Perry E. Metzger (@perrymetzger)

In the ancient world, the way many people gained great wealth was by forming gangs of strong men, beating up their neighbors, and taking their stuff. People still speak with admiration of men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, but they were little better than gangsters who enriched themselves through armed robbery. This was a negative sum game, and assured that people remained poor and unhappy for thousands of years. Eventually, however, we figured out that respecting each other’s rights, building things, and trading meant that we could play positive sum games instead. We could increase the amount of wealth, and all would benefit. As a result, we moved from living in unheated shacks to living in what our ancestors would’ve thought of as paradise in only a few hundred years. However, there are still people out there who think that beating someone up and taking their stuff is a really great idea. It is the great task of our civilization to shun such people, as they are not fit to be part of society.

No, quantum computers are not about to destroy the security of encryption systems. I have been seeing loads of noise about that, and it’s not true. To break encryption systems, you need to be able to factor numbers with thousands of digits to break cryptography and we have been stuck with quantum computers being able to factor two digits for 25 years now. 21 is the largest number ever cleanly factored by a quantum computer, and you can do that in your head in a moment, it’s 3 times 7. This graph is on a log scale (linear in digits), but it would be pretty much the same silly flat line on a linear scale. You need to be able to handle 1200 digits, but I will settle for being interested again when someone can factor 91 with a quantum computer. Now, a schoolchild can factor 91, it’s 7 x 13, but it would at least represent progress over the current record, which as I said is 21. (And yes, for the pedants out there, elliptic curve systems are a bit different but it’s the same principle.)