What's empty is your straw-man argument. Of course most academics do excellent work.

What the original poster claimed was academics in the QC hardware business dismissing D-Wave. The most outspoken critic is a theorists. Is it too much to ask to get a link to a more hardware oriented academic going on the record with regards to D-Wave?

MIT included them in the list of the fifty smartest companies, so we know there are plenty of academics who think highly of D-Wave.

Have been blogging about them for a while and visited them on site.

Full Disclosure: One of their board members paid a beer for me.

It's because of dudes like you that I am cross with Scott A. He has every right to be critical but his rhetoric is so over the top that he created a kind of parallel universe, that doesn't even allow for this kind of adiabatic quantum computation to be tried and tested.

" In THEORY you can delete bits, but in practice you actually can't ."

If I give you a bunch of RAM SIMs there's no way you can tell me what was written on them.

At any rate, fully reversible computing means the ability to completely reverse arbitrarily complex algos, being able to reconstruct a couple of previous bit states isn't cutting it.

And yes, you actually can delete bits, the entropy heat signature this produces is theoretically well understood, and Landauer's principle has recently been experimentally confirmed.
 

While he makes some good points he is unfortunately completely missing the point with this statement:

" In THEORY you can delete bits, but in practice you actually can't ."

Mighty big roar for an AC.

"D-wave is bullshit."

Tell us how you really feel.

A simple way to simulate this to some extend would be to just add some random noise in form of qubit flips.

But with just 20 qubits you unfortunately can't push this very far.

Should have included this in the previous comment, but couldn't find the link at first.

What I did use occasionally when taking the course was this little browser based gem. While certainly not nearly as powerful as this Google simulator it was still quite useful.

Show me yours, I showed you mine ...

... when I took the EdX's CS191x Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation course.

This is actually a requirement for such a simulator as all unitary QM transformations are reversible.

It's kind of ironic that Google released this project given that they are at the same time heavily betting on D-Wave with a radically different approach to QM than the Gate based model.

The D-Wave founder Geordie Rose is know for disparaging the Quantum Gate based model as completely impractical, and in turn other QC researchers have been very critical of his approach to the matter. Spawning a contentious controversy almost as old as the Canadian start-up itself.

Duh, do I actually have to include 'per capita' when making comparison between the US and Canada?

C'mon. /. has dumbed down, but some things should go without saying.

Don't think they are required to pay if somebody gets hold of your gun because you didn't safeguard it properly and then goes on a rampage, or if you shoot somebody while cleaning you gun.

That's the kind of damage I would like to see covered.

There are still plenty of injuries, and I wager more ammo is shot legally then while committing a crime. So as an accessory to crime guns may not have such much over on cars (after all criminals like to have fast get-away cars).

Incidentally the number one cause of gun deaths is suicides. Life insurances don't pay in that case, a dedicated gun insurance could be regulated so that they'll have to pay for clean-up and funeral.

They should also be required to pay if an insured stolen gun was used to commit a crime.

Used to live in the US but now in Canada, here we have about the same amount of guns but none of these ridiculous 1st and 2nd amendment contortions.

Far less gun crimes up here, but an insurance would still be sensible governance as it'll reinforce good gun safety practices (the guys who know how to handle a gun will receive lower premiums).

It is so refreshing that up here in Canada you can discuss these issues without getting ideological about it.

BTW an insurance for speech would be really cheap, because there simply aren't that many fools who yell fire in a crowded room. Yet, if you do you are in fact liable for the ensuing damages.

And that's exactly the way it should be.