Someone has ... every Hollywood studio has it running on their server farms

I think your summary is right. Skimming the article
http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.0005
I get the same impression. In the paper they say that you have to be careful to design your tests to catch all the errors that would affect the answer. The summary doesn't say it, but one significant aspect of the work is that it is the first experimental demonstration of verification of a quantum computation.

GNSS receivers don' t use change in position to measure speed. They use the Doppler shift of the GNSS carrier signal ie a frequency measurement and this can be done accurately. Typically, accuracies of about 0.1 km/h are specified by the manufacturer. The usual caveats about satellite visibility apply.

Where I work, a government scientific organisation, you can be promoted according to either skill or responsibility, at least to a point. So there are instances of someone supervising half a dozen people, several of whom are employed at the same level as the supervisor. The management path is a bit easier though, and promotion on skill alone pretty much tops out at the level equivalent to supervising half a dozen people.

A friend who works at a large company said that they had two promotion paths too: management or technical skill.

From the article : "The problem is that about 40 percent or more of retail shoppers walk out without finding what they want. But in half of those cases, the product actually was in stock.”

Let me fix that: The problem is that about 40 percent or more of retail shoppers walk out without finding what they want because the store is understaffed, and the few staff on the floor are lowly-paid, inexperienced casuals.

Not all ion clocks are optical. Linear ion trap microwave clocks based on Yb and Hg were developed in the 90s. Some Hg clocks operated as part of the NASA Deep Space Network for a number of years and there's currently an active project to develop a highly miniaturised Yb clock. So the summary should say that lattice clocks can beat single ion clocks on QPN and fountains because optical beats microwave.

Big M= 1000000 (like in megohms)
Little k =.1000 (like in kilograms)
But your confusion is understandable, given the failure of Americans to grasp the metric system (humour)

Actually come to think of it, we should really write $100M as 100M$.

All those things that a supercomputer could do 20 years ago ... they got done.
So that powerful tablet is doomed to executing Angry Birds because the interesting
problems that might create economic wealth still need a supercomputer and
always will.

... because we'll still be picking through the smoking ruins of the NTP-time rollover in 2036 :-)
 

Not sure what you mean here.
Are you referring to a systematic disagreement between the German and Japanese measurements of the Avogadro spheres that is not accommodated by the estimated uncertainties ?

It doesn't work that way.
In the case of the Avogadro sphere, for example, you count the number of atoms of Si 28 and then choose a certain number to be equal to 1 kg, this number being chosen to give agreement with the prototype kg held by the BIPM in Paris. This in effect defines the Avogadro constant.

Well,there is one proposed.
This is the Avogadro Project, one of two candidates for a redefinition of the kg, the other
being the Watt balance.
You take a lump of isotopically pure crystalline Si (Si 28) and optically polish it to a 'perfect' sphere.
You then use very accurate laser interferometry to measure the volume of the sphere (and with a suitable set
of measurements and model you can correct for any residual non-sphericity)
You use X-ray diffraction to measure the lattice spacing. You can now calculate the number of atoms
in the sphere. There are also corrections for the oxide layer at the surface,residual impurities etc.
The nice thing, apart from the kg being defined by dimensional measurements (which are then traceable to the SI second) , is that if you chip your kg standard, you just repolish it and remeasure it.
You then define what one kg is by saying a certain number of Si 28 atoms is equal to 1 kg. This number would be chosen to agree as closely as possible with the current definition of the kg. This process is similar to the way the second was redefined, from an astronomically defined value to a value defined by a microwave transition in the caesium atom.

.. and I work in a guvmint department where XP+Office2003 is the standard install image ...

I was doing leap second testing in the last month and I'm pretty sure that date
returns
23:59:58
23:59:59
23:59:59
00:00:00
as you go through the leap second addition
(Un)fortunately, not at work so I can't double check but a quick look at the date source code suggests that this is indeed
its behaviour on Linux.