I wrote advisories on that more than 10 years ago, so please go ahead and lecture me.

Your home network should not allow a request with an IP that doesn't belong to it out. If I'm the router that connects 1.2.3.0/24 to the Internet, I shouldn't put a packet that claims it originates from 5.6.7.8 on the wire.

The only places where a package that isn't part of my network should be routed through is when my network is a transit network.

I know from my own experience how right you are, but that, exactly, is the problem. This "it didn't crash in 10 minutes, ship it" approach is utterly horrible. It's become industry standard instead of being taken out back to be shot, and that is a really serious problem.

People shouldn't be used to computers crashing - they should demand that they don't do so.

Were they having trouble getting warrants for those sorts of investigations? Even a judiciary that isn't effectively a rubber stamp usually pays attention to that kind of thing.

I wonder how the law treats having all your cheap Romanian labor work via thin clients, so the data never actually reside in Romania?

Seems to me he's already sold out. :-) http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg

That needs a big 'citation needed' next to it, but:

You don't understand risk analysis. He's investing a very small proportion of his wealth in something that may have massive returns. The probability of said returns may be small, but that doesn't make it a bad investment if the potential payoffs are huge, as long as you can afford to take the loss if it doesn't pan out. Most people with his money will invest a few millions in a few fringe ideas, because it only takes one to pay off to more than make up for your investment. The majority of his portfolio will be in relatively safe investments with a close-to-guaranteed return, a bit will be in risky venture.

You missed decay, which is the most common form of nuclear reaction on Earth. Proton capture can technically be thought of as fusion (fusing a hydrogen nucleus with something heavier), but it generally isn't referred to as such. Neutron capture is not fusion and a lot of LENR reactions are neutron capture.

No, it proves that the network you are connected to is braindead because it still allows IP spoofing.

It used to be really easy to knock someone off the Internet. It's not so easy anymore. For some of the really big targets, being able to muster the bandwidth alone would be an impressive demonstration of power. Keeping them offline for more than a few seconds while their Anti-DDoS countermeasures deploy would be something that few players smaller than a nation state level can pull off.

Not really. I hate them as much as most people with three working brain cells, but they've both done quite a lot about security. It's just not enough and - like every company - they make decisions to not invest in some security measures because the ROI simply isn't there.

Nonsense. On their gaming systems you are unlikely to find any data that the companies would consider valuable. And 10+ years of experience show that "oops, we leaked customer data" isn't really a game-changer.

But cries from customers can be. Denying them the joy of their freshly gifted gaming console can be very powerful. It's not the nice way, definitely not, but it makes headlines.

I doubt it's going to change anything, because customers are too used to computers not working. That is the real damage that 30 years of Microsoft dominance have done to the world.

If I didn't know that, I'd give back my nerd credentials.

But there's a difference between making a prequel movie and a story that is set before. The Hobbit tried too hard to get as much from the LOTR movies into it as possible. For example, WTF is Legolas doing in the movie? He's not even mentioned in the book.

Insertion sort is terrible for the use cases the grandparent described. For one thing, it requires allocating a new data structure for storing the data (an immediate disqualification for a lot of embedded tasks). Second, it has much worse cache interaction because it requires searching the second array. Assuming that your target is an array, then it also requires a bit memcpy for each insert, which means that it likely requires a similar number of memory operations to the bubblesort, but with more temporaries. You can do a bubblesort in-place, with good cache locality, and only a handful of registers (insert base, top, current, and two for holding the current elements). If your CPU has 8 GPRs then the space requirements of a bubblesort are effectively zero - no memory required.

That's only if you don't have the requirement to sort in place. Bubblesort is also a good way of getting students to start thinking in terms of induction. Each step in the bubblesort leaves the array more sorted than it was before.

Insertion sort is one of these good-on-paper algorithms. It's very fast if insertion is cheap. But insertion relies copying unless your data structure is a linked list. If it's an array (worse, a contiguous on-disk store) then that copying can be very expensive. If it is a linked list, then you're going to have very expensive search (sure, you may still be O(log(n)), but that constant multiple is going to be hurt by the fact that you're hammering your cache and killing your branch predictor).

Teaching algorithms separately from data structures is one of the biggest flaws in modern computer science education. It's impossible to reason sensibly about one without the other.

Bubblesort has two advantages. The first is that, because it's only swapping adjacent elements, it has very good locality of reference (which means better cache usage, but can also mean more amenable to fine-grained locking). The second is that it performs well on almost-sorted data (that O(n^2) is the worst case - it's closer to O(n) if your inputs are mostly sorted). These two mean that there are situations where bubblesort can be useful, though they're quite rare.

Trouble is you need roughly APS-C sized sensors to make 50MP resolution worthwhile. Any smaller and quantum effects will make it too noisy. Not to mention the size you'd want for a good enough lens to deliver that much detail.