jf noonan:
> None of these are recent developments and the wider applications
> of these technologies are just that, wider applications, not
> great leaps forward in theory which was Chris's claim. I'm half
> expecting a referral to the Institute for Noetics or some other
> such rubbish in answer to my query.
I thought the question was whether QM had any "direct" effect on ordinary people's lives, not just _recent_ QM. Okay, according to the _Scientific_American_ etc., there's some work being done on using superposition as a computational resource. See www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20000815_quantum.html This is important because the plain old QM that tells us how to build conventional computers will run into a physical limit to further development before too long.
Superposition is _really_weird_, too, as Schroedinger's cat could tell you.