This is the first direct evidence for gravity waves, but another very clever indirect one earned a Nobel Price in 1993.

I.e. the exception to the rule: If faced with actual military invasion the comparison to Nazis is no longer prohibited.

Drove a Mercedes 190D once. Alternator quit on a long distance drive. I only noticed because the radio stopped working.

(Car had a great mileage, too.)

... and yet again overlooking the fact that such simulation machines would certainly be more like quantum computers.

Plato's Cave - The n-th sequel. Like most sequels pretty lame really.

As much as it pains me to observe this, but due to the 'special relationship' having the UK on board will mean that everything is tapped by the US anyhow.

But isn't the fact that blogs open the dialog up, to include individuals outside the realm of academia, a decidedly new quality?

Very insightful comment. May I asked what field of science you're in?

If you care about the environment you should want the mountain of nuclear waste reduced. And treating it with a particle accelerator, using a so called spallation reaction, you can do exactly this, while running the whole thing as an inherently save reactor with net energy gain.

The technology is proven and an industrial scale prototype is about to be build in Belgium.

... but I'd rather stick a needle in my eye than listen to that debate.

Anyhow, I am not done yet with reviewing the medieval debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Other than the fact that paper's like this would have been peer reviewed, I am not aware of any review of their architecture. But this paper is certainly key, because it all comes down to the spin coupling in order to decide if true quantum annealing happens on the chip.

Ups .. thanks for clearing that up ...

Only to a theoretical computer scientist would the difference between a modern Laptop and a marble-run *not* matter :-)

As mentioned in the other thread. Moore's law comes to an end for semiconductors. This machine doesn't use them and the integration density is still low.

Such implementation details may not matter to you, but I think it shouldn't be hard to see why they matter to the industry.

This is exactly the crux of the matter, but how many here on /. do you think can possibly get this from the article and the various opinion spouted here?

On quibble though: I essentially draw the opposite conclusion from the observation in your last sentence. In comparison to classical hardware they developed this on a shoestring budget, yet can already hold their own. Moore's law is ending for silicon based chip's within the decade, the structures are just getting to small. On the other hand their is still lots of room on the bottom for D-Wave, and they've been doubling chip density about every 16 months.

So quantum speed-up or not, I think this technology has a future.