: Alan Anderson
: Leaving aside the issue that a KVM switch does exactly the opposite of
: what you're talking about,

That depends only on how you hook it up.
Well... there are some complications, but certainly
the simple mechanical switches would do it.

: First, the picture on a computer monitor can be described perfectly by
: the numbers producing it, with no uncertainty principle keeping you
: from knowing as much about it as you wish.

Yes, that being the difference between quantum and classical.
Not between teleporting and telecommunicating.

: Second, you *can* display the same picture on multiple monitors at the
: same time; you do not *have* to remove it from one in order to place
: it on the other.

Yet, what if the drivers on your video card can only drive one
monitor? Sure, you could hook an amplifier in, but even so, whether
it is possible to copy vs move doesn't seem the dmoniant issue.

The thing is, you're moving a state, not a particle; software not
hardware. And moving a state is, in the classical world, communication,
not portation. Software is stuff you can send over an ethernet
connection, hardware is stuff you can't. And what's going on here
is you're sending a bit of classical information, and a packet of
quantum spookiness, which when you get it where you're going you can
induce a particle to aquire here a state some particle there lost.
Which seems much more like sending a description of something to
do to an object than anything else.

You're saying limits of the quantum world make it a portation, yet
even so, it is *still* going to be inevitably misleading because of the
tranditional connotation of the word "teleport".

And one simple way to tell that it's misleading, is that people
immediately say "gosh, maybe we can scale this up to get treknological
transportation", whereas you haven't even started to be able to transfer
coherently a whole object, or indeed a particle of any sort. And the
ability to transfer, oh, spin state of some of the particles on a
quantum level doesn't even start to head in that direction.

Now of course, everybody is their own Humpty Dumpty. And there are
rational justifications for the usage as you've just shown. But using the
term "teleport" for this operation is inevitably going to be misleading,
whether it's "proper" or not.

And after all, people call it quantum cryptograpy, implying
communication, not quantum postal service, implying portation.
Which seems altogether less misleading.


Wayne Throop http://sheol.org/throopw