Well, you may just end up giving that power to upper management, who has no idea who the good teachers are, only who is best at gaming the "teach-to-the-test" system. The only other thing management has to go on is firing people to save the most money (more senior, experienced teachers). Unless you're very careful to give teachers a strong voice in management decisions --- through, e.g., strong, local, democratic unions --- "fire bad teachers" will become "fire teachers who take on difficult students/subjects, and think outside the test."

I don't take Genesis 1 overly literally, either. However, if you do push for a certain rigid type of "literal" interpretation, then that's "where the Bible says the Earth is the center of the galaxy," in answer to your question. Note, however, that the definition of "literal" producing this reading was never "decided at some point" by the Church. Neither the "early fathers" (who often promoted allegorical/spiritual readings), nor later Roman Catholic dogma, nor Protestant Reformation-era understandings of "literalism," call for such biblical readings. The "extreme literalism" movement is largely a 19th Century American thing, isolated from larger theological traditions of all branches of Christianity, and developed to consolidate a political power base.

Implied in the Genesis 1 cosmology, where the heavenly bodies are placed in the sky above an already-formed Earth (complete with vegetation), and supported by numerous descriptions of the sun rising, setting, and even stopping still for a while (as opposed to imagery of the Earth twirling around). Granted, the Church was less upset by the heliocentric concept itself than by Galileo presenting his findings as a dialogue where the character representing "the establishment," who speaks the Pope's words, is named "Simpleton."

Well, everyone claims moral superiority (I think you just did right there). Only some vociferously base their measure of moral superiority on staying away from hookers and cocaine (in-between bouts of hookers and cocaine).

You're mistaken if you think all people reading the Bible agree on what it teaches. Especially, those unconvinced by any amount of rational scholarship on the age of the universe and the descent of humankind are likewise unconvinced by any amount of rational scholarship on Biblical exegesis. When addressing people frozen in to a shallow, reactionary 19th century worldview of both science and theology, one is likely to encounter rigid beliefs on what "the Bible teaches" every bit as shoddily constructed as their scientific views. So, perhaps the Bible doesn't teach you the world is 6,000 years old, but it does teach this to people who believe the world is 6,000 years old.

A fifteen million dollar computer is not cheaper than programmers plus a standard desktop workstation, which can apparently perform the same tasks. And we're not talking about a super-easy system to use, either --- the D-Wave is is complicated to set up problems for, requiring very specialized programming work (and teams of Google/NASA engineers to even test out). So, D-Wave wins neither on convenience nor raw power; so far, it's only advantage appears to be quantum-buzzword marketing compatibility.

In King James' era, a "glass" might refer to a mirror as well as, e.g., a window-pane (think "looking glass"), so the term was probably a reasonable translation at the time. However, "mirror" is more likely for a modern translation --- hence "in a mirror, dimly" in some modern translations. In less likely possibilities, the Greek word could also refer to crude lenses and glass panes (which wouldn't have been very high optical quality).

Note, also, "darkly" in the Greek was (transliterated) "ainigmati," cognate to modern "enigmatic" --- my Greek lexicon (BDAG) gives that as "that which requires special acumen to understand because it is expressed in a puzzling fashion, a riddle," or, alternatively (and more in-line with modern translation), "an indirect mode of communication; indirectly" (as in, by reflection) when used in the context of mirrors.

The simple answer to your question, which is admitted by D-Wave when pressed (though not made obvious in their PR literature) is no, D-Wave cannot run Shor's algorithm. The D-Wave is definitely not a full quantum computer in the most general sense; at best, it can carry out a very limited subset of what a general-purpose quantum computer can do ("quantum annealing" problems). At worst (and nothing better has been conclusively demonstrated), it can't do anything you can't do with cheaper fully-classical hardware (using classical simulated annealing algorithms).

No, it's more like "I have a device, and it generates power. It costs less than what I pay the utility company*."
*: when I paid the utility company $14/kWh, which I specially arranged for a week.

D-Wave keeps claiming their system is faster/more-cost-effective --- then, a few months later, independent researchers show it's not when compared against well-designed classical approaches (rather than poorly-designed or not-apples-to-apples classical algorithms). So far, they have not managed to demonstrate a definitive advantage which holds up to scrutiny.

Too bad that D-Wave blog post you linked to is full of outright fabrications/distortions. The machine they have is an annealer, not a "fast NP-complete problem solver." It does not solve NP-complete problems. An NP-complete problem is, e.g., finding the best solution to a "traveling salesman" problem --- this computer doesn't do that. Finding a probably-good-but-not-the-single-best solution to a "travelling salesman" problem is not an NP-complete problem; there are polynomial-time classical algorithms that can "almost" solve these problems (annealing) already. So, if you're trying to prove that the architecture of the D-Wave chip has been transparently disclosed to the public, it doesn't help to link to a PR fluff piece full of intentional distortions.

Unfortunately, D-Wave's proprietary approach is getting in the way of proper "baby-steps" research. Before you go selling a zillion-qbit $15M black-box system, productive research would involve letting independent research groups perform stringent tests for "quantumness" on, e.g., a simplified 2-bit system. D-Wave is selling an obfuscated system, getting in the way of low-level bare-hardware fundamentals that really advance research.

Chances are, they don't know themselves exactly how "quantum" the system is. It's unlikely to be an outright fraud --- there's something other than a Core 2 Duo on the inside faking quantum results --- but a system working on the hairy edge of current technical understanding. They've built something that has a bunch of cryogenic doodads and performs annealing, but the technical understanding isn't all there. That said, they have demonstrated signs of acting in bad faith --- being very cagey about offering real details, and performing poorly-done comparisons against sub-optimal classical systems. So, they know that even they don't know whether the system they have lives up to claims, and are acting like a for-profit corporation rather than researchers with integrity about it.

Well, it doesn't matter what color you paint the box, so long as there are enough entangled cats inside. </highlytechnicaldescription>

And the book title is itself a biblical reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (King James Version) --- but I doubt the summary titler was alluding quite that far back.

The reason that the dark matter separates is the same reason that it follows a different distribution from visible matter in other galaxies (a diffuse blob instead of a galactic plane): whatever the stuff is, it's very weakly interacting with everything else (including other dark matter). Normal matter experiences "drag" as you push one cloud of it through another --- from the particles interacting and bouncing off of each other (or, at least, more gently being pushed by electromagnetic radiation from other particles). These interactions, as particles clump and stick and drag, are what allow a galaxy to collapse into a flat disc (instead of a big, amorphous gas cloud). But Dark Matter hardly feels this "drag" at all --- it's extremely "slippery," so two clouds will pass through each other virtually undisturbed. The lack of interactions also makes it really hard (impossible, so far) to catch DM in the lab.