Was it indeed d'Inverno in the Introduction chapter where he writes having learned tensor calculus and the basics of general relativity by himself in high school? Not an impossible task, one only really needs a strong calculus background and after that you're pretty much set. For the simpler approaches to GR it's just about index manipulation and a couple of big, but simple, ideas, really. Having mastered calculus, the concept of manipulating indices shouldn't sound too unnatural. Just pick up a book used in basic GR classes and off you go. If you prefer free stuff, my favourite is http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~maloney/514/. Susskind's GR lectures are also quite decent, although hurried.

The fast inverse square root makes a beautiful example, for to me it seems that it is embraced not only in the gaming community, but also in scientific circles. I have not went through the relevant parts of the actual source code of GROMACS, an MD simulation package praised for its speed (and thus provides the framework the folding@home project is currently built on), but its implementation of 1/sqrt(x) is not totally unlike that of Carmack's. An important factor in the software package's speed, I've understood that GROMACS's implementation predates Quake by some 10 years, but it seems feasible to me that some of Quake's ideas might have been used to further optimize the code.

Most the features listed are built-in in any decent modern LaTeX editor. A classic one (for Windows) is TeXnicCenter. Many Linux editors (for example the cross-platform texmaker and it's forks) have the same approach. They all have a list of labels, to name one of the features you listed. Then there's the TeXworks approach (originating from the Mac-world), which focuses on a constant preview of the final work, using syncTeX to easily hop back and forth the PDF and the TeX file. This is still much in the works, and doesn't have a list of labels etc. Once these are added, I suppose I'll migrate.

Indeed, I much prefer writing LaTeX with an editor than using LyX, as I do like the coding aspect and the cleanliness of it. I love drawing pictures with TikZ and pgfplots, although I'm sure this is easily done in LyX as well.

I suppose Blizzard gets a cut from tournament monies as well. At least that's what they've been trying and received some flak for.

Have you not read the news regarding the matter and yet care to comment? Yes, I must be new here...

1. Windows wants to gain market share. Nokia wants to gain market share. Nokia would've been too late to jump on the Android bandwagon and thus chose to differentiate by "creating" an "ecosystem" of its own, with Microsoft. It was stressed time and time again yesterday that for Nokia to succeed in this regard, Windows Phone must prevail.

2. It was explicitly stated that Nokia would pay royalties to Microsoft and that this would increase cost per sold unit, but at the same time it was stressed that they could make cuts in their own OS R&D, which is the biggest reason the people marched out: The locations mentioned in the news here are filled with thousands of Symbian developers.

3. Also, Elop has said several times that the deal is not only one-way. While Nokia's phone's would be using e.g. Bing, powered by Microsoft, they expect that when you use Bing maps, you might see something of the sort Bing maps, powered by Nokia, for Nokia is at the bleeding edge of navigational software, thanks to Navteq. Thus the details of the deal aren't as simple as you make it out to be.