If you work in quantum computing -- which I did, full time for 13 years, and part time for a few years prior to that -- it's VERY common to run into people outs

If you work in quantum computing -- which I did, full time for 13 years, and part time for a few years prior to that -- it's VERY common to run into people outside the field who believe that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. Dozens of wrong papers have been written claiming just that, and the claim also appears frequently (often implicitly) in popular journalism. The blog's subtitle is just acknowledgment of that fact. Incidentally, P and NP certainly do have to do with the hardware. There are nonlinear variants on quantum mechanics in which all the problems in NP can be solved in polynomial time. See http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041 These variants are, however, unlikely to describe the way the world works.