Apple makes their money primarily from selling hardware. By making OS updates free it makes moving to the Mac ecosystem that much more attractive.

Aren't all 'big brother' systems put into place "with good intent"?

I'm sure there are many SimCity fans out there who would love to play the latest iteration. Unfortunately, EA has proven time and again that they're willing to sacrifice players' freedom in the name of profit. The online requirement is arbitrary DRM. Their backend is not thought out at all. This isn't WoW, there is no reason to tied to a particular server. Players are dealing with all the downsides of online play (long queues to log in, savegame problems, disconnects), and none of the benefits (finding friends, co-op play, etc).

And yes, there will be micro-transactions. Be prepared for the worst.

"Looks like a hurricane is headed for your city. Pay $5.99 now to save your citizens!"

I went in to college as a CS major, and eventually switched out of it because I was bombing Calc 4. However, I did pick up the fundamentals of OOP and programming in Java. Prior to that, I had been "programming" with things like batch files, IRC script, html, and css.

Graduated, began working at an internal corporate helpdesk at a large ISP. Started off doing Tier 1/2 stuff. Moved up, gained experience with the server side of things, began doing on-site support for a consulting company a major city. Hated it, and moved back to a corporate helpdesk in the same city. Acquired a macbook and iPhone. Took a liking to the mac ecosystem (i was a windows guy up until then). Decided iOS development was what i wanted to do.

Studied and programmed in Obj-C with my free time for about a month (free courses from Stanford available on iTunes). My OOP knowledge was still there, and I decided to quit my helpdesk job, study iOS full time, and try to get a job with that. As luck would have it, I was so essential to my helpdesk that they offered to train and transition me to development, in exchange for an additional month at my old position. (2 weeks was not enough time to backfill).

Went to an excellent bootcamp-style training course which solidified my skills and built up my confidence. Have been programming full-time for just under a year, could not be happier about the switch.

One day we'll figure out how to vote like a civilized nation. Today is not that day.

Great song, great dynamics, thanks very much Jonathan. Keep it up! Now I want to go pick up a tele...

TL;DR: Smoking pot during adolescence is correlated with a drop in IQ. The researchers themselves acknowledge that there could be some unknown factor that was not controlled for. Furthermore, they also suggest that the adolescent group dragged down the entire average, and it has very little effect in adulthood.

In the small group of participants who became cannabis dependent before age 18 -- a total of 23 cohort members -- the decline translated to an average of about 8 IQ points, whereas 14 participants who also showed heavy cannabis use but only beginning in adulthood showed only a very small drop in full-scale scores (P=0.02), Meier and colleagues indicated online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, the strongest relationships between persistent dependence and IQ decline applied to those who began heavy use in adolescence. Meier and colleagues suggested that, actually, the relationship between dependence and IQ decline may be entirely driven by this group.

here is the source i used: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Addictions/34415 i would bet there is some external factor not controlled for.

Did they just try to patent UITableView? as an iOS developer, I welcome our brushed-aluminum overlords.

I'd gladly see him make $10mil if he did the job well; the internet is important enough to warrant that expenditure IMO.

I used to play a PC game online called "Interstate 76". It was a game where you would drive cars around a virtual desert, and shoot at each other with turrets mounted on the cars. Shortly after the game was released, people started to figure out how to "hack" their cars by manipulating the game's files locally. With a bit of knowledge and a hex editor, you could customize the art on your car (although it would only be visible locally), and you could also override the number/type of turrets you were allowed to mount on a particular class of vehicle. There was no server-side check on the number/type, so if you went into an online game like this you could have a significant advantage over any players using "stock" vehicles.

This sort of "hacking" was a lot of fun, and I believe that it extended the gameplay experience for myself as well as many others. It was terribly unfair to everyone else, so people began hosting games which would specify "NO HAX" in the name. Of course this was unenforceable at the time, but it would be nice to have a walled-garden-type area to mess around in.

PS. great funk soundtrack on I'76, find it if you can.

Cheating is in the mind of the beholder.
It is difficult to learn something without seeing it done, and more information is always better.
If cheating is defined by "answering the question without having your mind go through the appropriate process first", no one except the student can truly answer that.
This school is freaking out at students for posting math online.