The copyright statute of Slashdot's home country defines a "copy" as a physical object in which a work is embodied, such as a book, ROM cartridge, or optical disc. The statutory license associated with ownership of a copy of a computer program includes making intermediate copies "as an essential step" in the use of the program. Title 17, United States Code, section 117. Historically, console makers and game publishers have lacked power to revoke this license with respect to a particular copy of a game that isn't online-only. With the end of video game distribution on optical disc, this license becomes revocable, and that's the problem.

"No net zero?
OK, carbon negative it is, you heard the boss."

Ya, but the new law also provides free snorkels, masks and swim fins to residents to mitigate policy ramifications. Besides, the idiots who passed this will probably either be dead or moved out of state by the time the bills come due.

The summary explicitly mentions "a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments"- so they are very aware that these systems may be wrong. If there's a legitimate criticism here, it is that it isn't obvious that these aren't short lists very similar to if not identical to the lists an expert would come up with. But that's a different claim.

Henrico County wraps clockwise around the top of Richmond from about the 9 to 5 o'clock positions. Most data centers are just north of Richmond, some are east and south-east. Plug, "Henrico County data center" into google Maps for pins.

Wow, Caldera, there's a company I haven't heard about in a looooonnngg time.

Let's remember that they transformed into blatant patent troll and persistent lawsuit pest The SCO Group which Microsoft funded in a futile attempt to bludgeon Linux out of existence.

I'm not sure what minor mistakes I'm being critical of here. If you mean the 50 year claim, it is just wrong, and in an important way. If an idea has a handful of physicists talking about the idea when it isn''t 50 years old, and there's no major physical work on the idea until some two decades later, then saying it has 50 years of failure is not a minor mistake. Or did you mean something else? As for Paul Benioff, yes, he's one of the other precursors to Feynman. I mentioned Manin, but Benioff is another example who is doing work at about the same time and slightly before then. Again, this is part of the early theoretical work, so making any sort of claim about the field failing at that point when it just in its infancy doesn't follow.

Whatever they come up with won't involve AI replacing politicians and upper management types.

Disagreement with gweirhir is not the same as irrational belief in progress. And I hope that people, whether I disagree with them or not, express their opinions; I might learn something. Unfortunately, when the substantive evidence someone gives for their position is a claim to have talked with an unnamed PhD student 32 years ago, it isn't easy to have a substantial dialogue. I might be wrong on the timeline for when quantum computing will take off; predicting technological development and rate of progress is genuinely difficult. But getting a more accurate understanding requires discussions with evidence, not insults. But since you do want to make this personal, we can go in that direction: do you want to point to any technology that is being developed right now that you expect is going to have a major impact in the next few years? If you cannot name any, then that might suggest that there is in your case an irrational belief in a lack of technological progress.

The DOGE Guy killed me, Mal. He killed me with a chainsaw. How weird is that? I got... a short span here... they destroyed my .gov equipment but I have a back-up unit... bottom of the complex, right over the generator. Hard to get to. I know they missed it. They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal.

I don't. The data is noisy, and in the most annoying aspect, different systems have gotten to different numbers of logical qubits. Neutral atom systems have gotten to claims of 96 for example here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09848-5 (but I'm skeptical of the accuracy of that claim) whereas superconducting claims are around 1 or 2. It would be nice for someone to go pull out the data and separate them for individual methods, but I'm not aware of anyone doing it that way. I agree it is a natural question to ask though, and some clearer idea of what the numbers are there would go a fair bit to establishing what the growth rate here is in a way that really matters for when the tech is going to be practical.

So the evidence is essentially "trust me, I had one conversation 30 years ago?" Would you take that sort of level of evidence seriously if someone else made it? They don't even need to be being deliberately dishonest; human memories are just really fallible. I wouldn't trust my own memory from a conversation with a PhD from 30 years ago. But even more to the point, it also isn't terribly relevant to the central question at hand, since the claim isn't there wasn't no one working in these areas, but that there was not a lot. Of course there was some work before that, as I acknowledged in my comment about black box algorithms (the most well known is Deutsch's algorithm but there are a bunch of others from the same time period).

If your argument is just that people were vaguely pointing in a similar direction, then that's radically different than claiming that that translates into decades of failure. That's pretty close to someone in 1937 claiming that very high altitude rockets had decades of failure because Tsiolkovsky was doing calculations in 1900 about multistage rockets. There's a vast gap between people thinking about related ideas and actual engineering work.

You cannot pick a handful of data points and then choose the type of curve to fit them, and that's especially a problem when you have only a few data points. You are using literally three data point. For any tech thing, if you ended up with a curve that shows negative progress, that should be a problem with your model. This is essentially the same thing the Trump people tried to do when they tried to do a cubic fit for covid deaths to argue that deaths would soon drop to zero https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing. But since you don't see where the exponential estimate is coming from, you could take the step of clicking through the link I gave which discussed it. But if you want here are other sources. For example, https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/103 discusses how decoherence times have gone up at an exponential rate, increasing by roughly a factor of 10 every 3 years. You are correct that successful use of Shor's algorithm has not gone up but that also shouldn't be surprising. Shor's algorithm has a pretty big jump in the number of logical qubits needed when you increase from very small n to medium sized n. Using those two data points to conclude anything about what is going on right now isn't useful. Once it does hit even n around 105 or so, we should expect then quick improvement from there.

You can, it's not illegal, but you really, really shouldn't.

I'm not sure why you think this is the case, and would be very interested in evidence or citations for this. It is possible you are confusing quantum computing work with earlier work on Bell tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test which do involve some of the same physical components that would eventually be used for quantum computing. In any event, this still doesn't address the point about exponential improvement: even if you had the same tech being worked on a decade or two decades before it work started, the point about exponential improvement would still apply.

I'm not sure how that could possibly be the case. Feynman suggested the idea of a quantum computer in a 1982 paper. Yuri Manin suggested a similar idea slightly before then which makes the entire idea about 46 years old. There wasn't any substantial work on the idea aside from a few black box algorithms until Shor's algorithm in 1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm which is from just 32 years ago. And substantial money going into physical implementations of quantum computing doesn't really start until around the mid 2000s . I'm also not sure why you would think it any of it is a failure given the rapid pace in improvement of the technology. Empirically, quantum computers are improving at an exponential or even faster than exponential rate for coherence times, number of qubits, and other metrics https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quantum-computings-rise-20190618/. The algorithmic end also continues to improve rapidly, especially with error correction, and we're just moving into the zone where the error correction and the physical systems are both good enough that we can physically implement quantum logical systems with real error correction. See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10628-y It is easy to forget how exponential growth looks: it looks slow and not impressive until it just takes off. We saw this just recently with the rise of solar power and grid storage which were both struggling and in the last 2 years have now taken off so much that they are rapidly dominating much of the electric grid.