I use Standalone Compiz with Xfdesktop to manage the desktop. Compiz is is actually fast and lightweight because your 3D viedo card does all the heavy lifting. It actually consumes no more memory than most 2D window Managers'. I have been using GLX-Dock which like Avant has an OSX look and feel:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67032602@N05/6104431313/

Motl may be brilliant mathematically but he is a prejudiced paranoid whose dubious behaviour into trying con arXiv into censoring scientists he disagreed resulted in his "resignation" (aka firing) from his post at Harvard.

<quote><p> the idea that un-entangled states would be able to communicate with one another is a bit more problematic than the idea that entangled states would be able to communicate with one another.</p></quote>

I imagine Valentini would have an explanation. In fact he has argued that something similar should occur as remnants of entanglements from the early universe before matter became close to equilibrium and the quasi-classical domain emerged and that should give rise to non-local effects potentially observable today. OK it is due to entanglements but not to recent experimentally prepared entanglements as in EPR ad the Bell theorem.

Einstein and Schr&#246;dinger also regarded the Copenhagen solution as effectively superstitious and nonsense. Bohr and Heisenberg won that round but they are loosing now, this paper shows that the Copenhagen interpretation is of necessity non-local something Einstein tried to prove with the EPR thought experiment. David Bohm and his supporters were prepared to loose locality to provide a hidden variables/quantum potential alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation, however I doubt the supporters of the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern variants are about to embrace non-locality.

Everett and quantum reality rules.

Yes one of the implications of this paper is that if we are to have a local theory of QM consistent with relativity is that then Everett and the many-worlds interpretation of QM is right. Hilbert space then becomes real, not just a mathematical vector space, and is filled with orthogonal real worlds with each world as real as any other.

I read the preprint over the weekend after I saw a reference to it on Cosmic Variance. The implications of it are still just beginning to sink in.

Bee the German theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute here in Canada has a recent post about scientific tattoos on her blog Backreaction. It includes to nice photos of scientists with scientific tattoos on their arms:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-do-people-get-tattooed.html

I have for the last twenty years have been trying to persuade myself into getting a tattoo of Schrodingers wave equation, someday I will, or maybe not.

<quote>It was the only fully featured music player / organizer (that I know about) that ran on the platform trinity (Linux, Windows, and Mac) out of the box. It looked and acted the same irregardless of the platform.</quote>

The Java based music player / organizer aTunes is fully cross platform and is in many ways comparable to Songbird in features.

<quote><blockquote><div><p>But the ones that buy into the scam, man, those are PLAIN IDIOTS.</p></div></blockquote><p> They probably figured that it would cost more time and money fighting these patent claims by MS than it would licensing bogus patents. If that's true, then it is clear that our patent system ought to be done away with entirely.</p></quote>

MS is probably paying them back more in some other related deal in order to pay I/O Data for joining in the FUD campaign the way they bought all the others who "paid" for MS licenses on unsupported patent claims against Linux

It is not particularity Windows like. It is just a standard KDE 3.5 desktop using the crystal icon set with a few new icons like the red star for the start menu icon. The file browser is Konqueror. Nothing new here. No special effort to make it look like Widows.

Yet again someone who just doesn't get what QM shows.

The evolution of the State Vector is unitary and therefore deterministic. That is a consequence of unitarity, as all the probabilities must add up to one. Any quantum experiment you perform can only return a probabilistic result. This is independent of whatever interpretation of QM you prefer and is not dependent on the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Einstein did not like the elimination of determinism from physical theory and believed a theory showing hidden variables that would establish determinism might be developed. He and his co-workers Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) developed a thought experiment designed to act as a reductio ad absurdum of a non-deterministic QM.

Von Neumann provided a mathematical proof that eliminated all local hidden variables theories of QM. Einstein disliked non-local deterministic theories of QM more than non-deterministic ones as the principle of locality is essential to relativity.

Later it was realized that the EPR thought experiment could be developed into a real experimental test of QM via the Bell inequality. Experiments have been carried out with QM confirmed and Einstein proved wrong. Hidden variable theories that restore determinism have been shown to be impossible.

The physical world we live in is fundamentally stochastic and it is one of the consequences of QM.

Indeed the Copenhagen Interpretation sucks and I prefer the Everett Relative State interpretation.

You don't understand quantum mechanics. For QM the world is fundamentally stochastic, not just pseudo random. Einstein didn't like this but he was wrong.

Einstein:

"God doesn't play dice"

Stephen Hawking:

"Not only does He play dice, He does it with his hands behind his back"

This sounds exactly like IE7 on my system at work. It crashes all the time. there are some websites it won't work with, compared to it Netscape 4 was a paragon of stability. It is even more unstable than Netscape 6.0

Anyway lets hope Google Chrome and Linux kill Microsoft's desktop monopoly.

Mark parent up. After getting laid off at my old company where we were using Office XP. I worked for for a couple of months at a company that had Office 2007, the ribbon presented a high learning curve and was totally counter intuitive for someone who had 15 years experience with various iterations of Word. What an inane infantile waste of time. I am now working for a company that has Office 2003. What a relief it is no longer a struggle to work out how to format a document.

As for Openoffice Writer it is a great program and the compatibility is now superb. I have used it ever since it was first released and before that back to Staroffice 5. I use it at home to produce word documents, spreadsheets and presentations in MS formats for collaboration with colleagues at work. Back five or more years ago I had to check the document formatting in MS Office at work and tweak the formatting differences. Now I no longer need to do that and I can send them the documents straight away, even sending it to them by email directly from home.

Not only are you weird you are wrong on this point, though you were more or less right
on your first three. Evolution operates on variation. The ultimate source of variation is mutation. The fundamental source of mutation is radiation and other events at a quantum mechanical level. Therefore evolution is stochastic. Without mutation while their could be some limited evolution by genetic rearrangements, however there could no longer be any evolution of proteins which is the real driver of evolutionary change.

Does that explain it simply enough.