I can still remember first reading about quantum computing in an early edition of Wired. Here was the new technology that could do it all, turning phonons into gateways and making today's fastest processors look like Turing's bombe.

It was heady stuff indeed but the news from the Netherlands to mind what Thomas Huxley called the great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact*.

But all is not lost for quantum computing. The news is a set back, nothing more. Goodness, if we can bring light speed down to 40 mph or make a Pot Noodle tasty there's no limit to human ingenuity.

One factor when quantum computing does come is going to be security. A true quantum computer would carve through current codes like a hot knife through butter. Consequentially it may be some years after the fact that we learn they have been invented. 

* - Post modernists out there may dispute the existence of any true facts, rather that everything is an incompletely tested hypothesis. This explains why they make such bad conversation.