A friend of mine works in a lot of internet marketing and used to do things like search optimization and whatnot. Trust me, no matter what user-based system you set up, people will work day and night to subvert it to push their products. Any sort of review or rating system would be corrupted very quickly.

So the system is inherently flawed.

I can't believe there's no way to design a more robust system of review that isn't prone to corruption. Maybe the FDA is that system, but it's an expensive and inefficient way to go. Of course though, any app that interfaces with a pacemaker or diabetic medication or something ought to be vetted by them. A "health and fitness app" less so.

Is this something that would respond to crowd-sourcing? I'm asking because I really don't know.

I've noticed that the reviews for apps have become much less reliable. Apple and Google have even started making it harder to break out the low-rated reviews on apps in their stores now, and there's so much manipulation of the reviews that it's impossible to fully trust them. And Apple and Google are far from blameless in this.

I wouldn't mind seeing some independent site that had sort of "wiki-reviews" of apps and medical apps might be a place to start. Let's see what some people with medical book-learnin' have to say about these things. We all know the wide range of quality of these things. This is one of those areas where anecdotal information would be pretty useful. I don't need to read peer-reviewed journal articles to know whether an app that measures and charts heart rate is useful, I just need to know if it does what it says it's doing. I've used an excellent sleep app for about a year now and I'm convinced that my experience matches what it's telling me, but I would have liked to know a little more in advance.

Having reviews on online stores was a good idea, but it's getting hopelessly corrupted. There's got to be some solution to this besides having the FDA have to chase it all down and delay the release of apps until they pass regulatory muster.

I'm so old, I still think an "engineer" is the guy who drives a train.

Clearly, a whale isn't going to be driving a train, though, so they must be the other type of engineer. But how do they work a slide rule with those flipper things?

Not him, this era.

A year ago, I would have said different, but I'm starting to get optimistic. Even the strange anti-corporate anti-authoritarian turn the Tea Party individuals have taken makes me optimistic.

What doesn't make me optimistic is the counter-revolutionary scum that's growing on the Left. Fortunately, those people are getting found out pretty quickly and exposed. The Obama dead-enders, the neo-feminists theoriticians and people who will tell you that privacy is "so 20th century".

I've got precious little energy left for those who would rather sit and point at "them" whether they be far-Left adbuster types or tea partiers. I had a bit of a revelation this weekend, hanging around a small Western Wisconsin town with a bunch of people who would consider themselves "tea party". They're figuring out that the Kochs and the mainstream AFP folks who've been funding the tea party don't really have their best interests at heart. They sounded a lot like the adbusters I know back home. Very strange times, when they figure out they've got converging interests, as they already have in Moral Monday parts of the South and anti-Keystone XL groups in Nebraska.

Or maybe it was just a nice quiet weekend in the country and I'm in a charitable mood. But you're right, fuck Obama. He's got nothing for me.

You do know they're a British government agency, right?

And the British government is an agency of The City bankers and imperial corporatists.

So what's your point?

When you can give an example of the BBC doing or saying something that runs counter to the interests of the economic elite, let me know.

your purportedly noble savages may not have been so noble

You mean Incas sacrificing their children by cutting their jugulars and allowing them to bleed out as a sacrifice to a volcano is not noble?

Yeah, now that I think about it, probably not. But white Europeans and their ancestors are the inventors of atrocity. Didn't you know that?

And look at all the American colonies in Africa, Asia, South America. The don't exist, except for the ones made by corporations, which are now transnational, and anything but liberal.

Say what you will about America and the Enlightenment. At least there is a learning curve. At least there isn't wholesale regression into stonings and female circumcision (Family Research Council not withstanding). Mistakes throughout, but more people have clean water and flush toilet. Women don't need to have 10 babies because 7 of them will die by age 4. We screw up other countries, sure, but even there you see something that represents a learning curve. And despite my misgivings about him (and Smitty's and JC's) Obama will be part of that ascending curve. Thing about culture and societies, even ideologies - they're trial and error. There's a reason the troglodytes screaming and trying to shame young women outside abortion clinics aren't gaining any traction: Because people mostly, and basically decent, and it's in part the residual of the European Enlightenment that has made them so and keeps them so and keeps them moving in the right direction. Guys like Smitty make the mistake of thinking it's been "Judeo Christian values" and "The Constitution" that have kept us together two and a half centuries, but it's neither. It's a basic desire among Americans to try to find some agreeable way to live together and to know when it's time to bend those hoary old chestnuts to make a decent life possible for more people. It's why most Americans are now willing to overlook Leviticus and support gay marriage. Legal and safe abortion. Birth control. And why despite the loud and well-funded protestations of the dead-enders, the hold outs, they're becoming extinct and we'll mainly be better off for it. It was never about "The Bible" or "The Constitution". It was about our willingness to adhere to some set of guidelines in order to live together and have as many people better off as possible. Until it's time to make a change, which in most cases, we make. In all of US history, there's only one group of people who have lost rights instead of gained them, and that's slave owners. Of course, now we're facing another threat in the form of the corporate fascists (and the police state they have given birth to), but I'm pretty optimistic that it will be dealt with (hopefully before too much more damage is done).

Considering the history of what humans have done to each other in the name of superstition, greed, envy, nationalism, racism, sexism and other sins, I'm not sure you can single out "Liberalism" as some special culprit. It might make you feel clever to do so, but it's basically grad-school drama. JC, you're too good for that. Like Smitty, the one you think is your enemy...is not.

Apologizing for history is a sucker's game. It's how the hustlers dine out. The magnificent Te-Nehisi Coates not withstanding. And while it's not usually my style to agree with Smitty One Each, it kind of is cheap propaganda. To what end? That's the question, yes?

Shit man, don't attract more attention on me! I, uh, use Windows! Windows...ummm...8? Is that the least terreristy one? I don't know! Don't rendition me, I'm harmless I swear!

We've always had different standards of punishments for different thoughts. State of mind is the difference between manslaughter, murder in the 2nd degree and murder in the 1st degree.

Hate crime consideration in sentencing is appropriate, because of the intent to terrorize a population in addition to the act committed.

If your neighbor is murdered by a business partner to collect insurance money, that's murder in the first degree. Terrible thing. Premeditated. You might be creeped out for awhile, but you feel no threat against you because the murderer had a specific target, for a specific reason, which has nothing to do with you.

Now let's say you're a black guy, and your neighbor's a black guy, and a bunch of dudes in white sheets string up your neighbor and light a lower-case letter t on fire in his lawn. That's murder in the first degree. Premeditated. However, in this case, in addition to killing that one black guy, the klansmen are clearly intending to intimidate and threaten the victim's neighbors and community. That additional damage done to a community, beyond the one act of murder, should be punished more harshly, as the perpetrators did more harm.

It's basically an added charge for "terrorism."

I don't think he actually bought the tools. He was googling around for some of them, and for a recipe for chloroform, but I just read the New Yorker article and it didn't say he bought any of the tools. He talked about having an oven he could fit a woman in, but didn't actually own such an oven. He also talked about having a cabin in the woods they could take a victim, but he didn't own such a cabin.

If he had bought the tools, yeah I'd say a conspiracy to commit murder charge might be appropriate, but he didn't. So it was still in the realm of fantasy.

As for using the police database for this, yeah, that's illegal, and that's what he correctly served his time for.

Regardless, the whole thing is creepy as fuck. Ordinarily, I wouldn't give a crap what somebody's fantasy or fetish is. Their business. Even this guy's. But once he started naming names and making plans, that pushes it over the edge. That is a hard, hard thing to say "live and let live" about.

Yeah, max 12 months? If it were a civilian misusing a government database (probably via DANGEROUS HAXORING!!) to find out personal information about police officers, they'd probably be charged separately for each officer they looked up, with 10 years per offense under the CFAA.

Naturally the `record' must be limited to the subset of known cases. I've been studying the history of Soviet nuclear science and industry for a few years. Things went on in the Soviet Union that beggars the imagination, as they say.

When the waste storage tank blew up in Mayak in 1957, 90% of the high level waste fell in the immediate vicinity. That's 90% of 740 PBq (740E15 decays per second) within about half a kilometer radius, in which there were certainly some number of workers, this being the most urgent period of nuclear weapons development.

There were criticality accidents at Mayak that killed people as well; the Review of Criticality Accidents (2000) mentions seven incidents at Mayak and eight at other Soviet sites.

Then there is Chernobyl. Shortly after the explosion soldiers on the grounds of the plant policed up pieces of graphite and other debris, including fuel, from the reactor core with simple tools, bare hands and no respiratory protection [1]. They were breathing particles of heavy metal isotopes so "hot" that they floated through the air on their own thermal output like little balloons. They were treated as military casualties and their numbers are not publicly known.

The worst case of radiation exposure took place in the Soviet Union. We do not know the circumstances, how severe it was, how many it killed, when or where it happened, but that it did is a metaphysical certitude.

1. The Legacy of Chernobyl, 1992 Medvedev

Oh, excuse me. I was reading too fast. My reply was predicated on the notion that the "traitors" in the original post referred to terrorists or something. For some reason (maybe the six beers I had shotgunned) I read "traitors" as "terrorists", and thought he was saying that we should dismantle the surveillance state only after we'd caught all the terrorists.

Of course we should behead the people responsible for the NSA overreach, and any unrepentant corporate fascists, after a brief and respectful trial. I'm still not completely comfortable with the "put their heads on pikes as a reminder to any public servant or CEO who would ever consider such surveillance again" but only because it doesn't sound very hygienic.

The problem is that a half-hour after you move into one of these houses, you want to move into another.

I'll take my chances with the traitors, thanks anyway.

Been there, and griped about it just before I saw your post. My guess is that "Mr Nice" was a bleeping idiot who didn't see the car in the other lane. I'm just glad I held back until I could see it.