Have you ever used a Newton? They used soups instead of a file system which very much addressed the problems you point out.

I work for a labor union in the US and what you describe is the same as what we have here. I think one big benefit of unions that is often overlooked is grievances. Before I was a unionized worker I often had to deal with my boss blaming his mistakes on me and taking credit for my ideas. This kept me from getting raises and promotions as it marred my permanent record. Had I been unionized I would have been able to file a grievance and an investigation would have taken place to determine whether my story or my boss's was true. I haven't had such problems with my current job but I feel much better knowing I'm protected should anything arise. Working for the union, we encounter a lot of problems like this though. For example, we have an employee here on a visa getting paid for one month but being told he better show up for 4 months. If he does not, his family who is also here on visa could be fired and be sent back to their home country. Without a union he'd be powerless to fight this. I think part of the problem creating with the antiunion sentiment in the US is that the relatively few instances when unions are awarded to much are highly publicized while the instances when unions were able to improve conditions bordering on slavery for workers are not. Another part of the problem is that non-unionized workers tend to respond to to hearing what unionized workers get with thoughts such as "That's not fair. Look at how much worse what I'm getting is and look at what they've demanded" instead of "That's not fair, we should unionize and get the same benefits."

Does anyone know if the collection of samples would have been redundant with those collected by NASA's stardust? I have been having trouble understanding the what else Hayabusa was to add but perhaps it's main job was to test new technology.

The claim was normal vision. Nearsightedness, though common, is by definition not normal vision. If you are going to start a sentence with "Some people can..." then you can't make a claim that the statement for normal vision is false.

I also think the cited expert looks for needless fights. At the end of the article he also starts one over the Quattron display. His claim is that since yellow is created using the RGB pixels the fourth color makes no difference. As was evident in the slashdot discussion on the same subject way back, at the very least we can say the issue is way more complicated than that. In fact, every artist I ask has quite a bit to say about CMYK vs RGB and the addition of Y to RGB. I think the reason he nitpicked the iphone 4 instead of the quattron (aside from that last paragraph) is that you can get much more people interested if you're nitpicking apple instead of sharp.

Are you sure about this? At every company I've worked for they told us never to reveal a competitors secrets if we ever obtained them. My current employer described, for example, a scenario in which someone offered to sell a competitors designs and told us we should contact the FBI if this happened. They also cited a famous case where someone tried to sell coke's formula to pepsi and explained that pepsi could not legally purchase it and so they contacted the FBI. All of my employers have reminded me of this fact at least yearly. I would assume it would also be illegal to publish apple's trade secrets

But what I find interesting is that the article seems to imply that the effects of ketamine are similar in different individuals: tunnels of light, the presence of god, etc. If that chemical has these specific hallucinations as effects, perhaps there are other factors that cause the negative NDEs such as different chemicals or different neural activity or different brain architectures

I'm also curious about people who see hell which none of the articles mention. I've read accounts of people feeling that they move to hell when they die and experience either eternal loneliness or demons eating them, etc. Apparently a small minority of NDEs are negative. None of the articles linked mention negative NDEs. I wonder if hell may be the effect ketamine has on some people just like some drugs have different effects on different minds. Or perhaps a different chemical is produced entirely maybe hell is part of the trauma that occurs if ketamine is not released. I've noticed an apparent similarity between waking and NDE. In both circumstances a small amount of time can seem feel very long. It would be very interesting to learn how a defensive chemical interacts with the activity in the brain that occurs as one is dying and comparing to other psychological phenomena

I graduated from Haverford in 2005. It's a fairly prestigious small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia (it was ranked 4th when I got in in 2001 but much of its endowment in 9/11 and is now ranked 8th by us news). It's a very liberal college with a quaker history though I believe it no longer has an official religious affiliation. The college is strong in the sciences which is the reason I went there. My faculty advisor, Gerry Gollub, for example, is recognized as a leader in the field of fluid dynamics. It takes pride in its campus and arboretum and I've heard many people with no affiliation with the college say it has the most beautiful campus in the US. Most students take about a quarter of their courses at Bryn Mawr college which is a similar but all girls college. Most events are shared between the colleges and there's considered to be little difference between a Haverford student and a Bryn Mawr student in terms of what they have permission to do. There is also a lesser relationship with Swarthmore college and the University of Pennsylvania. The college also is very proud of its honor code. Students, for example, may take tests home and are trusted not to open their text books while taking them. I would guess the college's pride in their honesty and trustworthiness was a major motivation in their decision to return the letter.

Right. How can a witness say she was raped, clearly enough that the defendant confessed and the officer recalls her saying she was never forced in that interview. Don't say his memory was fuzzy or anything because there is no way a fuzzy memory of maybe not recalling a woman saying she was raped should exclude her testimony. We live in a society where people either as incompetent or as biased for whatever reason can be cops. Their testimony is considered more credible than any physical evidence or the testimony of witnesses and victims.