So the history is actually really well described in crpgaddicts blog. First there was wizardry (basically all rpgs both in the us and japan are descendents of wizardry, some with the mixture of ultima). bard's tale is a wizardry clone (its wizardry in a city). Dungeon master is an attempt to make a better wizardry, taking advantage of the mouse and the amiga's graphics (its basically wizardry in real time). EotB is a dungeon master clone.
Np hard problems aren't that hard to solve. I'm solving one right now actually for work (graph bi-partition using simulated annealing), and it doesn't even take that long.
Of course my algorithm isn't actually correct! Or if I had a correct algorithm it might be really fast but still not have polynomial growth. You need a proof.
It actually does make sense, and is an important idea in complexity theory. In general, the problem of proving an arbitrary claim in ZFC isn't computable (this is just Godel's incompleteness theorem). if you confine your claims to smaller languages, you get smaller complexity classes. For instance, the problem of proving things in the propostional calculus is called BSAT, and is the quintessential NP complete problem.
In general a nice way of thinking about what NP is are the set of formula that have polynomial time checkable proofs.
It's important to remember that P=NP doesn't just imply that P = NP; it implies that P = PH (the polynomial hierarchy). There are a whole series of much harder problems than NP that also are in P if P = NP.
Finding proofs is always at least NP hard! Remember, any proof is at least going to include some boolean phrase (this is true and that is true so we get such and such), which is just BSAT, an NP complete problem.
In other words, yes. It's very very unlikely.
It's often also very local. Everyone knows who some castes are like Patels and Nayars, but how many people in north india know that vellalars are relatively high caste (but not brahman) for instance. And of course the specific relationship between various castes can change village to village.
Technically untouchables... but in practice white people can be very high caste indeed. I worked with a sanskritist in Chennai who was a very traditional brahman, and he did eat with me, but was extremely careful about separate food and separate plates (Tamilian Brahmans of that type are always careful about these things, but he was more careful than needed. I didn't mind since I'm jewish and used to weird dietary restrictions).
While last name is the big giveaway for caste, there's another issue that effects tech workers in the us, the IITs. These are the creme de la creme of indian educational istitutions (and to be honest, the single smartest group of people i've ever met). A certain percentage of seats in the IITs are reserved for people from low castes, and the IITs are tiny, so the graduates tend to know each other. Thus the reputation that you got in in the reservation can follow you.
You may be confusing "neighborhood" with the more common euphemism "community" (which can also refer in India to religion). Another common way of referring to caste euphemistically is that someone comes from a good family. That being said, it's relatively rare, especially outside of india, for people to explicitly talk about caste.
They were referring to a region, like europe! Even the name India indicates this: it's the greek pronunciation of the Iranian word Hindu, which is the Iranian pronunciation of the river Sindhu, which is the traditional western border between India and the Iranian lands.
I think the irony is that all those weird logics turned out to not just be useful for logic... but literally actually really useful! Like people make lots of money based off of them
This isn't true. First the terminology is a bit weird. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. This fact was not known until the 19th century! Classial "wrought iron" (whih has a carbon content under 2%) has a similiar composition to what is now called mild steel (it has somewhat different physical properties because wrought iron has inclusions of slag because of how its made). Classical steel has a somewhat higher carbon content. Pig iron (or cast iron) has an even higher carbon content, and is the product of a blast furnace.
Steel could be made in a number of ways. The process of creating wrought iron naturally produces some higher carbon steel, which could be removed. This is how japanese swordmaking works (they take higher carbon steel, and low carbon steel, and pound the together). The finery process, invented in china, but heavilly used in europe, involved taking pig iron, and slowly oxidizing it to remove carbon. For armor, case hardening involves baking wrought iron in carbon to cause the surface to become steel. The cementation process from early modern europe involved doing this, and then folding the steel to produce uniform metal.
Indian steelmaking didn't involve pig iron, since india didn't use blast furnaces.
the citation here is just from the 1911 britanica, which is not a terribly reliable source! For what its worth, transparent muslin is depicted on the walls of ajunta (in the Vessantara Jataka painting in cave 17) from the sixth century, and are mentioned in the Harsacarita, from the seventh, both from before Mosul was a major center.
When dealing with unix syscalls, you actually sometimes need to pass structs that aren't fully initialized, or are initialized to zero with the exception of some fields. The quintessential example is the sigaction struct.
a lovely little factoid is that in elizabethan england, a set of clothes could easily cost more than a house (Shakespeare paid a 60 pounds for the rather large house New Place, while a very fancy set of clothes could cost hundreds of pounds). This makes sense when you consider that the clothes could take more labor than the house!
When trying to understand C, it's always useful to look at what the pdp-11 did. the pdp-11 didn't have a mod instruction; but its div instruction can be used instead. Div can only take an even numbered register as its dest. That register holds the quotient. The odd numbered register numbered one greater then dest holds the remainder, which for a negative number will naturally be negative. so div easilly be used to calculate a mod-just ignore the quotient, but you'll get a negative value.
They actually use more than three now. The basic architecture is that computers are organized in "strings". Each string is doubled. If the two don't agree, the result is chucked, and the system reboots. Each of these "strings" then participates in a quorum. The result is extreme reliability, with relatively fast convergence.
I'm not sure it was a good test... Latex users do appear to be significantly faster at mathematical typing... which is obviously Latex's strong suit. What Latex is in general weaker than word at arbitrary formatting... its goal is to provide semantic markeup for large scale academic writing. Also, apparently its difficult to use Latex's table system compared to word (though tables in word are particularly easy!)