When it comes to uploading consciousness the fundamental question is if a classical computer can fully simulate a brain, or if we have some inherent physical resources not captured by the Turing model.

... in 'Tales of Pirx the Pilot' about forty years ago.

If I remember correctly, at some point the simulation of a famous departed scientist has to point out to the protagonist, that he can't really come up with any new idea since he's only a collection of the data and knowledge of the person.

Please mod parent up. Gauss law div B = 0 is perfectly healthy despite this inane babbling of monopoles in the write-up of this research.

Yes, its field looks from the outside like a monopole, but it's a quasi particle not an actual naked monopole, the latter would be the equivalent of a magnetic charge particle.

Despite having been hunting this Snark for decades there is no indication that there is such a thing in nature.

"The people" who complain are often academics outside the research community and not affiliated with an institution that can afford the horrendous subscription cost.

You may have notice the journals charge about $20 a pop for individual subscriptions of articles.

Why do you think they'll do that if there wasn't some demand for it?

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.