I know this will sound odd coming from the guy who helped popularize games on Linux w/ the Doom & Quake ports, but I actually want more text-based games like nethack.

I've been playing nethack constantly for about 20 years now, and I've only won a few dozen times. I just won again as a monk last night, and it was still concentrated awesome. I think a big part of its excellence is that it doesn't have pretty graphics to lean on, so it was forced to be seriously fucking fun and different every time. You just don't find games with that amount of procedurally generated, radically different gameplay every time you play them anymore. I also love that it's turn based because it actually lets me play the game faster the better I get at it, and I type 100wpm, which means I get a shit-ton more enjoyment out of it than I can out of most graphically-intensive real-time games. I also love that I can play it entirely with the keyboard without ever having to slow myself down with a mouse. I also love that I can read the source code, scour the nethack wiki, and still be challenged every time I play it. Plus, every time someone catches me playing it, they think I'm hard at work on something technical. :)

Nethack is really a masterwork of game design, and I'd love to play more masterwork text-based RPG's as well as other genres like strategy.

I think like most people, I use Linux only on servers and over ssh, so it's really the format I want the game in. The fancy graphics I want are coloured, extended-ASCII graphics. That's plenty, thanks!

Hostess has been a major arms dealer in the war against diabetes in the US. It's great to see them finally fail.

Next up: McDonalds? Dare we dream?

The US gov't should be heavily taxing food this unhealthy or subsidizing food that is healthy. Neither of these is happening, and it's fucking ridiculous.

Mitt's a devout Mormon. When they say they're gonna pray for someone, they mean it, and it's not a "fuck you". Prayer is basically self-programming. It means the supplicant is probably going to do things consciously or unconsciously to help out with whatever he's praying for.

I'm not religious, but the bitterness on here is really disheartening. It was an ugly process, but I think we came out the other side of these elections a lot better off on several fronts, and I'm a little more hopeful for the future.

Please switch! Closed source / binary ABI focused ecosystems do so well when you switch processors!

Between this brilliant idea and the Win 8 faceplant, I've never seen a stronger opportunity for Linux (or Android) to have another credible shot at the desktop. Linux can switch to ARM easily. OSX and Windows can't.

This is incredible! It's just like a terminal window, but SLOWER! Want!

Arrogant nerds won't listen to you unless you're either on par or further up the nerd hierarchy than they are. You've got to demonstrate your powerful nerd skills to do this. One opportunity to prove your nerd credentials is to do something the arrogant nerd states emphatically can't be done, and then you do it, but just throwing down with the right nerd track record can sometimes work, too.

After you've demonstrated your nerd qualifications, then you need to deliver a *withering* attack and follow up with a play-by-play of their arrogance at the start of the argument, because if you don't, by then, they will have forgotten their crime, as they're generally only dimly aware of the arrogant affectations of their delivery.

But it's a long shot even if you pull this off. For a lot of them, it's just too late. They didn't get the right parenting to temper their arrogance, and without great parenting, you generally don't get great kids.

This is obviously hampered by the fact that good engineers are exceedingly rare, and all kinds of bad behaviours are tolerated in order to secure their continued employment.

Works for me fine on Mac OS (10.7.5) Firefox (16.0.1).

Part 2 is even more awesomer than Part 1.

Thanks so much, Eben, for your time, service, and wisdom!

Go visit his site, watch the videos. He's a smart, well-spoken guy, and he's a coder. Watch the debate video in particular, and the interview on Greater Boston covering the debate:

http://www.fishmanforcongress.com/video

The two party candidates talked over him like he wasn't there. It was incredibly disrespectful, yet he handled it with aplomb, and all his contributions to the debate were valuable and substantive. He doesn't deserve this cynical reception on slashdot. He's a geek reaching out. This is an opportunity for us to make a political difference, and we're being a bunch of putzes.

This is a guy with 7% for zero corporate expenditures, and he's not a professional, two-party politician. This means he has promise as a candidate and could go far. Let's get his back.

The reason they won't go open source is that it exposes them to patent lawsuits, frivolous or otherwise.

There will come a time when we either have reformed patent law, or we have a widely accepted binary ABI like x86 or arm7 but for GPU's, and that'll be the end of this nonsense with the closed source drivers.

Same here. Awesome read. Refreshing to see such a high-profile geek who doesn't feel the need to douche it up in interviews.

Unfortunately for the counter-argument, every one of those examples can be replaced by simply visiting a website online that does the math for you.

I approve of the nethack t-shirt! Glad to hear we have another nethack fan in the area.

I'll show up with some kind of clothing as well- for sure.

Perhaps it's just a passive-aggressive way of laying off most of the company by firing them for writing malfunctioning code.

I taught them "one + one = ten". It was just easier, because it looked like ten, and that's what they knew to call it. Also "ten" conveys that something special has happened in that second digit.