That final link: http://heart-c704.uibk.ac.at/publications/papers/prl04_roos.pdf

It's a blog not a court: there is no "burden of proof"!

Anyway, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and imagine that you really are interested in physics and not just some awkward internet type ...

The NMR people have been doing computation for a long time now on systems with more than two bits. There was a famous paper by Ike Chuang in 2001 that implemented a real search algorithm on an NMR quantum computer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038%2F414883a . I'm pretty sure there were others before that with smaller computations but off the top of my head I can't point you to links. Nobody has figured out how to scale NMR beyond a few bits, for various pretty fundamental reasons.

Looking to other technologies that can get round this limitation, the leader is probably strings of trapped, laser cooled ions. There are two powerhouse groups: Rainer Blatt's group in Innsbruck , and the group of Dave Wineland at NIST (http://tf.nist.gov/ion/qucomp/papers.htm). They've both managed to entangle long strings of ions (8 I think is the record). There's a review here http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2284.pdf .

Coherence times for trapped ions are vastly longer than those for solid state systems, including the one reported above. Amazingly, optical coherences of greater than one second have been observed in these systems by encoding the q-bit in a dechorence free subspace of a pair of ions (see below). Hyperfine coherences can be much longer than this.

@Aaron Do your own research! Try googling: there are many established results and they should be easy to find. If you're interested in getting someone else to boil-down physics developments for you might I suggest you sign up to the excellent, and free, APS Physics bulletin http://physics.aps.org/ .

This is a really misleading story. People have done quantum computations before with more q-bits, and people have built q-bits with vastly greater coherence times than the one's in the article.

The real claim is that this is the first all solid-state quantum computation.

Is that my imagination, or is that David Schwimmer narrating?

It has a button to turn the mouse on and off.