And in the physics labs, experimenters are playing with simple quantum computers in which individual atoms manipulate bits of data.
Supposedly, it could do that because, unlike today's computers that manipulate bits, a quantum computer would manipulate quantum bits, or qubits, which can be 0 and 1 simultaneously.
This is not done through filtering but via the way the interface is built: it enables people to manipulate bits and pieces of other's account and to put it into their own.
Back then the machines manipulated bits; now the action is in atoms.
And many people who spend all day manipulating bits on computer screens are rediscovering the pleasure of making physical objects and interacting with other enthusiasts in person, rather than online.
The Ohio hip-hop producer and rapper Blueprint last surfaced as a solo artist in 2005, with the LP "1988," which revisited the year of the title via sampled and manipulated bits of records by Doug E. Fresh, Stetsasonic, and Run-DMC.
The films' sound designer, Ben Burtt, often just manipulated bits of audio from different human languages for the nonhumans to mouth: some Quechua from South America for the bounty hunter Greedo, some Haya from Tanzania for Lando Calrissian's odd little co-pilot, Nien Nunb.
"You know, the Hopi Indians think that if you manipulate this bit it can stimulate the sexual organs," says Dr Norman.
Classical computers encode information as a series of bits, which can be either 0 or 1, and then manipulate those bits according to simple rules.
Instead of flipping ordinary bits that can be set to either 0 or 1, a so-called universal quantum computer would manipulate quantum bits, or "qubits," that can be 0, 1, or, thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, 0 and 1 at the same time.
