To echo some of the commentary here, no one on any side should be surprised. We have come to the point in the US where it's more important to hold a position rather than be objective, where it's more important to be taught TO rather than taught how to THINK. The Education system has been shifting undeniably leftwards and downwards. So this push-back from the right isn't surprising.

The middle-ground is rapidly become an untenable position, while at the same time getting flooded, leaving a bell spike with smaller spikes on left and right, not a bell curve.

The fundamental inalienable truths of history, country, family, life and God are being twisted - by both sides - because they sincerely believe in what they believe in. While it's not quite fair to assail someone - anyone - for their beliefs, it is fair to assail them for pushing indoctrination over education - the steady rise of charter schools and homeschooling has a direct correlation to this impetus.

Finally, regardless of current education systems - unless there's ramifications for educators, students and parents for failures to perform nothing will change.

Honestly wild posts like this are part of the problem - where one side pushes it's agenda over the other. The ability to read, research, distill and think for oneself is rapidly fading away, much as every year the population of real software developers and systems engineers seems to shrink, replaced by rote-learned automatons.

Teach a man to think, and he'll push back the darkness is whole life.

Well ... so much for finally ordering FiOS service, maybe I won't now.
Moronic, sell FiOS but hunt you down (and what? kiss me on the lips?) if you actually USE it.

Uhm. WTF. The article would have been better if it focused on EITHER divergent views on social liberalism vs conservatism OR the fact that Sun screwed itself repeatedly through bad management yet still somehow found a buyer (who's the bigger fool?).

As it is, the article comes of as an angry, rambling rant flipping between one or the other yet not making a cohesive point - aside from slamming capitalist and conservatives - but hey, it's on the daily KOS, so no great surprise there.

Sun was a company with great tech, at the time. But if it's one thing technologists need to understand - it's not how great your product is, but how well you can a) SELL IT (capitalist dogs!) and b) EVOLVE it - fall behind and instead of going to the great socialist nirvana in the sky you get eaten up by the darwin doggies that took you down.

What happens to sun now is anyone's guess. Oracle's got it's fair shair of WTF and Brilliant! moments, more of the former recently.

uhhh ... what the HELL does more traffic and less capacity have to do with your computer jittering and freezing!?

Your computer will run fine. You may be paying for metered internet, have every bit you access stored for review by a governmental droid, but your computer will run fine until the inevitable bloatware and toolbars slow it down.

This hand is the internet
This hand is your computer
*smack* that's for associating the performance of one with the other.

On a more serious note, this is why I wonder about the wisdom of offloading everything to the cloud. Mainframes and shared processing anyone? Local clients must continue to be able to function in a disconnected state.

Anyone who's tried to create a real app w/ a Flash interface knows the absolute nightmare it is. It's familiar to users sure, but good Lord it's a pain in the ass to try to develop with.

Silverlight OTOH is far more developer friendly, especially if you're doing anything around .NET

Give it a couple of versions before it catches up to and crushes Flash.

As for the detractors, remember, no v1.0 of ANYTHING was perfect, never is, never will be. But as long as it get's better over time.

Macromedia\Adobe had years to listen to their development community and now they're behind the eight ball.

Isn't http://www.va.gov/VISTA_MONOGRAPH/ on sourceforge now ... ?

Careful there good sir you almost come off as a HIT Vendor sales critter.

HL7 is a best a recommendation. It's entirely inconsistent in implementation.

All hail the extremely abused Z-segment.

Just because everyone in HIT uses HL7 doesn't mean it's either good or a standard.

With all due respect.

Very observant and well put. I completely agree WRT physicians. Let us perhaps try to be fair and say they just want something that a) works without them having to think about it so it b) doesn't distract them from patient care.

The good news is that there are some very nimble new vendors out there that are aggressively solving the integration problem while staying above the fray.

Personally, I think there's room for innovation, it requires at the very least a rethink of the vendor/customer relationship.

I agree and disagree with you! :)

You are SO right that the whole BUSINESS of healthcare is rotten because of exactly the picture you drew - well drawn.

However, I also disagree that IT is not going to help anything! Quite the contrary, IT, BETTER IT, will definitely help Healthcare out of the stoneage that it's at. When you can integrate better you can complete better. Offerings like carol.com are the tip of the coming iceberg unless the Obama Stimulus melts them. IT can certainly help bring transparency, cost-savings and competitiveness, but not alone no.

You're only half right. The problem is that HIT vendors are generally well behind the times, slow to innovate and closed and proprietary as all get out. You think MS is bad? You haven't seen highyway robbery until you've seen the shit in a box most HIT vendors push. The technical implementation is lacking and the SOLE focus, the SOLE focus of every sale is simply to further ensare the particular customer still deeper into more from the same proprietary stack. Integration is a joke, made challenging by intention rather than accident.

This is a HIGHLY lucrative market. Any given vendor has ZERO interest in open systems and will push to make sure you buy their entire stack.

Thankfully, there are exceptions to the rule and there are many CIOs and CEOs that are wising up to their antics.

This stimulus plan, unfortunately, only makes things WORSE backing proprietary vendors and closed systems over open standards - real standards, not the recommendations AKA HL7.

The VA has an amazing EMR built in MUMPS (http://www.hardhats.org/)

Yes, it COULD be a great Open Source movement ... IF some brave souls were willing to step up and provide a strong guiding hand to it.

There's a LOT of smaller solutions out-there that could work. There's several keys, starting with a REAL standard (of course, we're now STUCK with HL7 God help us) and bringing about interop in HIT. You can't force it from the outside, clinicians and facilities have to band together and beat their vendors over the head and shoulders until they play ball.

Sadly, a LOT of hospitals aren't very profitable. Some are, but a LOT of them reinvest that into hiring more nurses (always in short supply HINT), doctors, buying new medical equipment or technology.

Yes, even for profit hospitals do that.

Doctors, HIT Vendors and Insurance companies are the one's raking it in :)