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Comment Human Safety Computing (Score 1) 30

To what extent are we able to compute safety related human dynamics issues and what is slowing us down in this particular programming area?

Can we ever come up with a safety system for a workplace that would be able to overcome employee buy-in issues early on, especially if the typical large corporation is in a constant tug of war with profit and employee needs?

You see whenever we introduce changes in policy in the workplace, employees assume they are going to be required to do MORE but they are not getting more money for the work so this tends at times to cause resistance from employees to safety policies. Management doesn't often understand the issues at hand so they tend to make contradictory safety policies as well, saying that things need to be addressed in a timely fashion.

But in the aftermath of this complexity, companies are often just faking safety in order to appear to be safe when in fact they are running at a significant moral hazard to everyone (their staff, the general public and anyone else for that matter).

This particular problem is of great interest to me and I find that whenever there is an imbalance between management and employee needs there is a systemic problem that is solvable but yet only once all the variables are on the table. The problem with human safety is that most of the variables are unknown.

The general equation for solving safety related issues is:

For every task an employee is required to do or will reasonably be presented with, the employee must be trained to perform the task safely within prescribed safety policy. This idea is fundamentally at odds with bravado in the workplace, hero complexes, profit margins and it goes directly against human psychopathy that is prevalent in modern corporate culture.

What's the best approach to stabilizing a safety model?

Comment Re:Signals (Score 1, Interesting) 144

Unless the particles aren't the message but the means of communication. Maybe they form some kind of field mechanic communications bridge to enable instantaneous communications?

We should consider something like this instead of probes like Voyager. Eventually we'll find a way to use fields or lasers as a communications field conduit that enables immediate lagless communications. Someone is probably working on this right now. To some extent the teleportation technology we've seen for communications could use such beams as guidance and accelerators that cut down lag. So maybe instead of thousands of years the lag is like a day or an hour or a few minutes.

A darker side of this could mean that the existence these focused particles could prove someone is communicating with their homeworld from Earth.

The film Kpax used this kind of idea as his transportation method, which was a pretty awesome film.

Makes for some awesome sci-fi even if it's far fetched!

Comment Signals (Score -1, Flamebait) 144

It would be really cool if we discovered these particles were actually packets of alien data. I mean if WE found a new civ and we decided to contact them I wonder how they would adapt to our technology. Wouldn't it present in a kind of similar way?

Because if these particles are pretty special, which they are, then can we not assume they might not be naturally occurring?

Comment Garbage In (Score 1, Insightful) 231

Mobile industry is afoul with moral hazard. They simply don't care about their clients because they only want to get paid once and then milk the clients for information.

Google's Android phones flat out REFUSE to uninstall Facebook, for example.

Users do not have control because we're experiencing what Oligarchy feels like.

Some of us remember what it was once like when you wanted to buy something and they would kiss your ass and make you at home while you were shopping. If you had any problems they would bend over backwards to serve you. That mentality is dead in the goods & service industry.

We are approaching the dusk of the psychopathic corporation era. Nothing after that folks. Thanks for playing.

Comment Re:JS (Score 2) 68

JS is totally impulsive for a site designer. They just decide to add so many different bells and whistles that they don't have enough time to do penetration tests on any of it. They grab source code from ANYWHERE and tack it on their site. Nobody checks that stuff.

Run NoScript and there are tons of sites calling 10+ different JS blocks.

Moral hazard.

Comment Counter-suit (Score 1) 272

Amazon has deep pockets and they could be bullying an employee here. Many non-competes are thrown out when court challenged. This case could come down to how poorly Amazon may have treated this employee. A non-compete is not a writ of slavery.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score 4, Interesting) 82

People aren't evil. The simple fact is if a publisher sells a book at a fair price people would rather pay money than simply download the book.

Case in point against DRM are the musicians and comedians who are offering a "pay what you want" model that is so successful these guys make MORE money than they would through a traditional publisher, with less advertising and less overall effort. Time is money.

So yeah some guy will offer the book for free... and a few people will see the link and realize they can BUY the thing, and they'll do that instead. The people who download it wouldn't have bought it anyway. How many books do you read at Chapters? Do you buy EVERY BOOK?

Nope.

Comment Re:Anti-Competitive (Score 1) 69

It would be nice if big corporations were self-policing, but it's unlikely they ever will become like that since the quick-buck-patch-job is short term better for investers and investers only tend to care about fast rewards, not long term gains. Google has to consider that stalling their growth will cause a giant swing downward.

Comment Re:Anti-Competitive (Score 1) 69

You can't have it both ways, though. You either support the narrow religious dogma based "trust us" approach of the big corporation or you require proof before believing what these fortune 100 companies say.

Science means we reject everything that is not demonstrable.

You either allow men like Neil Degrasse Tyson lead your mindset or you follow the Ballmers et al.

Don't be fooled. Google did a 180Â on their net neutrality stance.

Unless Google is willing to embrace open scrutiny, we have to assume they will prioritize their bottom line and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. But by all means let's succumb to group-think while we have our net neutrality stripped away one service at a time.

You are a fool if you believe otherwise.

Comment Anti-Competitive (Score 0, Troll) 69

Okay I'll bite. Google have set themselves up as the front door of the internet. They manage a huge chunk of email, and they index the web to provide access to the web on a search basis. Google is therefore in the business of ad sales because businesses want to be visible on the web and if the majority of people are using Google to find things and send email about things, then Google is in the perfect position to earn money while providing a valuable service.

Nothing says evil like monopoly. Google offering domain registry will lead to Google offering hosting. Now then you have the official position of Google on Net Neutrality in theory but you have an all encompassing reality where it is very easy for Google to fudge the rankings in favour of those companies who pay them money for hosting and domain registry. Those domains will get priority indexing. That's the opposite of net neutrality. There is no way to prove that Google won't give priority indexing to domains it registers.

This is what we call a conflict of interest, and that is evil unless Google is willing to become completely transparent and verifiable, which will never happen because they are a traded company.

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