D-Wave Systems is quite suspect and doesn't have much respect in the scientific community. On the other hand, Quantum Computing (QC) does rest on sound scientific principles, and in the quest for it we learn a lot. The gain if we succeed would be enormous. It is easy to get the impression that quantum computing only can be used for factorizing numbers, but the big gain would rather be in other fields of science, such as medicine and biology where we would use QC to simulate e.g. proteins.

The link you provided questions quantum physics in general. Quantum physics is extremely well tested theory that is the foundation for all modern science och technology. It's not that no one has tried, but it has proved very difficult to provide a competing theory that explains even a small part of the known phenomena on the atomic level.

You are wrong. The most probably location is in the center. Sqrt(n) describes the spread of the end locations, i.e. corresponding to the standard deviation of the end locations.

Do people even need to take a stats course any more?

Your answer will never be a superposition. You prepare the initial steps into superpositions and then use superpositions in the calculations, but you will get a definite answer in the end. Of course you can run your computer many times and if your programming is such then you can get different answer for each run even if the inputs were the same.

If you are Brit, they all are.

There is different isotopes of Cesium too, it is just that they have chosen one specific isotope for the measurements. In that regard Cesium isn't unique at all. I don't know what you mean with the "random changes in their electron sphere radii", but I don't see how Cesium would be different from other alkali elements in that regard.

The last part of your comment is just false. There are problems that quantum computers would be able to solve that you can't solve with any practical classical computer, but the a quantum computer would be a very sensitive device, and finding ways to get around the very high error rate in a QC is a very active area of research.

I do hope that no one is suggesting that the clocks are made purely by cesium. What they do is that they measure the hyperfine splitting frequency of cesium and calibrate their clocks to make sure that the frequency they measure is exactly the value they should get according to the definition of a second in terms of the cesium hyperfine splitting frequency.

Quantum key distribution is already available commercially, see for example:

http://www.idquantique.com/

Quantum computers do still have a very long way to go before they are useful for anything else than factorizing very small numbers. The last record I heard of was 15, which was already quite a while ago, but I find it unlikely that they have managed to do any significant improvements since then.

Not really. You set the initial state and read out the final results, which is in principle straightforward. The only thing you are not allowed to do is to try to measure the state in between.

I'll explain it slowly for you. Your analogy is stupid and irrelevant. If you insist on using a car in the analogy, refueling the car would correspond to recharging the iPod, not replacing the battery. Replacing the battery would correspond to replacing e.g. the fuel tank. No buyer of a car would expect that it would be easy and cheap to replace the fuel tank.

You do know that the batteries are rechargable? Your analogy is just stupid. Car manufacturers do not claim that you can replace the fuel tank. Under normal usage the batteries degrades significantly, long after the warranty has expired anyway. I'm still using my ipod mini that's about 5 years old with the original batteries. Of course the battery doesn't last as long as when the ipod was new, but long enough for many hours of listening during the day. On the other hand, the fuel consumption of my 15 year old Camry is significantly higher today than it was when it was new.

That he even mentions Fortran suggests that he is into heavy numerical computing. For that Fortran still is the language of choice for many, followed by C and C++.

The security guards in the Westwood Mall (Durban, South Africa), uses them. I guess they are excellent for patrolling the mall and the parking lots.

sigh...

I'm capped at 1GB, then $7 per GB after that.

I should mention that I live in Durban, South Africa.

A pleasure to put together the media.

Not at all. Pointer arithmetic works for all sizes and all types. It's not stranger than that arrays works for all types and sizes. I believe that the third line also can be written as

pointer = &var[-1];

i.e. pointer points to the element just before the first (var[0]) element in the array.

I guess this way would generate a warning about doing something stupid with an array.