Sorting have nothing to do with it. Such problem can arise every time one chooses between list, vector or set to store data. It is required to know how fast or slow operations on them are, and to understand it one need to know what all this funky math symbols mean.

Unfortunately, high school math isn't "basic understanding", it's in fact advanced. Most people do not have any idea how to multiply matrix to vector, or that matrix may be multiplied to something, or that matrix isn't just movie title. Or how parabola and hyperbola differ. Basic understanding is fourth-grade arithmetic (mentioned in the article) and this is absolutely not enough.
Sure one can code without learning math. And one can play in trash movies without learning acting. So much as I can apply a cast to someone's broken leg guided by google search result, but really should not unless we are in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. And I (and most people) should not sing in the opera even in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.

Then your desktop app works fine with 50 items of whatever it processes but becomes really shitty when loaded with 1000, because there is algorithm inside with quadratic complexity and you do not even know what quadratic is. Been there, seen that.

Let me google it for you: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/... This photo in particular: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnne...

It's all about precision. Knowing something will come near Earth, say inside Moon's orbit, and knowing something will hit Earth are two very different knowledge. Would be very disappointing to get a nuke to the object only to change near miss to direct hit.

Look at the Orion project, they intended to use this bombs in thousands. With much weaker payload, but the mass of the ship is a few orders of magnitude less too. I seriously doubt 20 nukes would be enough for any really dangerous thing at the range we can be sure if it would hit the Earth or not.

With a NUCLEAR DRILL!

Same hit spread over entire hemisphere probably would be much less catastrophic: small objects will burn in atmosphere instead of bringing their kinetic energy down to earth. We can hope for a hot summer instead of tsunami followed by a long "dust winter". The problem is how to blow up this NEO to the small enough pieces.

Given our nuclear stockpiles, I'd rather build big enough Orion spacecraft and just ram the thing. It may be enough to make it miss if hit early enough. Earth is quite small and fast moving target after all.

How could 10 or 20 nuclear devices help against any significant near earth object?

Yes, this is exactly "go fuck yourself" kind of answer this quote saying about, ESPECIALLY in "numbers will be 2% off, so it doesn't matter if we do not calculate it at all" part. Thank you for providing such a perfect example.

In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie1 of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade — which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.

No big deal, right. Unless you want to actually calculate something.

How hard is it to read four lines of text? ZeoBIT is in California and it cares enough to send a lawyer to court, to give up and to agree to put 2 million dollars to the compensation fund. Let me repeat it again: California, settled, 2 million dollars.

<i>In April 2013, ZeoBIT, which now lists its headquarters as Sunnyvale, California, sold MacKeeper to a company called Kromtech Alliance Corp. Kromtech was closely affiliated with ZeoBIT in Ukraine, and many employees of ZeoBIT transferred to the company, which lists its headquarters as Cologne, Germany.</i>

It is exactly like this. And even without it, having this lawsuit settled is cue enough.

No, not THAT act of civil disobedience. He was facing 35 years in prison for the audacity of going for trial instead of pleading guilty, which is absolutely disobedient in the eyes of the prosecutor. And after THIS act he dared to kill himself rather than plead guilty without guilt. Dignity, integrity, just look up this words in dictionary, it may explain something.

It's also a lessons learned from WinXP support story. Nobody is happy making patches to 10-years old OS, and stopping this was a major PR issue.