See your point. This may be an alternative to the "suicide by cop" approach. Clubbed to death with PowerBooks by enraged Apple 'geniuses'.

True there is a bigger picture here.

He always had the reputation of being a visionary and major league a**hole. I guess he's dead long enough now that we can acknowledge the latter again?

... in the summary ...

"Google also describes how advertisers will be able to use a customer's profile 'to exclude a customer from being considered for an offer based on exclusion criteria identified by a business,' such as age, job title, purchasing history, clothing size, or other 'desirable' characteristics."

... is about as old as business IT. So now it includes a tiered offer for a transportation discount. The only new aspect is the self driven car, may as well give a gas discount to the customers who prefer to drive themselves.

The Google Quantum AI lab puts this news into perspective and I put my positive spin on it here.

Having talked with one of the co-authors of the paper, he actually came away impressed at how far D-Wave has come in ten years. Although not yet far enough that I'd win my bet with him, that the D-Wave two could beat classical computing across the board.

So in short, yes, the BBC's reporting on quantum computing is atrocious. Not the first time either.

"... which most people already have."

Yeah, that's the theory. With business apps this has turned out to be almost a joke. Any friggen' client (Oracle, SAS, SAP you name it) brings their own private Java run-time (typically outdated) because that's the one that's tested and supported.

From the article I glean that they are developing some major business app. Usually if you want to make this platform independent you go with Java. Not exactly light-weight either.

It is Open Source code with a BSD style license. Google can't just disappear the currently released source code.

If they want to move to a closed development model you could fork the code.

Insightful only if you haven't read the article or didn't understand it.

As even the headline stated they use it as a library to compile against.

/. has really dumbed down considerably when people fail to grasp this and moderate this cluelessly.

Sure, but jailbreaks are readily available.

When a 'phone' runs UNIX underneath and is a commercially attractive software platform, then I think there is indeed a basis for comparison.

They likely do. But as we've wasted well over $100 billion on our so-called "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile system over the years, and even more money on the anti-missile systems we're developing with/for Israel, I'd bet the Russians fear the day that we finally get it working.

I think this is misleading. Of course Russia has developed new ICBMs. First, this ignores what may or may not have been in the developmental pipeline. But more importantly, it ignores that we did unilaterally break the ABM treaty and started deploying ABM sites and mounting systems on ships. To expect the Russians not to counter our aggression is to expect them to act foolishly.

Considering the US has launched multiple wars of aggression since the breakup of the USSR, the US gov't wages blatant proxy wars, the US gov't ignores all int'l law dating back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and claims a "right" to attack any country even if we have not been attacked first, and considering things like we have used flat-out torture as a national policy and spend almost 1/2 of the entire world's military spending, the US gov't may not be the "only" problem but most definitely our gov't is the largest and most aggressive problem country in the world.

Not surprisingly, but still sadly, it's not just me saying this; in one Win/Gallup International survey of people in 65 countries, the US is seen as the greatest threat to world peace.

"The organization has concluded that the United States is now the principle violator of human rights and freedoms worldwide." -- Amnesty International's annual report on human rights.

I think it's important to remember some of the skulduggery that we did in Europe -- for decades. Remember, we essentially bought elections in France and Italy in the late 40s to prevent communists from being elected into power; we beamed divisive ethnic propaganda into Yugoslavia for decades. Hell, even as late as the 1980s we had our CIA work with European rightists to conduct flat-out terrorist actions against our own NATO allies in a strategy of tension designed to push western European gov'ts to the political right.

Given the fact that many of the new leaders of the former Warsaw Pact we funded and backed for years and years, and in such an atmosphere of such skulduggery, it's not surprising that they'd want to snuggle up to the west if only to increase the odds that they would not continue to remain a target.

After all, it's not like the vast majority of the common people of those countries had a lot of say in the economic shock therapy that was inflicted on their nations, nor in whether they should become a member of NATO or not.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The reality is that the US and west never stopped waging the Cold War. We broke the understanding with Russia and pushed NATO eastward, even incorporating parts of the former USSR into NATO.

Then we tore up the ABM treaty and put anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe claiming we were doing that because of Iran. The Russians didn't find that laughable claim one bit funny and understood that the west was seeking to negate their nuclear deterrence.

NATO has been used offensively both inside and outside of Europe and shows that it has nothing to do with "defense".

We portrayed a rag-tag group of Muslim fundamentalists as some sort of existential threat to the US and west, but now the US gov't has made a "pivot" and is portraying China as militarily aggressive because they are squabbling over some worthless islets with their neighbors. It's clear that China is the focus of a new Cold War.

It's clear the US is in search of a "new enemy" because that's what keeps Americans distracted from how much we waste on our military and our continuing economic decline.

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy." -- Ambassador to the USSR and US State Dept. strategist George F. Kennan.

The quantum computing fear is really nothing new.

It makes the current encryption scheme more valuable but there are post-quantum schemes as well as quantum cryptography as alternatives.