Five atoms in an ion trap can beat most encryption today. “It might still cost an enormous amount of money to build – you won’t be building a quantum computer and putting it on your desktop anytime soon – but now it’s much more an engineering effort, and not a basic physics question,” 

Seems like a breakthrough that demonstrates that quantum computers are here to stay.

Now we have to work on making them better, faster, cheaper.

I spent six weeks in college writing programs for (nonexistent) quantum computers.  This seems promising, but there is a lot of hype in quantum computing... previously some folks have claimed to have one, when it really didn't meet the standard.  So it will be interesting to see if this holds up.

I figured there's a lot of hype in order to get more people interested so that eventually a real quantum computer can be made, and then keep improving the price-performance on a virtuous cycle.