Yale is not for profit. It spends more money on each student from its endowment than said student pays in tuition, even if he is not getting any financial aid.
On Hartl's site, the most recent update is from May 15th for Rails 4.0 rc1. I'll feel more comfortable when Michael confirms the tutorial is valid for the final release.
Yea I've seen that but I don't want to start until I know it accounts for the final version of 4.0. When he first released it for 4.0 beta, there were major inconsistencies between that and one of the release candidates.