My 15 year old stopped with the legos about 3 years ago (I will always remember the day he had $20 of birthday money to spend and ultimately chose a CD instead)
At least in our house, after one of the fancy kits got built once, the instructions were promptly lost or eaten by the dog, and all the legos ended up in 1 giant bin. Then the real fun started (the creative part)

To answer my own question, it appears that you can install on real devices provided you pay the $99/year fee. Still rubs me the wrong way as it seems like an artificial restriction that I can't run what I wrote on what I bought without giving apple more cash.

Are you sure? Last time I looked into this, you could write the software using an emulator but the only way to actually get it onto any device (including your own) was via the app store approval process.

Zaentz can't dance, but he'll steal your money
Watch him or he'll rob you blind

About 10 years ago I was driving along a gravel road in rural Minnesota and spotted a phone in the road.
During the first few hours I made a point of answering this phone so that I could get the word out that
the owner's phone had been lost. Almost without exception the people who called refused to believe that
I wasn't the owner of the phone playing some trick on them. Then I was accused of stealing the phone
and later of wanting money for its return. Seriously, I was verbally attacked by these morons for simply
trying to arrange a place for its return. Eventually I told one of these people which gas station I was leaving
it at, and simply left it there with a confused cashier. The whole experience was surreal; I felt like I had been
sucked into this person's life. It would make a good movie plot I think. Needless to say when I see an apparently
lost phone now, I just ignore it and walk away.

OWNED!

If you like Stephen King, and don't mind reading long serials while getting the feeling that nothing will ever be resolved to your satisfaction, I'd say go for it.
In my case I gave up after a book or two because I personally don't like the feeling that nothing will ever be resolved to your satisfaction.

Agreed, and I think it depends on your environment and what type of staff you have and how qualified they are.
For example, if a required service has moved to some other TCP port and production is down because of it, you can wait hours
for a solution, or a well-qualified and trusted developer can edit the port setting in the deployed code and get everything
back up in minutes.

Don't wait until immediately before before code freeze.
Your code will have to interact with the rest of the system and by waiting
until the last minute you are potentially introducing integration issues into
the mix at the worst possible time.

In Hollywood movies, the bad guy always draws first, and the bad guy always gets shot. QED

Did no one else else immediately think of Gilligan's Island? Granted that robot _walked_ across the bottom of the _Pacific_ Ocean. Maybe I'm just showing my age.

What about people who aren't actually dead, but have jumped the shark?

A couple of years ago when my daughter showed up for middle school orientation, all of her 6th grade class had been given slips of paper with the WRONG locker combination.
Mayhem ensues. One can easily imagine that schools aren't experts in tasks like this, although you can certainly argue that they should be. Probably some poor teacher with half a clue about technology was assigned the task of distributing locker combinations, and no one bothered to check before the slips were handed out. Ultimately there's no accountability for stuff like this so the situation is not likely to change any time soon.

The evil corporation is American (go figure)

...and I'm not being sarcastic, if my 11 year old son is any indication of what is happening around the country.

He saved all his birthday, christmas and allowance money for months to buy an iPod touch and spends way
too much time playing games on it. Most of the games are free or only cost a couple of bucks, meaning he
can get near-instant gratification without having to save $50 to buy a console game. He uses it almost
exclusively as a game platform, even to the point of using a clunky old mp3 player for music, in order to save the
iPod touch battery for game play.