..." If we don't see any biological agent, like a person or animal, then we might assume"...

Often what poses as causes, facts, etc. are themselves primitive inferences of agency. This is due to the importance of choice/agency/control in the world as filtered through our perceptions. However, there is little basis to believe that such analogies are fundamental at the level this article pretends to be an authority. If we're talking about simple causes, fine. But usually some much larger scope is implicit in these claims. My favorite pet example to expose the pontificating neo-carl-sagonists is entanglement. It is the pinnacle of scientific achievement & nearly purely magical by definition. That is, assuming one somehow manages to penetrate the formalism designed to defend it from inquiry. Any attempt amongst the peasants to explain entanglement through polite, socially acceptable causal means is superluminously chided from the ranks with a lesson in relativity, the definition of information, & general derision. Houston we've got a problem.

Until this well worn & thoroughly documented example--going on a hundred years old--is addressed squarely, I see little point in throwing nuts to the science & religious squirrels running circles around the inherent righteousness of cause over magic in more squishy realms of inquiry.

It's naive to believe they will lift a finger to even acknowledge, much lest recover, your pilfered goods. Gone are the days of cruising over to the Cerfnet cave to mingle with clairvoyant IOSmiths & tweak the 4k to perfection. They will respond to your legal actions & your payments, otherwise you don't exist. I lost a couple of domains I had for 10 years in the same manner as you... just as soon as they had enough street value to be worth the effort to lift. And it was very little effort! Response from Verislime/Network pollutions? Guess. Internet insecurity is the rule, not the exception. You just gotta play the numbers & hope for the best.

There are supposedly straight dealing ISPs such as "no bullshit" Gandi, I've yet to find one. Gandi is the same or worse than any I've dealt with, just better at hiding it. Dig a little deeper, take a peak at the flimsiness of their back-end ops, biz/support process & policy... no bullshit leaves the property is more like it.

Most get away with it cuz things work ok most of the time--as it was all automated by that guy with the ponytail in the corner over there a long time ago, & most people don't know any better. It's tempting to wish to believe these orcs have your best interest in mind--after all you are the guy who sprinkles the road with power pills for them to gobble gobble gobble. However, think about the motivation for becoming a DNS dealer. You need perhaps 2U of rack space, an 80 hour/week sysadmin, and low paid folk to answer the phone--the rest is gravy. Or so they are told as they swindle their clients down the river with re-assurances and paper over their crumbling foundations.

These folk be not your friend. Think cloud... of locusts.

Good luck brother.

Let's say quantum information science & engineering to avoid the hair splitting. Yup--there are QKD rack mount networking boxes more robust than the power & cooling they depend on. There are applications in astrophysics & metrology right around the corner.

The perspective I see throughout these posts is misplaced. In genomics, e.g. there were no science, tech, or market showstoppers, yet decades went by without fruiting as expected. Why? Bad attitudes & short sightedness. Contrast Burt Rutan & Von Neumann. Rutan digs QIS--sees the potential. Von Neumann was geared up in the 30's & poisoned the field for decades.

All these statements about QIS as suspiciously impractical or overwhelmingly difficult... It gets thrown into the same physics pile as speculative & aggrandizing--string theory, 50-years-of-bigscience--promises-for-bigcash--fusion, or over-hyped/overgrown--high energy physics. QIS is not the latest gee-wiz, watch me do cellular automata in a test tube with PCR. It's a rooting up of logic & representation that comes with parts you can do stuff with. Would it be so fun for you if it were squishy speculative theory with little hope for applications?

There's hardly any mention of the cloud in the "text"--once in the discussion maybe, and of no consequence. Mostly they speak of client-server ideas. And so what a failed attempt in buzzword compliance? One can't expect them to be in sync with the IT industry flavor-of-the-month lingo--they are quantum optics nerds, not IT guys. Hell, I'm a UNIX wizard & I can't say I know what a cloud is. Someone elses VM, not mine? A vague signal meaning 'don't hand over cash or private data to this entity?' These are practical people with interesting results to share. And for this insult, the tech community crawls over them as if they were a boot in the ant hill. Teen slashdotters would be all over this stuff if they could penetrate the noise of the krusties & naysayers.

What's important here is that they are integrating conceptually the disparate realms of networks, crypto, computation, & introducing a distinction between client and server. This is how one goes about making a mishmash of tech & tech concepts useful. It took us decades to figure these things out, unfigure them out, & figure them out again. Here you have it in a single paper.

Let em have their qcloud--they worked for it.

Not even wrong. Quantum computation is a parallel process which scales exponentially with the number of computing elements (wetware appears to have this property BTW, speaking of computational biology). Computers can't compete in this space--not with a zillion cores. Quantum states inherently sort out their threads. In other words, it is the next DSP/FPGA/GPU but entirely different--dreadlocks not deadlocks. Had we pursued this path in the 40's instead of computers, we wouldn't be in the jam we are now.

Fundamental yes, basic no.

"Measurement" is a technical term which is not the same as the usual meaning of the word. The input/"state" is "prepared/measured" & the output state is measured yielding a readable bit string. It's true that what's going on is subtle & it's easy in get it completely wrong talking about it. But the basic structure is quite trivial & the lingo surrounding it finite.

The guts, power, & mysteries are in the state, which no one understands/denies it's corporal existence etc. It's not necessary ( & not possible within the constructs of QM) to know about it--you just let it do the work. Not at all unlike some people's code which only they & god are privy to--just learn the interface and treat it as a black box. The physical dynamics behind the interface definitions are not known & the most complicated part of QM because it literally interfaces two very different worlds. Somewhat like trying to grasp one's fleeting dreams while being too awake.

The rules for using the interface, however, are not difficult. This is why physicists are so interested in re-branding themselves pragmatists in QM--it

Agreed. Check out Mermin's book (shut up & calculate guy). The algorithms appear to come from insights in number theory more than physics in general. The most compact & handy representations of the algorithms are... that's right--circuits. Open simulators are available for download.

The field is ripe for hackers to lend a hand. There's no reason to be intimidated by self appointed guardians of the turf. Most physicists didn't have a clue about the importance of entanglement--the primary resource making quantum computation possible--some ten years after it was demonstrated. The Aspect experiments in 1982 are to this day often referred to as the turning point.

They also did everything in their power to discourage learning about entanglement in the decades prior. It's an attitude that's difficult to penetrate. Appears to be somewhat rooted in big egos in an environment hostile to one's reputation--i.e. the usual suspects. The field has been invigorated by those interested in building stuff, who aren't afraid of accepting some odd logic & learning the tool sets.

Correct--quantum computers are not the next FTP server. Nor are graphics cards much good for Excel.

Such authoritative predictions are littered throughout the commentary on the field. Perhaps produced by those uncomfortable with a technology built upon a mysterious process for which there is no authority. More useful than additional replicas, would be to provide a solid basis for these exuberant predictions. Somehow, despite the best efforts of the critics, the tech is picking up steam in overcoming showstoppers such as error correction.

For those interested in learning something about the history of the subject, The Age of Entanglement, When Quantum Physics was Reborn. is well researched, intelligent, & engaging. For the latest advances--both fundamental & technical--the origin of the paper in this post is a prolific producer of relevant work.

This paper comes out of one of the best, possibly the best, experimental labs in quantum optics. A group of people who have knocked over one after another obstacles in this field. Some of which were considered to be not possible in the foreseeable future if I recall. I don't work in this line of physics, I'm not a mathematician, but I have bothered to read the paper. It's not at all bonkers. A useful property of quantum computers was uncovered. As mentioned in the paper, it was only recently that anything close to this was doable with a classical computer, & it took 30 years to achieve a softer result. It's quite interesting to me to see how a client-server quantum server might look. A practical quantum computer already exists, as demonstrated in this result. A tiny computer, to be sure, but perfectly adequate for this demonstration. I doubt anyone knows with much certainty in one direction or the other how long it will take to scale up the bit width of these boxen--this being the current major obstacle. Certainly a chemist working in NMR implementations is not going to know with any certainty what the potential is of addressable trapped ions, & there are a half a dozen or more very different flavors of implementations being prototyped. Having just come back from seeing the Peking acrobats, I can tell you I had know idea how many chairs could be stacked on top of four champagne bottles, one on top of another. Halfway up to the ceiling the crowd was in general disbelief that one more chair was possible. Chairs were subsequently stacked all the way to ceiling. The last one then balanced on two legs. With the dude then balancing on one arm on top of this. As evidenced from the ratio of ignorance & skepticism in many of these comments, versus inherent potential, to me the field appears rather under-hyped, not over-hyped. Quantum optics and quantum information science is incredibly solid theory & engineering--the most sound theory in the history of science to be sure. It has made steady & accelerating progress over the last 20 years. It does not deserve to be thrown in amongst other speculative, if not downright corrupt, realms of physics as is implied in comments like these. Naysayers, and those of you pretending to represent the field in it's entirety, please eat my shorts.