Open Standards and Protocols are what this space needs, along with regulations requiring vendors to allow interoperability for free or a nominal fee.

Open Source software, on the other hand, won't really solve any problems. Someone has to write the software and vet it. EHR software isn't an itch people typically want to scratch. Of course, an EHR platform could leverage Open Source software for development. A Web-based EHR could use an entire Open Source stack and even contribute libraries for protocol support.

Open Source is great for infrastructure components, not so great for user-facing applications. At some level in the stack, someone needs to do the UX work, testing, and validation to create an application people can actually use.

I would never advocate for a fully Open Source solution for EHRs or any other complex, user-facing software, but I would put incentives in place to leverage as much Open Source in the stack as possible. Plus, any company that does that right will have much cheaper dev costs and will be able to undercut the competition a bit (though for supported software, dev costs are usually only 10-20% of the costs, with support, marketing, sales, etc taking up the bulk of the costs).

-Chris

Um, Google tried the whole GoogleHealth thing a few years back and gave up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

This is not an easy space to play in. Hospitals and doctors are slow to change. Once an investment has been made in a particular platform it's very difficult to replace it.

-Chris

The question is interesting in relation to the current bias against four year degrees for software developers in some circles. If, as Peter Thiel claims, you don't need a degree, then it shouldn't matter what your degree is if you get one. So, from that perspective, a tech degree or a liberal arts degree shouldn't make a difference. If a liberal arts degree makes for a more intellectually well rounded person, then it could be argued that that's the better degree for tech.

Of course, I don't buy Peter's argument at all. A good CS degree teaches foundational methods that can be applied throughout a career. Don't get me started on the number of times basic complexity theory or knowledge of the full memory hierarchy has helped improve performance of web pages. Most hobbyists don't have those skills and write them off as just academic oddities. A good CS degree also exposes you to a range of technologies and methods for developing software (no, CS is not just math, no more than physics is just theoretical physics). It gives you an environment where you can develop your skills and gain exposure to the breadth of topics in the field. It's a Good Thing(tm).

Should all programmers have CS degrees? Of course not, but those that do are always going to have an edge over most of the other ones (there are always exceptions - I know a few great developers without degrees).

-Chris

VR simulations are only as good as our ability to model and simulate the things we're studying. Physics, maybe. Chemistry and Biology, no way. The latter two are messy and don't lend themselves to simulation expect in a few very specific situations. If it's simply for information retrieval and watching videos, a book or screen is sufficient.

I've spent a lot of time with various 3D emersion technologies and scientific applications (old-school VR, Caves, polarized googles, etc) and the reality is that they don't add much. Don't get me wrong, they make GREAT demos. I love playing with the technology. But, spend any amount of time doing real work with them and their limitations quickly become apparent. It's not that the technology doesn't work, it's that most content doesn't really lend itself to the medium and for content that does, getting the user experience right is a difficult and expensive task.

-Chris

And let's just remember that planes don't actually fly themselves:

http://www.askthepilot.com/que...

-Chris

And that is how our current implementation of the free market actually works. No business action is made for the customer's benefit. It's always about making one more dollar off a captive customer base and pretending you're doing them a favor. America needs to return to stakeholder capitalism rather than the current shareholder model (yes, there actually are different models for market-based economies).

Yes!!! I wish I had mod points. They basically had them ready to go for C++11 and then committee infighting killed them (Bjarne stubbornly backed the wrong horse - not that I have a strong opinion on this or anything ;) ).

Syntactic support for generic programming would be the single best addition to C++ to breathe new life into the language and get a whole generation of developers who've written it off interested in it. Generic programming is as paradigm shifting as OOP. It just kills me that it's so thoroughly obfuscated by template meta-programming in C++.

Markets are defined by their rules, plain and simple.

The rules for an ideal free market are pretty straight forward: everyone is free to do whatever they want. There's also another term for this approach in the political sphere: anarchy.

What most people really mean when they say free market (in America, at least) is a market defined by the rules of property law (the foundation of most western legal systems). As soon as you have some basic rules, you no longer have a free market.

A real free market is a theoretical extreme, like an ideal gas. It's useful for reasoning about things, but doesn't actually exist in any practical form in real life.

-Chris

Actually, neither C nor C++ have formal specifications. They both have very well defined and curated standards documents that can be called specifications (without the formal part), but neither has a proper formal specification.

-Chris

I look at it this way: I can pay $100+ a month to watch cable TV with commercials or I can pay $9 for Netflix, $8 for Hulu Plus, and nothing for my TV antenna for local shows. Yes, the ads on Hulu Plus are annoying, repetitive, and can't be skipped. But, I grew up in the 70s and 80s and have developed the skills to cope with ads and the lack of time shifting for local news. Millennial's milage may vary...

-Chris

Professional Grade???

Nope. I've talked about this with many lawyers. It varies by state. In CA, non-compete clauses are basically unenforceable. In TX, where I live, they're the law of the land.

-Chris

I've tried Occulus and agree with the parent (I'm also 40 and have been around this block before). VR will never be a mainstream, mass market application. Now that the tech is mostly working (OR is awesome - it works like we all wanted it to the first time Jaron Lanier was in the news), it needs applications. Sure, core gaming will change as will some industrial applications, but otherwise there aren't a lot of good reasons to put an app in an head mounted display. HMDs are not exactly a great fashion accessory (even at the scale of google glass).

-Chris

Sacramento and the rest of the Central Valley has been trying this forever. It didn't happen during the first bubble, it likely won't happen this time around. The Delta and Valley regions may as well be flyover country as far as techs are concerned. It's almost as easy to hop on a plane and be in Austin, Boulder, Portland, SLC, or any other regional tech hub than it is to drive around in CA.

I grew up in Merced and have seen this same story too many times in the past... 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s... This conversation is a good predictor for bursting bubbles, though. ;)

-Chris

I'm a bike commuter and I own two cars. I pay more taxes relative to car commuters for the use of the roads.

Of course, I could get rid of the fun car and keep just the practical one, but I'd still be paying more than most drivers relative to my impact.

For rule 1 to be a valid argument, all bikers can't own cars. In the US, that's almost universally not the case.

-Chris