Apologies if I came off as 'all puckered', not my intent. I guess I'm a little exasperated with the rampant invocation of parental authority in this thread- I'm impressed, triplets- but that doesn't give you a PhD in clinical psychology, it means you're an understandably proud dad.
My point was simply that your data, while no doubt broader than you cited and convincing for you, don't conclusively support the conclusion you've reached. I've heard no evidence proving that these differences between your children are in fact innate (that they are not acquired through conditioning). Sure, they've lived in the same general circumstances, but different individuals will experience the same circumstances differently, that's par for pretty much all of humanity.
I'd buy into the notion that different individuals might be born with certain temperments or inclinations, but pre-programmed, specific aversions to things like blenders or vacuum cleaners? I believe (based on research) that specific fear responses are innate- they're common to all of us, which is why we can recognize fear in others- but don't accept the hypothesis that the object of those responses is somehow innate.
I've found that my son (10 months old) will cry when surprised by the blender, but if I make a lound noise before, the blender is a curiousity and he wants to know more. When very tired, the same stimulus will produce a different response. When teething, the same stimulus will produce a very different response. When gassy, the same stimulus will produce a profoundly different response. When hungry... you get the picture. We don't know the extent to which these conditions factor into the associative learning children do, even though we do know that many of the associations we all make are depressingly arbitrary.
Science is discovering that children learn, to some extent, in utero- they certainly respond to reading, parents' voices, music, loud noises, and late in term, bright lights. We've discovered a lot about the way we learn and self-program- that in particular, we model reality in terms of patterns we recognize, and that our recognition and mapping processes are quite arbitrary. Can there be any surprise that different developers will produce differently-behaving code? Why should there be any expectation that anybody should think like anybody else, given what we are self-programmed entities?
Give this similarity of experience and stimulation, why is it that one of my children was DEATHLY afraid of the vacuum cleaner from birth to 2 years old, while the other two were not afraid of it in the least?
Because you're not talking about innate fear. If fear of vacuum cleaners was innate, they'd all have it. You're talking about some aversions each of your kids developed, for some reason God only knows, to some arbitrary thing.
I think I have some pretty substantial data to back up my point.
...and when were you planning on sharing it? None of the data you've supplied supports your assertion that people are born with, or are presupposed to, certain fears. I understand you're the world's greatest expert on your kids, but all you've proven here is that they're different, you don't know why, and that hasn't stopped you having an opinion about how it happened.
Actually, none of the evidence supports this notion.
The study showed that when used, acquired physiological responses to pre-programmed stimuli could be 'un-programmed'. Specifically, mice were conditioned to expect an electric shock after hearing a specific tone, and this was tested by playing the tone and noticing that conditioned mice flinched, even when no shock was delivered. Those treated with the drug were able to un-learn their panic/freeze response, while those without it flinched every time they heard it, even after many months with no shocks.
Learned fear is one of the primary motivations behind the conscious and the ability to determine right and wrong. Take away fear, and watch out what people can be convinced to do.
I suppose if your level of moral capacity is to equate whether you'll get caught with being moral, then that's accurate. This is the moral capacity of your average 3-4 year-old, incidentally. Once you're past about 4 years old you've got the capacity to understand the 'would I want to be treated that way?' principle. (note that although we all have this capacity, we don't all use it fully all the time).
I'm more disturbed by the notion that you seem to think it's important to keep people afraid (otherwise they'll be uncontrollable). I would argue that fearful people do more evil than those who are not afraid.
Want to know what innate fear is? Next time you have an infant or toddler, go grab yourself a big, mean, snarling dog and set your child near it. That is an innate fear reaction.
How does that follow? Are you saying that because a child has never interacted with a big dog yet reacts in one's presence, that it must therefore be innate to fear big dogs?
This assertion (if I've understood it correctly) doesn't control for indirect experience- specifically, even though the child may have no knowledge of the nature of big mean dogs, you do. It may not be the dog the child is reacting to- it may be your response the child notices. Kids, especially those who haven't learned language, are sensitive to the kind of body-communication we all express, and even if you're not afraid of the dog (you might be afraid that the child will fear the dog) the expression is loud and clear. That's still a learned response, albeit learned not through direct experience of the dog, but indirectly, by noting your fear response to the dog and mapping their own fear response to it.
Also, don't mis-construe the reflexive nature of the startle reflex to be evidence of the innate-ness of [fear x]. Most fear is not innate.
To be honest, if I ever had to go into combat, I'd be begging for this stuff. If it works like I suspect it would, you'd avoid a lot of cases of shellshock that way.
Okay, I'll be behind you, drug free, retaining the fear-instilled good sense to duck.
You don't need fear to give you good sense; you need good sense, something fear doesn't provide. While the duck/cover/freeze/run away response might deliver an appropriate outcome, it might get you killed. Most fear-responses actually deny you use of your ability to use reason or sense, btw- hence, all that training.
Actually, the application this drug shows the most promise with is to help people un-hook the automatic fear responses that trigger in cases where the fear response is worse than the danger that might or might not be objectively present. Think: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, something that seriously degrades the quality of life for many people and limits their capacity to live healthy lives.
The way it works is pretty fascinating; in this study they played a sound, then gave the mice a shock. After a while, they just played the sound with no associated shock, and the mice that had received the shocks all froze, anticipating the shock that never came- this behavior persisted over the lifetime of the conditioned mouse. A different group of mice were given the shock and had the drug administered; these mice never developed the fear/freeze response. A subsequent group was played the sound and given shocks, developed a fear response to the sound, and when given the drug, swiftly un-learned their fear response to the sound. The same result could be achieved by simply giving the mice massive brain damage, but this was tested as well by 'programming' different associations to different stimuli (for example, different sounds)- the mice that un-learned their response to the initial pre-shock sound did not un-learn their responses to other stimuli.
This discovery has interesting implications, as it doesn't fit with our model of how memory works- we've traditionally thought of memories as immutable raw data, cached in our brain and read out of memory later. This suggests that what we remember isn't so much re-called as it is regenerated- the implication being that any time we experience a memory, we've got that set of associations open 'readable' in our brains, that we can dis-associate (for example) a panic-response from an experience pattern (like loud noise). For those of us who have been diagnosed with PTSD, this is potentially huge news.
I have an innate fear of combat and confrontation. This is an innate response.
You have a learned fear of combat and confrontation, and an automatic response that engages when you recognize yourself to be in a confrontational situation. It feels like you have no choice because it feels automatic, but that doesn't mean it's not learned. PTSD is learned, yet it engages automatically. Somewhere you learned (think of this as self-programming) to be afraid of whatever it is you've associated with confrontation- not all people are like that.
Fear is a conditioned response, related to physiological mechanisms present in all animals, the mechanics of which are only now being discovered- we know that certain regions of the brain manage different classic 'fear' responses, for example- there's one region that prompts a vocal wailing, the call that reunites a lost child with its mother, another region that governs a 'freeze' behavior, and yet another that prompts a violent, aggressive posturing, and another that spools up your system for fight/flight by speeding up heart rate, breathing, etc. We know that certain brain chemistry affects the way these systems are regulated and that genetics are involved, but we also know through clinical studies and experience that simply thinking and relating differently to the object of your fear can influence whether or not these primitive brain systems are triggered. In other words, these studies suggest that while the mechanics of your physiology are natural and instinctive, the act of engaging (or overriding) these systems is a learned, conditioned response.
millions of years of evolution have evolved a fight or flight response that tends to result in higher survival rates among those who don't ignore it.
It's not that simple. Animal behavior studies point out that there's a phenomenon called 'the handicap principle' observable in many species, whereby individuals who live dangerously but survive are favored when it comes time for mating- hence, perhaps, our urge to seek thrills and our admiration of strong, fit, or dynamic individuals. The urge to seek a little danger, to live gracefully under stress, lives in your genes too.
You're not that far off- modern people have eaten long-frozen mastadon. I forget who it was- either my AP Bio teacher or my friend's dad (a Bio Prof at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks) reports that it's quite good.
Are you suggesting that if inquiries into the data were accountable, (say, 'let me know who's looked at these records in the last n months') there might be less abuse? That technology exists, you know.:-)
I appreciate the value of healthy mistrust as a means to defend liberty, but it's an expensive way to go and I don't trust that it really truly defends our liberty. I'm just sayin'.
What if the government could collect all the info it wants, but couldn't use it for prosecution? We have admissibility laws to protect people from being prosecuted with evidence obtained via searches that don't meet a specific legal bar (like, was it obtained via a warrant). If we want legal protections, we could probably more easily establish a threshold for admissability of evidence and let the intelligence agencies collect all the data they want, but require law enforcement agencies to subpoena that information.
Preventing the government from collecting and storing information (specifically, in databases) doesn't protect your privacy- it just keeps the government ineffective at doing basic things that reasonably fall within the realm of what we'd expect it to do (like verify someone's identity, citizenship, right to vote, criminal record, etc). That the government isn't collecting your data doesn't mean the private sector isn't busy collecting that data and selling it to anyone willing to pay them for it. At a certain point, just stopping government from collecting data about us doesn't protect us- it just gets us ineffective law enforcement, and our private info is available to them anyhow- all they need to do is buy it on the black market, hush-hush.
Also note: law enforcement already has the right to obtain pretty much any information they want- the question is, when they're tracking a suspect by looking at credit card purchase activity, should they have to send an agent over to the card center to go through a paper file, or should they be able to subpoena that info and get it instantly in electronic format? In other words, we're not talking about protecting your personal information any more, since the government has limited rights to look at it already- the question is, are we willing to allow the government to use technology effectively to do the stuff it's already legitimately tasked with doing?
| Their old toolbar broke on Vista because it was referencing an API that was neither documented, supported, nor guaranteed to exist in later versions.|
This is an old argument. You control the documentation, support, and guarantees. Microsoft controls the DLL environment not Google. Please don't blame the people who use the environment, they are after all users.
Developers that don't follow the guidelines and get burned because they took a dependency on an undocumented API should be blamed for building their app around a faulty assumption. If it's not documented, it's not guaranteed to be there next time around, end of story. It's not like this hasn't been explained, publicly and repeatedly, for the last 15 years.
I understand your frustration- you want a perfectly interoperable system with perfect compatibility and APIs that do everything for you and never need to change, that consume zero resources and take no time to happen and will run on yesterday's hardware, and are completely, perfectly documented, transparent, and anticipate all future use cases and as-yet uninvented technologies adequately. The problem here is that your expectation is unrealistic.
Currently there are no products, nor are there likely to be any in the near future, that a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs. Furthermore, no firm that does not currently market Intel-compatible PC operating systems could start doing so in a way that would, within a reasonably short period of time, present a significant percentage of consumers with a viable alternative to existing Intel-compatible PC operating systems. It follows that, if one firm controlled the licensing of all Intel-compatible PC operating systems world-wide, it could set the price of a license substantially above that which would be charged in a competitive market and leave the price there for a significant period of time without losing so many customers as to make the action unprofitable. Therefore, in determining the level of Microsoft's market power, the relevant market is the licensing of all Intel-compatible PC operating systems world-wide.
What's interesting here is that Windows has had a search feature since Win95 days. It was never "anticompetitive" according to Google until now. Of course, it was never better than what Google has to offer until now, either.
More than just that: their careers page shows they've got development centers in Beijing, Copenhagen, Aachen, Hyderabad, Dublin, Haifa, Cambridge and Redmond. Not all or even half of these are in what I'd consider "cheap" labor markets.
eehhhhh.... you've got that backwards. Back in the BSOD days, they were mostly marketing, sorta somewhat a little bit engineering. Today they're a for-real engineering shop with an overgrown marketing department. Today MS is much more solid from an engineering point of view than they were, say, 10 years ago. BSODs are waaaaay less common than they were- they're virtually a thing of the past- they're just an engineering shop with a lot of crap legacy code they inherited from their cowboy predecessors.
No, what's happening here is simpler than that.
Windows has had built-in search forever, and it was never a concern to competitors because it sucked. Vista search does not suck- it blows the doors off of Google's desktop search- which is why it's suddenly anticompetitive.
You can't blame Google for playing the monopoly card here. You can roll your eyes tho, at the unintended consequence of anti-monopoly regulation, which in this case seems to punish the improvement of the product most people use (windows), for the sake of competitors that happen (in this case) to have inferior technology in this area.
You also can't blame Microsoft for developing a better mousetrap- they need to provide something compelling or else they'll be irrelevant and quickly at that.
It seems that Microsoft and Google each have a tiger by the tail, and are fighting for their survival, which would be good for us as consumers if the sort of fighting they were doing resulted in better technology....litigation, unfortunately, seems to produce crippleware instead of anything anybody wants.
Microsoft is violating a black letter agreement - blatantly
Are they? The DOJ seems satisfied with their remedy. From tfa:
The DOJ and all 17 state attorneys general agreed with Microsoft's proposal. "Plaintiffs are collectively satisfied that this agreement will resolve any issues the complaint may raise under the Final Judgments, provided that Microsoft implements it as promised," according to the joint filing.
Actually, there is. The Inuit make use of the salmon runs as well.
Having grown up in Alaska, with native friends (whose family participated in the hunts) I've got maybe a different view on the whale hunt. This isn't about food, it's about identity. The Inuit who live in western housing, who have electricity and regular groceries, who attend schools (often taught by non-inuits), who get around on motorized vehicles (snowmobiles in the winter, 3-and-4-wheelers in the summer), who receive dividends from their native corporations (these native corporations receive oil royalties) have feet in two cultural epochs- the industrial world and essentially the stone age.
Bridging these worlds isn't easy- their once-rich culture is declining, as the need it fulfilled (sustaining true subsistence hunter-gatherers in an incredible environment) slowly becomes a thing of the past. The Inuit are awesome, beautiful people and I don't envy them their position, nor do I begruge them this tradition. (even though I would never harm a whale or seal or walrus myself). It's the centerpiece of a culture that equated survival with community and cooperation- and their challenge for now is how to translate these values into their modern lives. The hunt is really a big deal- part rite of passage into manhood, part party, it's the time where disparate families and communities would meet, trade, where young adults from separate communities would court each other- imagine your life if suddenly the place where you did all of these things were gone.
We could learn a thing or two from the Inuit, just like they've got some stuff to learn from the rest of the world. This will take time. Maybe they'll replace the hunt with something else to serve all those other purposes. Maybe not. That's their thing, and they'll do it on their terms.
It will lose the idea that closed-source is better in a vast majority of their markets
I'm not so sure customers really care about open vs. closed source. All the real information I've seen suggest they just want to do their own work, and want something they know *will* work- and be supported in the future.
...so your "half the point" might be irrelevant to most people- I think the only people who really care about open/closed source are propeller-heads like us.
In fact, you can take that a step further and be even more selfless if contributing others harmed not only you, but all your loved ones, too, and also helped your enemies to harm more of your loved ones.
I'm not sure we do agree. There's nothing about altruism that requires self-harm- it TFA simply says that there's pleasure to be had in causing some benefit to someone else. There's no "if I win, you have to lose" or vice-versa here, benefit is not a zero-sum proposal.
I think your shared genes (and you recognizing the child as your offspring) account for the "kick" you get for changing your infant son's diapers.
That's a rationalization of a distinctly non-rational phenomenon... and I can rationalize with the best of them, but what happens with my son is not a rational thing. At all. This is a full-blown, emotional, makes-me-cry-it-feels-so-good experience, not some "bla bla for the betterment of the species" phenomenon I have to rationalize or talk myself into (like investing for my retirement, or driving the speed limit).
TFA describes non-rational altruism, where we give to others for the pleasure it gives us. I donate my time as a coach, I teach kayaking for the fun of it. It comes as no shock to me that science has discovered that we get pleasure from helping others; hell, I'm an addict.
My background as a coach is what has hammered this home for me: when the person I'm coaching achieves their goals, it's a win for me even though I don't get anything but the satisfaction of having been involved.
In a purely un-scientific sense, I coach and volunteer because doing so is part and parcel of being true to myself. Granted, there's no science to say what one's purpose is in life, but as long as I'm making stuff up, I'll say that my Raison D'etre is to help people. Doing it makes me feel good. Am I surprised they've found scientific evidence to say we're wired that way? Nooooo. I live for that stuff.
If we didn't get something out of giving, we wouldn't do it.
I can say without cynicism that if I didn't get incredible joy out of caring for my infant son (who is teething, very expressive about it, and quick as a ninja monkey) I don't know that any force on earth could make me change a dirty diaper- yet somehow it's strangely enjoyable and I come back for more.
It's pretty obvious if you think about it that we get a LOT out of contributing to others. My most-satisfying jobs have all been ones where I helped people out, my least-satisfying ones have been the ones where I couldn't tell that I was making any difference for anybody. I once put together a program to teach at-risk teens how to kayak, and when I told people what I was doing and asked for their help, they thanked me for creating the opportunity to donate gear, time, money and expertise. My experience asking for help to put the program together was quite surprising- I had thought it would be hard, they wouldn't want to, but it was the opposite: people are hungry for any chance to help others.
If you look broadly, people are willing to die in order to make a difference. People join the army in time of war to serve. They strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up in a crowded market, in order to serve. People will open their checkbooks and donate money, they'll give blood, they'll use their vacations to go build houses for people- there's not much people won't do for the chance to make a difference for others.
Slashdot Mirror
Apologies if I came off as 'all puckered', not my intent. I guess I'm a little exasperated with the rampant invocation of parental authority in this thread- I'm impressed, triplets- but that doesn't give you a PhD in clinical psychology, it means you're an understandably proud dad.
My point was simply that your data, while no doubt broader than you cited and convincing for you, don't conclusively support the conclusion you've reached. I've heard no evidence proving that these differences between your children are in fact innate (that they are not acquired through conditioning). Sure, they've lived in the same general circumstances, but different individuals will experience the same circumstances differently, that's par for pretty much all of humanity.
I'd buy into the notion that different individuals might be born with certain temperments or inclinations, but pre-programmed, specific aversions to things like blenders or vacuum cleaners? I believe (based on research) that specific fear responses are innate- they're common to all of us, which is why we can recognize fear in others- but don't accept the hypothesis that the object of those responses is somehow innate.
I've found that my son (10 months old) will cry when surprised by the blender, but if I make a lound noise before, the blender is a curiousity and he wants to know more. When very tired, the same stimulus will produce a different response. When teething, the same stimulus will produce a very different response. When gassy, the same stimulus will produce a profoundly different response. When hungry... you get the picture. We don't know the extent to which these conditions factor into the associative learning children do, even though we do know that many of the associations we all make are depressingly arbitrary.
Science is discovering that children learn, to some extent, in utero- they certainly respond to reading, parents' voices, music, loud noises, and late in term, bright lights. We've discovered a lot about the way we learn and self-program- that in particular, we model reality in terms of patterns we recognize, and that our recognition and mapping processes are quite arbitrary. Can there be any surprise that different developers will produce differently-behaving code? Why should there be any expectation that anybody should think like anybody else, given what we are self-programmed entities?
The study showed that when used, acquired physiological responses to pre-programmed stimuli could be 'un-programmed'. Specifically, mice were conditioned to expect an electric shock after hearing a specific tone, and this was tested by playing the tone and noticing that conditioned mice flinched, even when no shock was delivered. Those treated with the drug were able to un-learn their panic/freeze response, while those without it flinched every time they heard it, even after many months with no shocks. I suppose if your level of moral capacity is to equate whether you'll get caught with being moral, then that's accurate. This is the moral capacity of your average 3-4 year-old, incidentally. Once you're past about 4 years old you've got the capacity to understand the 'would I want to be treated that way?' principle. (note that although we all have this capacity, we don't all use it fully all the time).
I'm more disturbed by the notion that you seem to think it's important to keep people afraid (otherwise they'll be uncontrollable). I would argue that fearful people do more evil than those who are not afraid.
This assertion (if I've understood it correctly) doesn't control for indirect experience- specifically, even though the child may have no knowledge of the nature of big mean dogs, you do. It may not be the dog the child is reacting to- it may be your response the child notices. Kids, especially those who haven't learned language, are sensitive to the kind of body-communication we all express, and even if you're not afraid of the dog (you might be afraid that the child will fear the dog) the expression is loud and clear. That's still a learned response, albeit learned not through direct experience of the dog, but indirectly, by noting your fear response to the dog and mapping their own fear response to it.
Also, don't mis-construe the reflexive nature of the startle reflex to be evidence of the innate-ness of [fear x]. Most fear is not innate.
Actually, the application this drug shows the most promise with is to help people un-hook the automatic fear responses that trigger in cases where the fear response is worse than the danger that might or might not be objectively present. Think: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, something that seriously degrades the quality of life for many people and limits their capacity to live healthy lives.
The way it works is pretty fascinating; in this study they played a sound, then gave the mice a shock. After a while, they just played the sound with no associated shock, and the mice that had received the shocks all froze, anticipating the shock that never came- this behavior persisted over the lifetime of the conditioned mouse. A different group of mice were given the shock and had the drug administered; these mice never developed the fear/freeze response. A subsequent group was played the sound and given shocks, developed a fear response to the sound, and when given the drug, swiftly un-learned their fear response to the sound. The same result could be achieved by simply giving the mice massive brain damage, but this was tested as well by 'programming' different associations to different stimuli (for example, different sounds)- the mice that un-learned their response to the initial pre-shock sound did not un-learn their responses to other stimuli.
This discovery has interesting implications, as it doesn't fit with our model of how memory works- we've traditionally thought of memories as immutable raw data, cached in our brain and read out of memory later. This suggests that what we remember isn't so much re-called as it is regenerated- the implication being that any time we experience a memory, we've got that set of associations open 'readable' in our brains, that we can dis-associate (for example) a panic-response from an experience pattern (like loud noise). For those of us who have been diagnosed with PTSD, this is potentially huge news.
Fear is a conditioned response, related to physiological mechanisms present in all animals, the mechanics of which are only now being discovered- we know that certain regions of the brain manage different classic 'fear' responses, for example- there's one region that prompts a vocal wailing, the call that reunites a lost child with its mother, another region that governs a 'freeze' behavior, and yet another that prompts a violent, aggressive posturing, and another that spools up your system for fight/flight by speeding up heart rate, breathing, etc. We know that certain brain chemistry affects the way these systems are regulated and that genetics are involved, but we also know through clinical studies and experience that simply thinking and relating differently to the object of your fear can influence whether or not these primitive brain systems are triggered. In other words, these studies suggest that while the mechanics of your physiology are natural and instinctive, the act of engaging (or overriding) these systems is a learned, conditioned response.
It's not that simple. Animal behavior studies point out that there's a phenomenon called 'the handicap principle' observable in many species, whereby individuals who live dangerously but survive are favored when it comes time for mating- hence, perhaps, our urge to seek thrills and our admiration of strong, fit, or dynamic individuals. The urge to seek a little danger, to live gracefully under stress, lives in your genes too.
You misspelled Colonel Angus , friend.
Are you suggesting that if inquiries into the data were accountable, (say, 'let me know who's looked at these records in the last n months') there might be less abuse? That technology exists, you know. :-)
I appreciate the value of healthy mistrust as a means to defend liberty, but it's an expensive way to go and I don't trust that it really truly defends our liberty. I'm just sayin'.
What if the government could collect all the info it wants, but couldn't use it for prosecution? We have admissibility laws to protect people from being prosecuted with evidence obtained via searches that don't meet a specific legal bar (like, was it obtained via a warrant). If we want legal protections, we could probably more easily establish a threshold for admissability of evidence and let the intelligence agencies collect all the data they want, but require law enforcement agencies to subpoena that information.
Preventing the government from collecting and storing information (specifically, in databases) doesn't protect your privacy- it just keeps the government ineffective at doing basic things that reasonably fall within the realm of what we'd expect it to do (like verify someone's identity, citizenship, right to vote, criminal record, etc). That the government isn't collecting your data doesn't mean the private sector isn't busy collecting that data and selling it to anyone willing to pay them for it. At a certain point, just stopping government from collecting data about us doesn't protect us- it just gets us ineffective law enforcement, and our private info is available to them anyhow- all they need to do is buy it on the black market, hush-hush.
Also note: law enforcement already has the right to obtain pretty much any information they want- the question is, when they're tracking a suspect by looking at credit card purchase activity, should they have to send an agent over to the card center to go through a paper file, or should they be able to subpoena that info and get it instantly in electronic format? In other words, we're not talking about protecting your personal information any more, since the government has limited rights to look at it already- the question is, are we willing to allow the government to use technology effectively to do the stuff it's already legitimately tasked with doing?
I understand your frustration- you want a perfectly interoperable system with perfect compatibility and APIs that do everything for you and never need to change, that consume zero resources and take no time to happen and will run on yesterday's hardware, and are completely, perfectly documented, transparent, and anticipate all future use cases and as-yet uninvented technologies adequately. The problem here is that your expectation is unrealistic.
What's interesting here is that Windows has had a search feature since Win95 days. It was never "anticompetitive" according to Google until now. Of course, it was never better than what Google has to offer until now, either.
More than just that: their careers page shows they've got development centers in Beijing, Copenhagen, Aachen, Hyderabad, Dublin, Haifa, Cambridge and Redmond. Not all or even half of these are in what I'd consider "cheap" labor markets.
eehhhhh.... you've got that backwards. Back in the BSOD days, they were mostly marketing, sorta somewhat a little bit engineering. Today they're a for-real engineering shop with an overgrown marketing department. Today MS is much more solid from an engineering point of view than they were, say, 10 years ago. BSODs are waaaaay less common than they were- they're virtually a thing of the past- they're just an engineering shop with a lot of crap legacy code they inherited from their cowboy predecessors.
ooooo... how badly I wish I had mod points for you. That was funny.
No, what's happening here is simpler than that.
...litigation, unfortunately, seems to produce crippleware instead of anything anybody wants.
Windows has had built-in search forever, and it was never a concern to competitors because it sucked. Vista search does not suck- it blows the doors off of Google's desktop search- which is why it's suddenly anticompetitive.
You can't blame Google for playing the monopoly card here. You can roll your eyes tho, at the unintended consequence of anti-monopoly regulation, which in this case seems to punish the improvement of the product most people use (windows), for the sake of competitors that happen (in this case) to have inferior technology in this area.
You also can't blame Microsoft for developing a better mousetrap- they need to provide something compelling or else they'll be irrelevant and quickly at that.
It seems that Microsoft and Google each have a tiger by the tail, and are fighting for their survival, which would be good for us as consumers if the sort of fighting they were doing resulted in better technology.
Having grown up in Alaska, with native friends (whose family participated in the hunts) I've got maybe a different view on the whale hunt. This isn't about food, it's about identity. The Inuit who live in western housing, who have electricity and regular groceries, who attend schools (often taught by non-inuits), who get around on motorized vehicles (snowmobiles in the winter, 3-and-4-wheelers in the summer), who receive dividends from their native corporations (these native corporations receive oil royalties) have feet in two cultural epochs- the industrial world and essentially the stone age.
Bridging these worlds isn't easy- their once-rich culture is declining, as the need it fulfilled (sustaining true subsistence hunter-gatherers in an incredible environment) slowly becomes a thing of the past. The Inuit are awesome, beautiful people and I don't envy them their position, nor do I begruge them this tradition. (even though I would never harm a whale or seal or walrus myself). It's the centerpiece of a culture that equated survival with community and cooperation- and their challenge for now is how to translate these values into their modern lives. The hunt is really a big deal- part rite of passage into manhood, part party, it's the time where disparate families and communities would meet, trade, where young adults from separate communities would court each other- imagine your life if suddenly the place where you did all of these things were gone.
We could learn a thing or two from the Inuit, just like they've got some stuff to learn from the rest of the world. This will take time. Maybe they'll replace the hunt with something else to serve all those other purposes. Maybe not. That's their thing, and they'll do it on their terms.
TFA describes non-rational altruism, where we give to others for the pleasure it gives us. I donate my time as a coach, I teach kayaking for the fun of it. It comes as no shock to me that science has discovered that we get pleasure from helping others; hell, I'm an addict.
My background as a coach is what has hammered this home for me: when the person I'm coaching achieves their goals, it's a win for me even though I don't get anything but the satisfaction of having been involved.
In a purely un-scientific sense, I coach and volunteer because doing so is part and parcel of being true to myself. Granted, there's no science to say what one's purpose is in life, but as long as I'm making stuff up, I'll say that my Raison D'etre is to help people. Doing it makes me feel good. Am I surprised they've found scientific evidence to say we're wired that way? Nooooo. I live for that stuff.
People who express their opinions should be locked up. In little cages. In my opinion.
OK, it's intended to be ironic- hating the haters doesn't make one morally upright, it makes one part of the problem.
If we didn't get something out of giving, we wouldn't do it.
I can say without cynicism that if I didn't get incredible joy out of caring for my infant son (who is teething, very expressive about it, and quick as a ninja monkey) I don't know that any force on earth could make me change a dirty diaper- yet somehow it's strangely enjoyable and I come back for more.
It's pretty obvious if you think about it that we get a LOT out of contributing to others. My most-satisfying jobs have all been ones where I helped people out, my least-satisfying ones have been the ones where I couldn't tell that I was making any difference for anybody. I once put together a program to teach at-risk teens how to kayak, and when I told people what I was doing and asked for their help, they thanked me for creating the opportunity to donate gear, time, money and expertise. My experience asking for help to put the program together was quite surprising- I had thought it would be hard, they wouldn't want to, but it was the opposite: people are hungry for any chance to help others.
If you look broadly, people are willing to die in order to make a difference. People join the army in time of war to serve. They strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up in a crowded market, in order to serve. People will open their checkbooks and donate money, they'll give blood, they'll use their vacations to go build houses for people- there's not much people won't do for the chance to make a difference for others.