Replying to undo my accidental mod because you made a damn good point here. Too many people are in the cult of "Perfection upon initial demand" and do not take into account that iterations are often needed to achieve a maximally optimal solution.

They're referring to the battles between the Ummah at Medina and the pagans at Mecca. And in those cases, Muhammed wasn't the actual general. There were others who directed the campaigns.

Yeaaaaaah... I have. And my point still stands. Emperor-worship is emperor-worship, only instead of the Pope you have Jesus Christ the Super-White Son of God And Lord Supreme Of All (a la Revelation--which, btw, wasn't written by the Apostle John, it was written by St. John of Patmos). Have you taken a look at the way Evangelical philosophy is swaying modern religious dogma these days?

Dude, your entire response proves my point: I'm NOT a mathematician, I don't know these things, and I'm still trying to comprehend them. That's why I'm asking the question. Please don't get pedantic on me--my ignorance is genuine and not due to stupidity.

One thing: Muhammed _wasn't_ a tribal warrior. He was an illiterate son of a city merchant who married well. He also had epilepsy.

Shit, I think I understood that. I better go buy myself some hiking shoes... I need to stare out into vast distances now...

As I am not a mathematician, I can safely assure you I was indeed ignoring relativity and curved space :o) Even though right now I'm traveling along a curved path in spacetime around an immense gravity well, the result of which is slowly propelling me through time faster than I would be if I were seated at the center of the Earth.

You're responding to someone who is definitely NOT a mathematician here. What I was trying to convey was that prior to that revelation, I had no concept of unary, base 0, base 1, base 2, etc. All I knew was that Mathematics worked because of arabic numbers . THAT'S IT. That's all I knew--just stop for a moment to grasp the depth of this ignorance. I didn't know why it worked, and I had no context in which to even imagine being able to ask "why" it worked. It just did--and that was the limit of my experience. Then I learned about the concept of base-X computing and how mathematics itself can vary depending on the base used. This is why I'm using the base analogy to think about QC; it's because I'm wondering if there are applications that are so far outside our ken that I can't even conceive of, that QC would be perfect for.

The irony of this is that the Prophet Muhammed fought explicitly against this kind of behavior in his wars against the Arab pagans. Before Muhammed, Arab culture was drowning in "Jahiliyah", which is best understood as extremist machismo. Arab chieftains would think nothing of acting violently and completely out of context/overreact to any insult, real or perceived. They would commit acts similar to what occurred in London: beheading a fellow tribe member for looking at them wrong, proclaiming a blood feud over a trifle--all in the name of being a leader and being a "man's man". Women had only the rights and privileges that men allowed them--which in those times varied wildly. If a woman was part of a bedouin tribe, she was merely property and forced to be part of a polygamous society (and as far as the whole 9 year old girl thing--that was exceptionally common amongst most cultures in that time period, and it was the de-facto standard in Arab tribal life); if she lived in Mecca or one of the few Arab cities, she had a chance at wealth and education. What Muhammed did (leaving Allah out of this) was introduce a counter-culture where women and men were on separate, yet equal footing, and deprogrammed the extreme masculinity. The wars between Mecca and Medina were all about this, and eventually Muhammed won out. Except that after his death, the Arab culture slowly subsumed and altered Islam, because culture always subsumes religion (and not the other way around; modern Christianity is nothing more than Emperor-worship a la Rome).

And now I'm going to violate the One True Scotsman rule, and say that what happened in London was a complete barbarity, and Muslims should be ashamed because they have allowed the worst aspects of Arab culture to redefine the words of the Prophet--it's as the critics of Islam say on here now: Islam as it is now, needs to either be destroyed or thoroughly reformed because it no longer reflects the will of Allah and the Prophet.

Now that I've RTFA and through the commentary threads, as a dumb ignorant layperson I get why Scott Aaronsen is right to call out D-Wave. I also get the counter-argument that there needs to be some sort of hype in order to sustain interest in QC. And, the damn thing's got to work eventually. What I'm wondering though is this: Are we (as a society) making an error in trying to use QC to solve problems that are particular to classical computing?

The reason I ask is that a while back on /. I was educated about the nature of Base-10 computing. Prior to this, I'd spent my entire life thinking that Base-10 WAS mathematics, and I'd had no reason to assume or even imagine that there could be any other type of mathematics than Base-10. Base-10 was the pinnacle of mathematics to me. Then I find out that Base-10 is probably the most efficient to date for our society, but that it is not the only way to count; and that Pi is only Pi because of Base-10. Which led me to look at mathematics in a whole new light. Similar with Quantum mechanics--the more I understand about Quantum Mechanics, the more I realize that I have to set aside everything I know about Newtonian physics, because trying to understand quantum physics from a newtonian perspective will always result in failure--while there is a bridge between the two, if I don't take that "bridge" into account then I'm metaphorically trying to judge apples based on my prior experience in dog shows.

Given this, is it fair to hold QC to the same standards as Classical Computing, or should we be looking at entirely new applications of computing? And, is there anyone out there who's staring into the vast unknown and saying "What happens if we do THIS with a QC?"

I have read the Constitution, and I still side with Amiga. Why do you think you're THAT important?

But if we don't ask "what if", how is there any advancement? Yes, we'd most likely be wrong--it's only through error do we find the truth. What I fail to understand is how science advances without speculation?

I... cannot argue with this. LOL!!!!

Respectfully asking, what's wrong with saying, "What if?" You are correct, we haven't discovered any of what you described. But what I fail to understand is why you are so quick and so adamant to cite what we don't know and imply that speculation is pointless. The impression I get from your post is that we're better off limiting ourself to what we do know--which eventually just leads us to an endless loop because we never move beyond what we don't know.

Because draw and quartering, not to mention hanging served as such an effective deterrent back in the good ol' days. Didn't they used to throw big parties at those events? Draw and quartering only serves to sate the bloodlust of those who have been wronged (and those who imagine themselves to be). It doesn't actually deter crime.