Re:R is fine if you're in love with statistics
on
Go R, Young Man
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· Score: 1
Derp. Never do wrong, not also could do wrong. Shouldn't post to slashdot before coffee.
Re:R is fine if you're in love with statistics
on
Go R, Young Man
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Exactly.
For the average person working at a medium-to-large company (or even small ones, really), VBA (or whatever scripting language your office suite uses) will be much more valuable than R.
Back when I still cared about such things, you also could do wrong with stuff like Crystal Reports and learning to actually use MS Access. The PHB doesn't understand code or programming - they don't mean anything to him - but if you can hand him the data that he wants in a beautiful format and make his spreadsheet jump through flaming hoops, he'll be impressed.
No, actually. You need to turn your brain on and reread my comment. The key words there (which you quoted, ironically enough) were "out of anger."
For that few seconds where I actually would have killed someone, I didn't have a vehicle, IED, knife, brick, chair leg, or rock in my pocket. I did have a pencil, but that's one-on-one combat, and I wasn't any good at that. Not that I didn't consider it.
I wonder where you went to school that you had easy access to the things listed above. My town funds their schools well enough that bricks don't just come out of the walls at a tug, and chair legs don't snap off without a great deal of force. The janitors are pretty good at keeping rocks and other debris out of the halls, and it was against the rules to carry knives, explosives, or drive your cars inside the building.
By the time I would had access to any of the above things, I was calm enough that I wasn't going to kill someone.
That's the point, actually. The FCC makes the regulations that govern communications under their mandate. Congress (usually) lets them do their thing, because they're the experts.
Congress has authority to set policy, and this is what they're doing. The FCC will update regulations to reflect that policy if needs be.
This is more of a political corporate greed vs. public good thing, though, so it's not like it's really a technical argument. Politicians understand how money flows, and that's what's at stake here.
There's a book by Charles Stross named Rule 34 that deals with trying to regulate 3D printing. It focused more on child sex dolls than guns, but the concept is the same.
Taking your gun to school is only seen as a problem because some people choose to act hysterically when it comes to a particular bit of modern technology.
Taking your gun to school is only seen as a problem because kids make bad judgement calls and haven't mastered their tempers. Having weapons around them is generally considered a bad idea.
Seriously. If I had a gun at school, and nobody stopped me, I would have shot four or five people (at least) out of anger, and I've always had a fairly even temper. I wouldn't do that now, but I'm an adult now.
Keeping adults from carrying guns into schools makes sense, because there's no reason to have one there. The only people that have a reason to bring guns into a school are either A) cops, which are authorized to do so, B) lunatics who want to shoot up the place, or C) instructors who want to use a gun as an example when teaching kinematics or history. A) is a non-issue, B) we don't want and C) is unnecessary since we have powerpoint and projectors.
They were never any where near as big nor as important to the industry to begin with!
I would argue that Mozilla was, at one point, more important to the industry than Sun ever was.
Sure, Sun's impact on UNIX was huge, but let's face it; UNIX has had little direct effect on the majority of people. For those things where UNIX was widely used, something else would have been used had UNIX not been there.
Mozilla broke the IE monopoly and returned control of web standards to the community at large. I shudder to think what the web would be like had Microsoft maintained control over web standards all this time.
The success of a large open source project aimed at general users also changed the opinions of many important people in the industry.
Mozilla's not imploding like Sun not because they've never been important or big, but because open source projects don't implode the same way large corporations do. To do implode, but it's rarely from a dip in marketshare - it's usually over personality conflicts (too many to name here) or developer disinterest (XFree86, abandonware). It's too big for either of those to happen - personality conflicts at this stage would just lead to a fork, not abandonment.
Other people have given various examples, but I'd like to add two:
Mozilla proved (eventually) that open source development of a major, widely-used program was possible. It unfortunately wasn't enough to save Netscape (the company), but most people hadn't heard of open source before Mozilla (or only heard of it in relation to Linux).
Mozilla made web standards important. Netscape and IE added extensions all over the place, and due to their dominance (first Netscape, then IE) they were defacto standards, even when the W3C disagreed with them. Ask anyone who did web development circa 2000 how fun that was. The Mozilla team decided to follow the W3C standards, and when it gained enough marketshare to outshine IE, it forced IE to do the same. Neither are perfect, but they're a lot better than they used to be, and the situation for web developers isn't as bad.
(Granted, the whole HTML5 thing was more or less a revolution against the W3C and its unrealistic viewpoint that webpages should all look like research papers, and Mozilla did take a leading role in that, but that's just something that needed to happen. We have HTML5 now and the W3C seems to be better about things these days.)
Sure, there aren't a lot of "spauldos" out there, so people could find stuff from me by that name (hopefully they see that attribution in the iptools howto and think it was for something technical and important rather than correcting the author's use of "learn" and "teach"), but my social media presence is almost null. I probably reveal more of myself on slashdot than anywhere else, and I only post on here a few times a year.
I never install apps on my phone that require access to extra stuff (why does this Stitcher update need to read my contacts? Play Store->remove), I don't have a facebook account, and all anyone can tell by my google+ account is that I like to rant about really geeky technical stuff (and occasionally about cooking). Good luck getting a picture of me from that - anyone who talks to me for more than ten minutes knows I'm an old geek.
My girlfriend thinks I'm nuts, but my privacy is important to me. It's the next generation that doesn't care about it. Until us old farts are dead, I don't think there will be a problem.
Congress oversees the FCC. The FCC has to abide by law. If congress passed a law that FCC workers had to wear their underpants on their heads while at work (and the courts didn't overturn it), they'd have to do so.
If the FCC's mandate was set up by a constitutional amendment, then they wouldn't be able to change it without another amendment - but it was set up by a law, and newer laws trump older laws.
That wouldn't solve much. Our system is set up in a way that it reaches equilibrium in a two-party system. A lot of the decisionmaking is done on the party level, and that wouldn't change.
If you want a multiparty system, you'd have to change the way voting works. I'd love to see a good setup for runoff voting in this country. I don't care much for either party (although Bush and then the Tea Party has made me hate the Republican party with the fire of a white supergiant), and my views are a mix between the two (along with a few "socialist" ideas like public ownership of natural monopolies, like last-mile broadband lines). I believe that with more parties to choose from, we'd have a government that is more representative of the people.
The FCC isn't writing laws. It's operating by its legal mandate, which it is required to by law. It's delegation from an authority (congress) to a skilled subordinate (FCC).
It's overseen by elected lawmakers. This is congress doing its job - overseeing the FCC.
Those unelected bureaucrats know a lot more about what the FCC does than congress. That's why they make the regulations. Congress has authority over them because they're accountable to their corporate donors^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H constituency.
So this is things working like they should. The alternative is having congress vote on every little thing from how many janitors the social security office in Cheyenne, WY has to emergency fire procedures for every government building everywhere.
That would be the uninformed armchair libertarian with a poor ability for critical thinking.
The free market won't work for telecom. The last mile problem ensures that whoever has the wire in the ground always has a huge advantage over everyone else. That leads to what economists call a natural monopoly. If not for regulation that forces those lines to be shared, we'd all be running low-speed DSL and paying three times as much for it.
There's a similar situation with electricity. I can buy my electricity from several sources, because the law says the local power provider that owns the lines (the city government, in my case, but not in the rest of the county) has to provide that option. It's regulation, sure, but it's anti-monopoly regulation. The only monopoly is the owner of the lines themselves, which is why they're regulated to make sure they play fair.
You know that saying that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well, the free market philosophy is a hammer. Great for a lot of stuff, but it doesn't work everywhere. Sometimes regulation is a good thing. It's the only thing that can control natural monopolies.
The president can't make laws. He can make "executive orders," but there are limits on what an executive order can do, and it can be overturned by the courts (as can laws).
The president is the head of the executive branch, tasked with carrying out the laws set by the legislative branch. Since the FCC is a department of the executive branch, the president has direct control over its day to day operations, but he can't change their mandate or order them to act outside their authority authorized by congress.
The FCC is tasked by law (actual law, not executive order) with regulating certain types of communication. Within the boundaries of that law, they can make regulations. What's being proposed here is a law prohibiting the new regulations, which the FCC would have to follow.
I doubt your parliament votes on things like what hours a ranger station is manned at a national park, or when to patch potholes on a highway. Those decisions are made by (supposed) experts closer to the problem. It's the same here - the FCC has a job, and making rules for communication is one of those jobs. Their rules have the backing of the legislature. If congress feels a rule is in error, they only have to pass a law changing it.
NT 4.0 came out in 1996, not 1999. Earlier versions had the same look and feel as Windows 3.x, which would have been _really_ out of place in 1999.
We had it installed on a 166MHz Alpha back in '97, I think. Funny thing - flood ping the thing and it's like a pause button. Everything just stops. Stop pinging, the clock skips forward and everything goes on as normal.
My friend with the Aplha wasn't amused. He was less amused every time he left and came back to Linux running on it.
Sure, you've got good points about failures in/dev/random. Surprise, there have been problems - just like there's been problems with pretty much all code everywhere at some time.
But what exactly do you expect kernel developers to do?/dev/random exists, and a lot of stuff uses it. It's expected to be there. Kernel developers (especially BSD developers, who tend to view UNIX much more conservatively than Linux developers) are going to make sure that the service is available and as bug-free as possible. You might not like/dev/random, but it's not going to go away any time soon.
I don't use Linux for anything important (I'm a BSD guy these days - Linux is for desktops in my opinion), so I don't know what to tell you about rngd. I have noticed that a lot of "system" level stuff seems to be on the backburner compared to nifty convenience features. If you need a working rngd, it's up to you to find a working configuration and push it to your servers. Treat it like ntpd or any other service that requires site-specific configuration. I do know that I would expect something like random number generation to be working flawlessly in BSD, but Linux today... I can't say I'm surprised.
/dev/random has been part of UNIX for ages. It's part of the system, and expected to be there. The kernel developers take it seriously, because most UNIX software that needs random numbers uses it.
If you don't trust it, that's fine, but pretty much all UNIX software uses it - and UNIX runs the 'net. Certificates are generated using it. If you want to avoid it, install Windows and unplug your internet connection.
I learned BASIC on various micros in the 80s (mostly C64 and Atari 800) and it was pretty much the same thing. The most "structured" you got there was using the GOSUB statement.
Then I sat down in front of a PC and tried writing a program in QBASIC - and some bastard stole my line numbers! How was I to structure my code? What's all this looping crap? Learning Pascal in high school was even more of a culture shock - I kept looking across the room at the rows of Apple ][e machines and missing my GOTOs.
Oh well, I'm all cured of that now. I'm just glad I wasn't started on COBOL. The damage may never have been undone.
The referenced UK survey showed that families with engineers in them can have between 2.5 to 8.6 *times* the statistical occurrence of autism in their children.
Protip: either post coherently, or use proper punctuation. Seriously, half your post is gibberish, and the conflicting run-on sentences make it all the worse.
Your point of view (as far as I can tell) requires you to care more about the strength of the species than you care about your own children. Either you don't have children, or you don't deserve them. You want to belive that aliens shot JFK? Fine. We'll just laugh at you behind your back. You want to ignore the proven evidence of the effectiveness of vaccines and risk your child's health over what's essentially an overblown old wive's tale? Your idealogy is more important than your children? Then do your unborn children a favor and get a vasectomy.
That's all very nice and all, but that's just not the way it works, or really how it's ever worked.
The federal government can pretty much do as they please, powers-wise, and leave it up to the courts to sort out. Because departments like the FDA, Agriculture, Energy, Education, etc. are in generally deemed necessary by most of the people whose opinions actually matter (i.e. not pee-ons like us), they get a pass. You could certainly challenge their constitutionality, but you'd better have a team of very good lawyers and be willing to wait a decade or so for the final decision.
Politicians, in practice, tend to treat the constitution more as a guideline or an obstacle. What really matters is how the powers of influence flow, not what some dusty old piece of eighteenth century vellum has written on it.
Don't like it? Well, you could always move to... wait, everywhere else is pretty much the same way if not worse. The moon, maybe?
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.
And really, user reviews aren't a good source for medical data anyway. Half the people who leave reviews think streptococci is on special at the fancy italian place downtown.
Personally, I think the FDA just needs to come up with guidelines on what an app can or can't do health-wise without going through the FDA approval process. Something that keeps track of your calories or measures how much you walk in a day should be fine. Something that keeps track of your heart rate might be acceptable with a disclaimer that it's not "medical quality" or something. Programs that interact with medical devices (pacemakers, etc.) probably should be vetted in some way.
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Derp. Never do wrong, not also could do wrong. Shouldn't post to slashdot before coffee.
Exactly.
For the average person working at a medium-to-large company (or even small ones, really), VBA (or whatever scripting language your office suite uses) will be much more valuable than R.
Back when I still cared about such things, you also could do wrong with stuff like Crystal Reports and learning to actually use MS Access. The PHB doesn't understand code or programming - they don't mean anything to him - but if you can hand him the data that he wants in a beautiful format and make his spreadsheet jump through flaming hoops, he'll be impressed.
No, actually. You need to turn your brain on and reread my comment. The key words there (which you quoted, ironically enough) were "out of anger."
For that few seconds where I actually would have killed someone, I didn't have a vehicle, IED, knife, brick, chair leg, or rock in my pocket. I did have a pencil, but that's one-on-one combat, and I wasn't any good at that. Not that I didn't consider it.
I wonder where you went to school that you had easy access to the things listed above. My town funds their schools well enough that bricks don't just come out of the walls at a tug, and chair legs don't snap off without a great deal of force. The janitors are pretty good at keeping rocks and other debris out of the halls, and it was against the rules to carry knives, explosives, or drive your cars inside the building.
By the time I would had access to any of the above things, I was calm enough that I wasn't going to kill someone.
That's the point, actually. The FCC makes the regulations that govern communications under their mandate. Congress (usually) lets them do their thing, because they're the experts.
Congress has authority to set policy, and this is what they're doing. The FCC will update regulations to reflect that policy if needs be.
This is more of a political corporate greed vs. public good thing, though, so it's not like it's really a technical argument. Politicians understand how money flows, and that's what's at stake here.
There's a book by Charles Stross named Rule 34 that deals with trying to regulate 3D printing. It focused more on child sex dolls than guns, but the concept is the same.
And yeah, enforcement didn't work very well.
Taking your gun to school is only seen as a problem because some people choose to act hysterically when it comes to a particular bit of modern technology.
Taking your gun to school is only seen as a problem because kids make bad judgement calls and haven't mastered their tempers. Having weapons around them is generally considered a bad idea.
Seriously. If I had a gun at school, and nobody stopped me, I would have shot four or five people (at least) out of anger, and I've always had a fairly even temper. I wouldn't do that now, but I'm an adult now.
Keeping adults from carrying guns into schools makes sense, because there's no reason to have one there. The only people that have a reason to bring guns into a school are either A) cops, which are authorized to do so, B) lunatics who want to shoot up the place, or C) instructors who want to use a gun as an example when teaching kinematics or history. A) is a non-issue, B) we don't want and C) is unnecessary since we have powerpoint and projectors.
They were never any where near as big nor as important to the industry to begin with!
I would argue that Mozilla was, at one point, more important to the industry than Sun ever was.
Sure, Sun's impact on UNIX was huge, but let's face it; UNIX has had little direct effect on the majority of people. For those things where UNIX was widely used, something else would have been used had UNIX not been there.
Mozilla broke the IE monopoly and returned control of web standards to the community at large. I shudder to think what the web would be like had Microsoft maintained control over web standards all this time.
The success of a large open source project aimed at general users also changed the opinions of many important people in the industry.
Mozilla's not imploding like Sun not because they've never been important or big, but because open source projects don't implode the same way large corporations do. To do implode, but it's rarely from a dip in marketshare - it's usually over personality conflicts (too many to name here) or developer disinterest (XFree86, abandonware). It's too big for either of those to happen - personality conflicts at this stage would just lead to a fork, not abandonment.
Other people have given various examples, but I'd like to add two:
Mozilla proved (eventually) that open source development of a major, widely-used program was possible. It unfortunately wasn't enough to save Netscape (the company), but most people hadn't heard of open source before Mozilla (or only heard of it in relation to Linux).
Mozilla made web standards important. Netscape and IE added extensions all over the place, and due to their dominance (first Netscape, then IE) they were defacto standards, even when the W3C disagreed with them. Ask anyone who did web development circa 2000 how fun that was. The Mozilla team decided to follow the W3C standards, and when it gained enough marketshare to outshine IE, it forced IE to do the same. Neither are perfect, but they're a lot better than they used to be, and the situation for web developers isn't as bad.
(Granted, the whole HTML5 thing was more or less a revolution against the W3C and its unrealistic viewpoint that webpages should all look like research papers, and Mozilla did take a leading role in that, but that's just something that needed to happen. We have HTML5 now and the W3C seems to be better about things these days.)
Same goes for me.
Sure, there aren't a lot of "spauldos" out there, so people could find stuff from me by that name (hopefully they see that attribution in the iptools howto and think it was for something technical and important rather than correcting the author's use of "learn" and "teach"), but my social media presence is almost null. I probably reveal more of myself on slashdot than anywhere else, and I only post on here a few times a year.
I never install apps on my phone that require access to extra stuff (why does this Stitcher update need to read my contacts? Play Store->remove), I don't have a facebook account, and all anyone can tell by my google+ account is that I like to rant about really geeky technical stuff (and occasionally about cooking). Good luck getting a picture of me from that - anyone who talks to me for more than ten minutes knows I'm an old geek.
My girlfriend thinks I'm nuts, but my privacy is important to me. It's the next generation that doesn't care about it. Until us old farts are dead, I don't think there will be a problem.
Um, yeah, they can.
Congress oversees the FCC. The FCC has to abide by law. If congress passed a law that FCC workers had to wear their underpants on their heads while at work (and the courts didn't overturn it), they'd have to do so.
If the FCC's mandate was set up by a constitutional amendment, then they wouldn't be able to change it without another amendment - but it was set up by a law, and newer laws trump older laws.
That wouldn't solve much. Our system is set up in a way that it reaches equilibrium in a two-party system. A lot of the decisionmaking is done on the party level, and that wouldn't change.
If you want a multiparty system, you'd have to change the way voting works. I'd love to see a good setup for runoff voting in this country. I don't care much for either party (although Bush and then the Tea Party has made me hate the Republican party with the fire of a white supergiant), and my views are a mix between the two (along with a few "socialist" ideas like public ownership of natural monopolies, like last-mile broadband lines). I believe that with more parties to choose from, we'd have a government that is more representative of the people.
The FCC isn't writing laws. It's operating by its legal mandate, which it is required to by law. It's delegation from an authority (congress) to a skilled subordinate (FCC).
It's overseen by elected lawmakers. This is congress doing its job - overseeing the FCC.
Those unelected bureaucrats know a lot more about what the FCC does than congress. That's why they make the regulations. Congress has authority over them because they're accountable to their corporate donors^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H constituency.
So this is things working like they should. The alternative is having congress vote on every little thing from how many janitors the social security office in Cheyenne, WY has to emergency fire procedures for every government building everywhere.
That would be the uninformed armchair libertarian with a poor ability for critical thinking.
The free market won't work for telecom. The last mile problem ensures that whoever has the wire in the ground always has a huge advantage over everyone else. That leads to what economists call a natural monopoly. If not for regulation that forces those lines to be shared, we'd all be running low-speed DSL and paying three times as much for it.
There's a similar situation with electricity. I can buy my electricity from several sources, because the law says the local power provider that owns the lines (the city government, in my case, but not in the rest of the county) has to provide that option. It's regulation, sure, but it's anti-monopoly regulation. The only monopoly is the owner of the lines themselves, which is why they're regulated to make sure they play fair.
You know that saying that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well, the free market philosophy is a hammer. Great for a lot of stuff, but it doesn't work everywhere. Sometimes regulation is a good thing. It's the only thing that can control natural monopolies.
That's not quite accurate.
The president can't make laws. He can make "executive orders," but there are limits on what an executive order can do, and it can be overturned by the courts (as can laws).
The president is the head of the executive branch, tasked with carrying out the laws set by the legislative branch. Since the FCC is a department of the executive branch, the president has direct control over its day to day operations, but he can't change their mandate or order them to act outside their authority authorized by congress.
The FCC is tasked by law (actual law, not executive order) with regulating certain types of communication. Within the boundaries of that law, they can make regulations. What's being proposed here is a law prohibiting the new regulations, which the FCC would have to follow.
I doubt your parliament votes on things like what hours a ranger station is manned at a national park, or when to patch potholes on a highway. Those decisions are made by (supposed) experts closer to the problem. It's the same here - the FCC has a job, and making rules for communication is one of those jobs. Their rules have the backing of the legislature. If congress feels a rule is in error, they only have to pass a law changing it.
NT 4.0 came out in 1996, not 1999. Earlier versions had the same look and feel as Windows 3.x, which would have been _really_ out of place in 1999.
We had it installed on a 166MHz Alpha back in '97, I think. Funny thing - flood ping the thing and it's like a pause button. Everything just stops. Stop pinging, the clock skips forward and everything goes on as normal.
My friend with the Aplha wasn't amused. He was less amused every time he left and came back to Linux running on it.
Sure, you've got good points about failures in /dev/random. Surprise, there have been problems - just like there's been problems with pretty much all code everywhere at some time.
But what exactly do you expect kernel developers to do? /dev/random exists, and a lot of stuff uses it. It's expected to be there. Kernel developers (especially BSD developers, who tend to view UNIX much more conservatively than Linux developers) are going to make sure that the service is available and as bug-free as possible. You might not like /dev/random, but it's not going to go away any time soon.
I don't use Linux for anything important (I'm a BSD guy these days - Linux is for desktops in my opinion), so I don't know what to tell you about rngd. I have noticed that a lot of "system" level stuff seems to be on the backburner compared to nifty convenience features. If you need a working rngd, it's up to you to find a working configuration and push it to your servers. Treat it like ntpd or any other service that requires site-specific configuration. I do know that I would expect something like random number generation to be working flawlessly in BSD, but Linux today... I can't say I'm surprised.
/dev/random has been part of UNIX for ages. It's part of the system, and expected to be there. The kernel developers take it seriously, because most UNIX software that needs random numbers uses it.
If you don't trust it, that's fine, but pretty much all UNIX software uses it - and UNIX runs the 'net. Certificates are generated using it. If you want to avoid it, install Windows and unplug your internet connection.
I can second the whole "thinking in gotos" thing.
I learned BASIC on various micros in the 80s (mostly C64 and Atari 800) and it was pretty much the same thing. The most "structured" you got there was using the GOSUB statement.
Then I sat down in front of a PC and tried writing a program in QBASIC - and some bastard stole my line numbers! How was I to structure my code? What's all this looping crap? Learning Pascal in high school was even more of a culture shock - I kept looking across the room at the rows of Apple ][e machines and missing my GOTOs.
Oh well, I'm all cured of that now. I'm just glad I wasn't started on COBOL. The damage may never have been undone.
The referenced UK survey showed that families with engineers in them can have between 2.5 to 8.6 *times* the statistical occurrence of autism in their children.
Holy crap! Mountain Dew causes autism!
Protip: either post coherently, or use proper punctuation. Seriously, half your post is gibberish, and the conflicting run-on sentences make it all the worse.
Your point of view (as far as I can tell) requires you to care more about the strength of the species than you care about your own children. Either you don't have children, or you don't deserve them. You want to belive that aliens shot JFK? Fine. We'll just laugh at you behind your back. You want to ignore the proven evidence of the effectiveness of vaccines and risk your child's health over what's essentially an overblown old wive's tale? Your idealogy is more important than your children? Then do your unborn children a favor and get a vasectomy.
I'd request anonymity too, if I went around in public saying stupid crap like that.
I seem to remember Gene Roddenberry originally conceived of Star Trek as "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" in space.
(If you've never seen Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, it was a television show about a submarine crew that explored the deepest parts of the ocean)
It's off the M11 north of London, actually.
That's all very nice and all, but that's just not the way it works, or really how it's ever worked.
The federal government can pretty much do as they please, powers-wise, and leave it up to the courts to sort out. Because departments like the FDA, Agriculture, Energy, Education, etc. are in generally deemed necessary by most of the people whose opinions actually matter (i.e. not pee-ons like us), they get a pass. You could certainly challenge their constitutionality, but you'd better have a team of very good lawyers and be willing to wait a decade or so for the final decision.
Politicians, in practice, tend to treat the constitution more as a guideline or an obstacle. What really matters is how the powers of influence flow, not what some dusty old piece of eighteenth century vellum has written on it.
Don't like it? Well, you could always move to... wait, everywhere else is pretty much the same way if not worse. The moon, maybe?
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.
And really, user reviews aren't a good source for medical data anyway. Half the people who leave reviews think streptococci is on special at the fancy italian place downtown.
Personally, I think the FDA just needs to come up with guidelines on what an app can or can't do health-wise without going through the FDA approval process. Something that keeps track of your calories or measures how much you walk in a day should be fine. Something that keeps track of your heart rate might be acceptable with a disclaimer that it's not "medical quality" or something. Programs that interact with medical devices (pacemakers, etc.) probably should be vetted in some way.