(January 28, 2010 at 1:41 pm)Tiberius Wrote: Why do people trust the government so much? Don't make the testing government-run, make it private so that companies have to pay for the product to be certified. It's worked with security certificate systems on the internet so far; I see no reason why it can't be extended to other products.
Course, you could also have private charities doing the same thing for free, or making sure the private companies doing the testing are legit.
No it hasn't worked out well at all on the internet. I assure you that an NSA security certification is far more dependable and verifiable than some unimportant small fry for profit venture. SSL certifications on the internet are questionable, as anyone can get them (a hot topic at the last Chaos Computer Club conference in security for SSL null string attacks).
And why the fuck do you think that the communications system that is the internet is even remotely comparable to medical testing processes? Medical testing is slow and ponderous, like the law, for good reasons. It is more applicable to compare medical testing and certification via the FDA to the judicial system, as the final stages are full of paperwork, wide-scale testing and records keeping; in addition to the scale of time involved in certification.
Government-run testing, at the expense of the company (the way the FDA does it), keeps a common denominator with lesser opportunity for corruption than a for-profit venture, with definite interests in rushing out a treatment. Civil servant laws in the US are incredibly strict in the FDA, NASA, etc, while there are almost no hindrances in private companies, which also have fewer accountability requirements. Adding accountability via law is difficult and opens up a can of worms over how much the government can meddle in a private practice, while the government passing federal and administrative law to apply to itself is much easier to do so.
