Russia has had fewer astronaut fatailities than the United States, and all of the fatalities Russia has had have been less recent than any of the US's fatalities (those occurring in space, not on the ground). Although it would certainly be a tragedy if people died on a Russian spacecraft, please remember that the reason we now rely on Russian spacecraft is because people died on American spacecraft, and NASA responded by retiring all of the spacecraft involved in the human space program (without developing replacements).

I could think of a worse PR disaster: American astronauts getting killed on an American spacecraft. Russia has had fewer astronaut fatailities than the United States, and all of the fatalities Russia has had have been less recent than any of the US's fatalities (those occurring in space, not on the ground). Although it would certainly be a tragedy if people died on a Russian spacecraft, please remember that the reason we now rely on Russian spacecraft is because people died on American spacecraft, and NASA responded by retiring all of the spacecraft involved in the human space program (without developing replacements).

is this news?

Bazaar allows more different types of workflows than git does (like the Subversion workflow, as you mention). My main problem with bazaar is that when I wanted to convert the SVN repository that holds my whole home directory about 5 years ago to bazaar, bazaar choked and git didn't. Now I'm using git, and even if they fixed my problem (or more likely the problem is moot), I see no reason to change.

You could use rsync to send your releases over the VPN. (And if you're compressing them, you can use gzip --rsyncable first). But if git does what you want, then by all means...

I think you want the link for the paper, rather than the slides.

The truth is that many system administrators prefer the command line, because you can come up with a bunch of repeatable commands that can be put into a script file and replayed on lots of machines, and because you can more efficiently work with a command-line over a remote access protocol like SSH (becuase less data needs to be sent across the network). Of course, the GP's attitude doesn't really help people appreciate the power and utility of the command line, and I certainly admit that crippling or removing the GUI tools could be a hard sell for some of MacOS X's intended audience if they don't have an appreciation of the command line.

This is not surprisingly restrained behavior from the Israeli government. Israel has always been much more restrained in this regard then her neighbors (for example Syria and Egypt) are. Do you know why? Because Israel is actually a functioning democracy, not like her totalitarian neighbors (Iran comes to mind) who just put on a democratic front sometimes when it's convenient.

Maybe you were the only one who didn't get spammed.

The opinion quoted Ginsberg v. New York because it's prior precedent, and did not overturn Ginsberg because it was an inappropriate case to do so. An appropriate case to overturn Ginsberg would be one that dealt with sexual material (not violent material), and expanding this case to cover sexual material would have been judicial activism in the technical sense of the word.

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.