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• Commented on Upcoming Appearances
  Sorry about this, off-topic, but I thought people would be interested to know. Ann McCaffrey has died. See http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2011/11/anne-mccaffrey-april-1-1926-november-21-2011.html...
• Commented on Cooking in zero gee
  Actually, you still get convection in zero-G, just a different sort. This was a big surprise when people first saw it, and was a disappointment for the growing perfect crystals crowd. One effect is called Marangoni convection which is driven...
• Commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
  One of the arguments that the D-wave stuff is spurious is that other groups trying to work with the same system (junction based superconductors devices, in particular SQUIDs), like the Delft and SUNY groups, have published fairly detailed accounts of...
• Commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
  qubits are not analogue values that vary between 0% and 100%. They are entities with two (rarely more) discrete quantum states. What varies is the probability of being in each state; in a complex system with many qubits you then...
• Commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
  See http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0301141 for attack on elliptic curve cryptography. There are crypto algorithms that are resistant to QC attacks - search for "post-quantum cryptography" for details....
• Commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
  There are a lot of misconceptions about QC. The most widespread is that gets an advantage from "using multiple worlds". In the general case, distributing the system of many configurations (worlds) is not a win, because you get a weak...
• Commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
  Like most solid state systems, the decoherence time is way too short. You can see the oscillations damping out in few dozen cycles; worthwhile QC needs something like 10,000 cycles. The other, more subtle, problem with defect based systems is...
• Commented on Nanowrimo
  I did Nanowrimo a few years ago, and made it, but it was a struggle. My novel was about a group of people doing Nanowrimo, which gave me a framing device for writing fragments in multiple styles, and ensured there...
• Commented on Design changes
  I prefer flat comments; I value the chronology over the nested structure. Please keep it the way it is....