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.

It's like a lot of these technological inventions coming up with the method is easy actually achieving it is harder. The quickest achievable one I can come up with is laser styled printer. Where the drum picks up the printing medium in a pass and you use a laser light to set and heat the medium in select areas and then apply it to the printing bed. As the drum makes each pass a layer is laid down, adhering to previous layers. Partially set printing media on the bed provides support for suspended parts, those parts as the same for the rest of of media are forced from the drum by the application of the appropriate charge at the appropriate location in conjunction with a charge in the printing media. All print media is partially set via electric current to provide support for set areas of print media, thus partial set media is recovered and recycled at the end of a print run. Thickness of each pass can be varied to accelerate printing.

So easy to came up with the idea, now putting it into practice is far more difficult including coming up with the printing medium. Of course the USPTO passes patents on far broader description with far less of an idea all to feed patent lawyers.

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.

The multi-verse. From chaos, every thing, every where, every when, life enforced a singular time line, some thing, some where, some when because you can never have nothing, no where, no when. Although not to be fooled, time as such doesn't exist, it is just a life based relative measure of change.

Yep, because that way, some privatised company can grab the research for free and then claim how much cheaper their stuff is, of course without reminding people it is cheaper because they didn't have to pay for all that research, they don't have to properly monitor space to ensure they can achieve a safe launch and orbit and they don't have to pay for all that rescue stuff. If we want to be doing more in our solar system, then we have to be researching and designing new stuff. We have to push the limits of our understanding. Otherwise as a society we will shrink back into self consuming parasitical nothings, eating ourselves to extinction, food for the psychopaths until our society collapses. To strive for nothing but greed is to strive for nothing at all.

Now add in those earthquakes and basically the completely fracturing of the formations that waste water was injected into and well, those estimates just reflect the intent of those estimates, sheer and utter bullshit to justifying the cheapest possible method of dumping that water, short of just dumping it straight into the nearest river or stream.

The legal requirement is the seller is to ensure the person making the purchase is the holder of the credit card, nothing more and nothing less. The commonly extort payment by threatening the holder of the card children with criminal charges even when under law the minor they threaten is to young to enter a contract. So the courts need to rule on real and actual harm. What is the real and actual harm engendered by a minor making a false purchase of a virtual product, would the parent have ever allowed the purchase, is the virtual product devalued and now second hand, is there a restocking cost of the virtual product ie what are the real and actual damages of the cancellation of the virtual product. Now that virtual product also logically has to extend to downloaded content, again, no devaluation of product, no restocking and the end user paid the delivery costs. So legal common sense needs to surmount insensate psychopathic greed. There is a penalty for failing to properly authenticate the purchaser and really as it is fraud and theft that penalty should be revised and made far more severe.

Yeah, nut everyone with half a brain who reads the reviews knows that Beats suck for the price. So point and laugh at the suckers and teach the a lesson they need to learn, don't believe anything coming out of the mouths of pseudo celebrity douche bags, they are full of it. I as a rule steer clear of any product with a psuedo celebrity endorsement, the immediate thought is they have wasted money spending it on the douche nozzle rather than on making a quality product. Now that's the lesson that needs to be spread far and wide.

The majority of psuedo celebrities are extroverts, in fact they are clinically narcissistic extroverts. Their behaviour tends to flood the air waves and is presented as normal and desirable, however this does not make it so.

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?