> I remember an article that even google's lab could not make final verdict if they work or not. Forgot the computer name

I know exactly what you're talking about, and you're wildly off the mark on the significance of that.

“Unexpectedly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence

That's an argument for “let the service inform the parent and let the parent decide”, not against it.

Try not to take criticisms of tools personally. Phillips head screws are shit for a great many applications, while simultaneously being involved in billions of dollars of economic activity, and being a driver that everyone has available.

And the correct response to this knowledge is to not try to optimize for the user that will screw anything up.

This only depends on how much money they have. If dumb users pay the most, then businesses will optimize for them.

> For incorrect OS answers, keep reading

Nothing there responds to the question. If my 17 year old answers “I'm 23”, what exactly prevents them from posting to /r/nsfw? What constitutes “clear and convincing evidence”? If there's no answer here, then there appears to be no purpose to this law as this sort of thing is precisely what it's supposed to be preventing.

That would seem to require that the act provide a shield against liabilities involving minors, which doesn't seem compatible with the notion that it's such a low-friction mechanism. A minor installs debian on a raspberry py, clicks “I am 23 years old and then an “adult dating” site isn't allowed to repeat the question?

If anything, this seems like a convenient path to mandating far more restrictive measures under the guise of “fixing an obvious loophole in the law”.

There's clear liability put on the owner of the device, which cannot be a child, but the child's parent. The "Account Holder" definition and subsequent penalties make that pretty clear. The parent is ultimately responsible for locking down the child's account and inputting the correct information.

What happens when the child downloads a Linux iso and then live boots or overwrites the install? I have a hard time understanding how this law does not purposefully set the foundation from which they can push for actual ID verification.

It's the parents responsibility regardless, they own the device and it's their child. This is exactly the correct way to do this, if you must.

My contention is that there is no reason to do this, and it shouldn't be done.

My contention is that I vastly prefer this to what is demonstrably already happening, which is every 3rd party webapp implementing or paying yet another 3rd party to collect my ID and face scan for the privilege of using their service.

No, there are none; the closest we currently have are various special purpose and more or less hard-coded machines that demonstrate that scaling exists; various general-purpose machines operating on handfuls of qubits demonstrating the various gates; and various snake oil scams that may or may not have semi-respectable research divisions associated with them.

Interesting, do you work in that field?

All “industrial” quantum computers currently fall entirely in the former category. Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is selling snake oil.

This, for sure - if there were any risk of quantum computers with 64 or 128 functional qubits, expansion would be a matter of engineering - the development of real, actual, functional quantum computing is on the order of nuclear weapons development. The US government would make it secret, take it over, and scale it up to 1024 bits for immediate and near total cyber dominance; something like pre-emptive strikes on bank accounts, total pwning of adversaries' secure systems, planting command and control malware everywhere, grabbing intelligence from anywhere the administration saw as valuable. There are a ton of dead drop encryptions. They could move btc from Satoshis wallets and wreck crypto value.

Quantum computing research you hear about is "neat lab experiment" fluff, or a demonstration of corporate technical acumen and research capabilities. You won't hear about real quantum computing until well after it's been used in geopolitical conflicts.

Is there a QC out there that can perform a commercially useful computation? No, not yet. And yes snake oil is abound. But the reality is not two categories, it's a spectrum. Some are more useless than others.

No, it's not a spectrum in any meaningful sense. There are scam companies (some with semi-respectable research departments attached to them) and there are research projects. Anyone selling devices with the promise that those devices will do anything useful for their customers are simply lying.

It's like fusion energy: there are legitimate companies working on the problem, and they may even succeed at some point, but anyone willing to deliver a 1MW fusion plant tomorrow is scamming you, because the technology doesn't work yet.

I have far more faith that fusion someday might be useful than I do for quantum computing.

They can't solve np hard problems better than conventional computers.

They might be able to solve those faster though (than silicon), since nobody has demonstrated a workable general-purpose (conventional) photonic computer - but TfA at least says they have a machine with 256 "spins", so while that's ~useless for real world problems, it seems to work while not being hugely complex, so there's hope for scaling it up, perhaps.

(I roughly agree with the other "useless" comments in this thread, with a caveat)