You have two other alternatives to the idea that quantum mechanics causes consciousness and/or free will. (Again, both of these are hypotheses, and need to be proven somehow)

1. Consciousness and/or free will can be simulated on a Turing machine. This would imply that "true" artificial intelligence is possible.
2. Consciousness cannot be simulated on a Turing machine. It needs something more powerful, but that's OK since the human brain is more powerful than a Turing machine (at least in certain respects).

Well, I think it's plausible to actually define a model that explains how quantum mechanics would cause consciousness, and then we can look at what we would need to research in order to prove it. Here's a set of hypotheses that would qualify:

1. The brain, absent quantum-mechanical effects, is Turing complete, and is no more powerful than a Turing machine.
2. Consciousness cannot be simulated on a Turing machine. (It needs something more powerful.)
3. Consciousness could be simulated on a Turing machine where some input was provided by a "consiousness oracle".
4. A person's neurons are sensitive to random quantum-mechanical effects. (i.e. the quantum-mechanical effects serve the function of the "consiousness oracle" in hypothesis #3). I think that this is actually Penrose's hypothesis.

This should be sufficient to prove that consciousness is a quantum-mechanical effect, but I'm not sure what it would say about free will.

To prove that humans have free will requires an additional hypothesis: Posit the existance of a soul that provides free will. Posit that the soul communicates with the brain and controls the body by causing quantum-mechanical effects inside the brain. Posit that the soul is not observable in any way, except through its quantum mechanical effects on the brain. We now can have two hypotheses about how this may work:

1. The ordinarily random quantum-mechanical effects we see outside the brain are actually quite ordered inside the brain. (i.e. though we can't explain what causes a particular quantum fluctuation to occurs, we would see a definite pattern if we put some kind of probe into a living brain -- the quantum-mechanical effects would no longer look random to us.)
2. The random quantum-mechanical effects we see outside the brain are actually only pesudo-random. They're random enough to fool the analytical methods we've developed for investigating how quantum mechanics works, but the brain has an algorithm for decoding them that's computationally more powerful than any of our analytical methods. (For a brief introduction to the field of pesudorandomness in theoretical computer science, see the April 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM, or see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness. This subfield of computer science field has not yet advanced nearly enough to prove this hypothesis.)

It could still aid rail car manufacturing, which is an international industry with orders for trains in one country from companies in a different country.

Why don't they put the voice recorder in the same box, that way if you find one you find them both? For that matter, why don't they put two identical black boxes in the plane, that way searchers have a higher chance of finding at least one of them?

Even though I trust their claims that they'll anonymize the data, I suspect that this data could be very easily de-anonymized (like they discovered was possible with the NetFlix data set), and would not contribute my data to this project.

Reminds me of the Greek wiretapping scandal. In that version of the wiretapping scandal, a very technically sophisticated attacker (possibly an insider in the phone company) installed wiretap software into the phone network's routers. News broke after a top exec at the phone company hanged himself. Though surely there's a lot we don't know, it was almost certainly not official company policy to cooperate with government wiretaps on political opposition.

It's not excitement unless you're programming in hand-optimized assembly like a real programmer.

Yes, StripeSpotter is a UIC project. See the Google Code page for the software.

If they're using a logarithmic scale, there must be a reason why the logarithmic scale makes more sense. Maybe it's because the damage or perceived power scales logarithmically with the energy of the quake?

Under the USA's first to invent system, some other company can still claim they invented whatever product before Google announced it even though they only filed the application after Google announced it. I'm sure there's lots of incentive to lie and make the invention date earlier in order to defeat prior art, or even steal prior art.

Under the S.23 reform to change us to first to file, prior art can be considered from the filing date, rather than the invention date, and publishing instead of patenting will be more effective at establishing prior art.

To understand the changes in S.23 (and for intelligent discussion of the relative merits of both systems) see http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/03/mccrackinpatentreform.html

You mean... "God would have created us in such a manner or in a location so as to tolerate the particle flux. In the ocean, for example." Right?

Yeah, I think that jurors who want to ensure a fair trial should answer the first question (whether they might have potential bias because they know one of the parties or witnesses) by pointing out that the lawyer is making this offer, and let the judge sort it out.

The point is that it's not LibreOffice's place to write an Outlook replacement. The job will be at least as difficult as reverse engineering the Microsoft Word formats, and LibreOffice isn't likely to have a good Outlook replacement for years to come. If you want to devote resources to the task, get involved in Evolution.

Nobody's integrated an Outlook substitute into OpenOffice because Outlook is very different from the other office applications (which are all centered around creating documents of various types). Outlook is focused on connectivity, mainly email, address books, and calendars and the open source world has had a full stack for these capabilities for a long time. The recommended way to replace Outlook is with open protocols (IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV), but if you need Microsoft Exchange support, that's available too. One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.