Merely needing to convert time zones is a trivial requirement. Work with them any other way and it's a nightmare. My first exposure to it was when implementing a crontab-like scheduling software, which on proper implementations has defined behavior to not fall on its face when daylight savings time wreaks havoc on the world. I couldn't find a way to do this reliably in .NET, but Noda made it possible.

Don't take my word on why Noda should be used though... read from it's blog for plenty of examples for why the seemingly great .NET DateTime can be a minefield in far more common situations than mine.

I've questioned that myself while working in .NET. Ever needed to write time zone aware code?

Date libraries, as it turns out, are rather monstrously difficult to make. While .NET did a great job for the common stuff, uncommon things can be painful, error prone, or impossible.

The fullest solution I've found so far is Noda Time, which is actually based on the Joda-Time Java library. It feels out of place with a number of Javaisms still in it, but it provides a much richer functionality and better separation of concerns.

.NET Core is the redesign.

.NET Framework (the full big monolithic install like we've got now) remains backwards-compatible and so 4.6 is appropriate.

>It is a big deal. The game comes with a built-in expiration date, which is a mystery. When EA is done with it, you're done with it. And to rewind...

The multiplayer may very well come with an expiration date. EA is pretty horrible in that respect.

The single player works even if the servers are down, and single player is the focus of the game.

>This is why I don't give money to fuckheads like EA and Ubisoft, and why you shouldn't either, and why I think you're an asshole for doing so. You're helping fuckheads be fuckheads.

I haven't given a dollar to Ubisoft since they implemented UPlay (except once accidentally when I bought a game without checking the publisher). On Origin, I own exactly 2 games (Mass Effect 3 and DA:I). On Steam I own 438. Their DRM system is the main reason why I refuse to support them with my dollars. But as I said, the DA:I DRM isn't as mind-bogglingly stupid as SimCity's.

The user metacritic scores were very low for this game, whereas the critic's reviews were pretty high. This was the first time I can remember in which I've actually sided with the critics over the users. As far as I can tell, the users were just giving it bad scores because of the DRM. Due to debacles like Sim City, people are very, very leery of EA's DRM policies, and in fact DA:I has presented some problems for people doing benchmarks and the like (it detects the hardware changes and locks you out of the game after 4 or 5 changes). That said, DA:I will continue to work even with the EA servers go down (which they have) - you just can't play multiplayer. No big deal.

The game itself is amazing. Great story, amazing graphics, open(-ish) world with non-linear(-ish) design, challenging combats (I'm playing on Hard, can't comment on other modes), and an absolute ton of side missions to do with your companions that ties in back and forth with the non-interactive missions you can send your army on across the world. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes RPGs. It's the best CRPG I've played since Fallout New Vegas.

Recent video cards support encoding an H.264 stream directly from the screen without ever touching the CPU. If Steam isn't currently using this functionality, I'm sure it will soon.

The real question should be:

>Just to clarify, I believe Kip Thorne is the physicist who was a consultant on Interstellar, who made efforts to make the move more scientifically accurate than what Nolan could do on his own

And failed utterly. There are so many horribly bad manglings of physics in the movie that he's trying to salvage himself by saying on just one of the two dozen serious errors it's maybe sorta possible that it could be that way.

He should be ashamed of himself for granting the movie his imprimatur.

The EU seems to have a chip on their shoulders about Google. I get it, they're huge and they need to be kept on a leash. But when are we going to see them go after other huge companies abusing their market share? We have Amazon regularly putting full-page ads for their latest electronics right on their front page.

EVA!

>China's producing 7.2 tons per person. The US is producing 16.5 tons per person.

Per capita comparisons are ridiculous since a large chunk of China is still non-industrialized. There's a reason why China and India always focus on per-capita numbers - by having lots of poor people living in non-developed areas, they can get lots of extra quota for their highly polluting power plants and factories.

A better comparison is CO2 emitted per kWh produced or per dollar (or RMB) of GDP.

That said, at least China is building out some nuclear capacity. America is frozen on the issue.

Multi-process is the major reason I use Chrome. One tab freezing up the entire app, or even just making other tabs slower, is unacceptable.

Then this hits general availability I'll definitely be re-evaluating Firefox.

Hipster culture is like a passive-aggressive punk culture. Both have a distinctive styles of clothing, music, and a strong counter-culture attitude. The main differentiation is that hipsters are less raucous, less extreme.

I can use some of that. I'm teaching 1st and 2nd semester CS in January, and I don't want to overload them too much with philosophy of programming, but I plan on having code reviews be 20% of their grade. They'll have to come up in front of the class and talk about why they made the design decisions they did, and other students can earn extra credit by finding bugs and pointing out questionable decisions.

But yeah, I was planning on doing a maze solver, so maybe a A* solver might be a little more useful. Thanks for the ideas!

Will do. Thanks for the input!

I plan on using some common computer science job application questions as homework assignments, like Fizzbuzz. A friend of mine applied to Facebook and was asked to test a string for being a palindrome, create a linked list class, and write a method to reverse it.

You do have any suggestions for such homework assignments?