Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)

Actually, that could happen, if you've eaten a purple F, for example. (Admittedly, the fact that "gnome" and "gargoyle" both start with g would be an irrelevant coincidence in such a case.)

Five bytes. In decimal, it'd be 38 115 104 121 59. HTH.HAND.

Honestly, it'd probably taste better than some of the other stuff NetHack characters eat.

For practical purposes, you can think of libuncursed as the display layer of NetHack 4, replacing an older curses library that NitroHack used, which in turn replaced the extensive and rather complicated set of platform-specific user interfaces NetHack 3.4.3 used, which were never entirely consistent with one another, due to being separately maintained.

libnethack is distributed with the game, as part of it, and I think it is even linked in statically by default. Yes, it was written as a highly-generalized support library, so that it *could* be used by other projects if desired and could probably even be made a dynamic library. But if all you want to do is build and run NetHack 4, that doesn't matter.

But in any case the original question from the Dev Team is about what to do in the vanilla codebase that may eventually lead to a new vanilla release (with a number yet to be announced, but 3.6 is probable; the number 3.5 will not be used for reasons explained on nethack.org). The vanilla codebase does not use libuncursed and in a number of additional ways is far more similar to 3.4.3 than it is to NetHack 4.

Although, the NetHack 4 devs are probably following this thread as well and may also implement Unicode in a larger way. (Unicode graphics for map display are already supported there, but things like player names, fruit names, object names, and level annotations are still treated as ASCII, I think, the same as in 3.4.3.)

Another thing not mentioned in the post is that the Dev Team is known to have already implemented some Unicode support, using wchar_t, which you can find in the leaked code (a tarball made from the tip of the dev team's internal repository from a few months ago now), if you hunt down a copy of that. But apparently they have not entirely settled on that implementation as the final solution.

Get ready for the big one. If we have an earthquake because of this, it could measure, 3.0, 3.5, maybe even 4.0 on the moment magnitude scale. People up to several miles away from the epicenter might be able to *feel* the quake, if they are sitting quietly in unpadded chairs at the time and concentrating on paying attention to tiny vibrations.

(I exaggerate. Slightly. I believe we actually had a 6.something once, back in the eighties, and people up to eighty or ninety miles from the epicenter claimed afterward that they felt it.)

Ohio is only seismically active in the technical sense. You generally need an actual seismograph to detect said activity. I'm sure it's fascinating, but it has little practical significance.

My current favorite is NetHack. Brogue is also interesting, but it's *really* hard, and I'm not that good.

We never had a democracy. Ever. We have a republic -- a representative government. We elect people to engage in political discourse for us, so that we don't all of us have to do that ourselves, so that we can get on with our lives.

Furthermore, engaging in political "discourse", as you call it, with morons going on about irrelevant garbage on social networks would do absolutely NOTHING to help me know how to vote. Having an actual intelligent conversation about a real political issue would be a different thing. I might actually be interested in that. But listening to the kind of idiots who like to talk about news and politics on social networks drool about talking points they don't even understand that they heard on television is NOT my idea of good discourse.

Blocking Akamai would have significantly more impact than blocking Edgecast, because Akamai is the *big* CDN. It's like the difference between blocking Bing and blocking Google. One will result in bitter complaints, and the other will result in torches and pitchforks.

I watched a cat video once. It was dumb. With that said, however...

> The French love sharing news and politics on social networks

If I had to choose between sitting through a hundred hours of nonstop stupid cat videos or thirty minutes of news and politics on social networks, I'd take the stupid cat videos every time. It's clearly the lesser of those two evils.

You forgot the most important selling point of the new Firefox version:
  - Re-arranged the toolbar buttons, merged some unrelated ones, and changed their appearances beyond recognition, to prevent users from easily learning where to find the ones they want.

Can you read your email in it? Can you read Slashdot in it? Can you use it to play music, get on IRC, play Zork and NetHack, and do in-place edits on a file that's stored on a remote server that you can access via ssh?

If you answer "no" to any of these questions, then it's not Emacs.

> three years (a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm).

I don't know exactly where you live, but where I come from most consumer (i.e., home) computers aren't really new enough to comfortably run Vista, let alone Eight. Most of Seven's market share comes from people's work computers, which are upgraded considerably more often than home computers, on average. Most of Eight's market share comes from people whose old Windows XP computer finally died, so they went out and bought a new computer. (Seven has some of that too, but such systems are outnumbered by work computers, which are *mostly* Seven at this point, although there are still some XP holdouts.)

No, seriously, I think I will just continue to use Firefox 2.0.0.20, like I've been doing ever since I uninstalled the festering pile of excrement that was Firefox 3.

It *would* be kind of nice to have an updated Gecko, with support for things like inline-block, but eh, it's not worth the tradeoff in the UI.