and have come to different conclusions based on more complete information.

The only way to know for sure would be to find an exec willing to disclose a company's own internal studies on the subject, and that's not likely to happen. With that said, the longer we go without corporations deciding to hire more women, the greater the chances that those studies are flawed. After all, the alternative requires us to believe that something matters more to a corporation than money, which for most companies would require an almost unimaginable suspension of disbelief.

Counterexample: Why is the sky blue?

Late-stage Ebola typically involves skin lesions. So any contact with the dead means you're touching bodily fluids.

Another thing worth noting is that a small percentage of people choose the other two options. Thus, it can be logically inferred that there's an evolutionary advantage to having a few hermits and sociopaths as a sort of a failsafe in the relatively rare situations where being a hermit or a sociopath confers a survival advantage compared with normal, functioning members of a modern society, such as plagues or corporate boardrooms.

That's remotely possible, but if so, it means Samsung has no cojones. After all, they haven't strong-armed Apple into dropping support so quickly. Either way, it makes Samsung look bad, just for different reasons.

The closest anyone has come up with is the "was this review helpful?" but that gets abused easily.

The big problem with the helpful/not helpful dichotomy as a means for rating reviewers is that it fails to take into account why the reviewer didn't find it helpful. What the system needs, IMO, is to ask a second question at that point:

Did you find the review not helpful because (check all that apply):

• It mainly covered things that I don't care about.
• I disagree with the opinion.
• It contains facts that are incorrect.
• It had nothing to do with the product/service (spam and other abuse)

A review marked with the fourth one will get flagged for review by a human, and if verified to be crap, will lower the reviewer's reputation for everyone, and will be removed.

A review marked with the third one (factually incorrect) will just lower the reviewer's reputation, but at least initially by a smaller amount than a "Helpful" vote increases it. The more reviews this occurs in, the more negatively each negative impacts that person's score, so if a person consistently lies, the negatives count more and more, until they greatly outweigh the positives. However, that balance should only tip when those negatives come from unique users (so that one user can't just mark every review by a particular reviewer as unhelpful and have a bigger impact than marking a single review that way), and those ratings should be cancelled out by a sufficient number of positive reviews, ensuring that a small number of people can't attack a reviewer by each reporting one of his or her reviews as factually incorrect.

A review marked with the first two options ("not interested" and "I disagree") will lower the reviewer's reputation, but only for that reviewer and other people whose "not interested" and "I disagree" ratings on other goods and services are statistically similar to those of the reviewer. This allows users to get better, more individualized reviews that are more likely to match their interests and concerns, without adversely penalizing other people who might be interested in and concerned about the same things as the reviewer in question. To that end, instead of "44 out of 50 people found this helpful", it would say "44 out of 50 people whose tastes match yours found this helpful", such that other users of the site might well see completely different numbers.

And users who frequently give "not helpful" ratings with more than two boxes checked, but rarely give "helpful" ratings, should have progressively smaller impact on the overall helpfulness rating for the reviews that they rate, until at some point their helpful/not helpful ratings end up getting thrown away entirely (except in their own view).

I know this one. It's something about the rightful beneficiary of the estate of Prince Akeem Joffer.