Slashdot linked up news that scientists have managed to link five photons together and use their quantum states to transmit information:

A key step is being able to entangle five particles, which would make it possible to check computations for errors and teleport quantum information within and between computers.

Error checking has always been known as a critical block to quantum computing, because errors are utterly unavoidable on that scale. That they seem to have overcome this obstacle indicates real progress indeed.

I can remember when quantum computing was thought to be a pipe dream. Too many insurmountable problems, it was thought. Now the problems seem to be falling one by one, and people really are starting to think about what an actual computer based on these principles would look like.