Twice I've had problems with phone companies making a billing mistake, working it out with me over the phone, waiving it from my bill and THEN selling it to a collections agency.

They're double-dipping it as a write-off AND making back 10% or whatever they sell it for.

I have excellent credit and pay my bills on time, but nothing can convince a collection agency that they were sold bad debt. Why would they ever listen to or trust the person they're hassling? Not like they care anyways, say they know I'm right, why would they stop bothering me when they can hassle family and shame me into paying a debt I don't owe? It's extortion.

C++ programmers don't think they're superior to anyone??

It's a super-set of C, so belief of it's superiority is natural.
I'm gonna need some rationale for the humble C++ guys idea. It's just a dead-end on that chart.

Since you're a C guy, there's http://onboardc.sourceforge.net/ that compiles right on the Palm Pilot. A bit tough by modern standards, if there's an API call you want that's not in the standard header file you have to find the ROM address for it and put it in yourself.

Much easier but of course limited is http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net/ which runs on Palm OS and has a lot of little games in the forums.

I've never understood this idea. Sure at a macroscopic scale there is some resemblance between scales and feathers, but on looking close you get an entirely different structure.

Scales being basically flat plates and feathers being long rods with interconnected hooks on them.

If this story is correct and way more dinosaurs had feathers than previously thought, then why force it?

But more importantly it doesn't have reaction traction.

http://youtu.be/5ooEz9QtErM

For centuries researchers have lamented the difficulty in studying society and accurately running social experiments. Now for the first time in human history companies such as Google and Facebook have a real window into how ideas and emotion spread. They can see the relationships between philosophy, religion, gender and culture in how they define our dealings with each other.

I disagree with what they're doing and how they're doing it. Yet I pause and think to myself... In the same position, could I resist the temptation to pry and to tinker? Power corrupts, those who deny their power deny their abuse of it. It's frightening what they hold in their hands, the power to shape society and attempt to bend it to their will. The law of unintended consequences is going to bite down on them HARD.

Xcode allows Mac OS X and iOS development for free. It's a public download on the App store.

To distribute apps through the Mac App store, or the iTunes App Store there is a $99 a year developer fee which includes the certificates needed to run your app on other people's computers or iOS devices.

So on a Mac yes, completely free to make apps for your own desktop. (Because you're bypassing binary signing, which is optional on a Mac) On iOS you will only be able to use the simulator until you pay for a dev certificate. This is because of no "side loading".

Now there is a free developer account which gives access to documentation and sample code (and old WWDC videos?), much of which is google accessible but some of which is not. Kids can get the free developer accounts, practice on a simulator and apply to go to WWDC for free (https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/students/).

So long story short. Things are not that simple, it's a nuanced situation, but YES you can start coding iOS apps before you're 18.

The WWDC app requires a dev account because that's pre-release info that requires signing an NDA. That would normally exclude minors, but it works the same way as kids going to WWDC, via sharing a dev account with their parent or guardian. So a grown up gets a dev account, puts in info that it's for their minor child... pays for a dev certificate and a kid can make their own iPhone apps with parent's permission.

Then what were all those kids doing at WWDC 2014?

Surprised at all the responses with no mention of OpenStreetMap.

Unlimited data download in various formats. Convert to Garmin/Tom Tom/whatever if you like and have custom GPS maps. Print PDF maps, wall maps, tour books, etc... Plenty of mobile apps to download entire cities and even countries with no time limits.

The key point to remember is that OpenStreetMap is open DATA and there's hundreds of apps and projects built around it letting you do just about anything you can think of. Including several routing APIs and services.

For now.

Guess they're not prepared to buy the next thing the internet tells them to. For shame.

What are those arcade games with the girl pictures on them? Dating simulator games where you try to say the right thing to a static image of a real person?

Just curious on cultural arcade differences, did kids play games with sex and nudity in them or was it more like Leisure Suit Larry?

I read an article about Dr. Dre and how he used to record his music. At the time radio was the dominant way people were exposed to new music, he realized that his audience would not experience pristine reception nor studio quality "reference" speakers with extremely low distortion. There would also be plenty of background noise and an engine sounds to compete with.

To ensure his music sounded to his listeners the way he wanted it to, he would broadcast over a private short-range radio station and drive around listening to his latest work at the end of each day.

Now to me, this shows from an early date that Dr. Dre had a pragmatic and insightful understanding of the end-user experience of listening to music. How did that mold his philosophy on sound equipment and Beats headphones? And they "crafted" to intentionally distort certain kinds of music for a more enjoyable experience? Are they the physical equivalent to a "Pop Music" preset on the iTunes EQ? Or is it simply creative marketing and the cheapest speaker components he could get his hands on? No idea, I'm deaf. :-) But I do think the story is interesting and there just might be something to the sound of those headphones.

I know that I'm probably sounding like some sort of Dr. Dre fanboi, but I assure you that there is no rap music nor hip hop in my music collection. I'm pretty much permanently stuck in the 80's and early 90's since that's when I could hear more. My listening is mostly attempting to follow along while filling in the missing sounds by memory.

http://gameprogrammingpatterns...

This site takes a subset of the "Gang of Four" patterns and explains how and why to use them in your games.

You'll especially enjoy the command pattern which will be heavily used in an RPGSgame.

Looks like it's time for an international body to "kindly" step in and make these kinds of global decisions for everyone. I'm sure several are writing up proposals as we speak.