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.
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.
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.
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:)
Most hospitals and clinicians actually want to avoid too many tests. There's always risk and safety involved. Most folks involved health care would prefer they get the right test, the first time and not repeat it.
On the one hand the health care facilities are focused on patient safety (don't kill anyone) and physicians satisfaction (we just lost our neurosurgeon because of some benefit he wanted we turned down, there goes our trauma designation).
On the other hand, most health care facilities might have a good operational and infrastructure IT staff, but they are so accustomed to vendor and COTSS solutions they're likely to have an anemic, if existing at all, software development component.
On the gripping hand, MOST HIT vendors are incompetent as hell, backwards technologically and completely uninterested in anything resembling standards (HL7 is NOT a standard, it's a recommendation, at best) or even interop with anything but the next hare-brained system they come up with.
And just because some facility implements a fancy EMR the problems don't suddenly disappear. You would be surprised at the push back from clinicians sometimes at something as modern as an EMR.
Of course, when the sun flares next we'll be back to using paper, so now who's smarter?:)
MONEY won't solve this, UNLESS money goes to the RIGHT vendors, the RIGHT facilities that are committed to modern best practices and open standards, not some throwback from 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
"what *is* happening is some bigger hospiatls are rolling there own stuff using either.NET or Linux. and thats... a good thing.... " Damn right and Amen. If the vendors won't play ball.
Any healthcare customer who expects to see a lower cost is in for a rude surprise. Healthcare IT is shattered due to a tightly controlled vendor environment - they are the tail that wags the dog. All this will mean is increased profit margin for McKesson and the like and the same level of quality at the same price for the Healthcare consumer. Cerner, btw, is also doing the same. Moving their codebase to Java gradually and shifting their platform to RH Linux. Expect the same from them.
These are big money businesses. Somewhere along the time necrotic momentum sits in and consumer satisfaction takes a back seat.
Don't expect better integration either. That's perhaps the biggest joke amongst these vendors.
Until there's a solid council formed that bend the vendor to adopt best practices and interop, things won't change. How much of an effect this is on Healthcare costs to the consumer, much less an improved continuum of care, I have no idea. There are other factors, such as people, skills and processes that mix into it.
Regardless, nicely spun, but it's still shit in a box.
Cost of acquisition not withstanding, cost of ownership & maintenance really ends up being in the joint hands of management & implementers. Management for business ownership & goal setting, implementers for effective implementation. The worst build OSS system WILL cost you considerably more in the long run and sink your ROI, than a similar payware system correctly designed & efficiently built.
I think that's the crux of this whole debate that all/.ers seem to forget regularly : it's not the technology (unless you're doing something patently idiotic like using Access), it's getting management buy-in.
Again, so what for Houston. If they have competent techs and it's a solid product, sure their ROI will be better. If their techs are incompetently lead (all too common) or inept (as common) then they won't see an ROI and they'll take the easy route out : blame the product\system\people\OSS.
Keeping in mind you'll be talking to a politician, who's probably a capitalist, answers like for fun are still going to leave them wondering. This has been and will continue to be a root issue for the Open Source movement: justification of a free service as a business model in a capitalist society - or how the heck do you plug a worthy square peg (Open Source) into a round hole (Modern Economic Theory - which sometimes runs 200 years back or more) which seems to be unable to shift paradigms and mature.
This is not a technology question, this is a fundamental business issue which is best answered by the tech community that propagates OpenSource (cf work by others on this btw, none of which I can currently quote of the top of my head).
Without a common basis to look out from, anyone who's not a geek is not going to understand why we do Open Source. What that common basis is and how to get there I leave for those brighter than me.
In order for OpenSource to grow to more than a niche Economic Theory & Practices need to make a radical - overdue - paradigm shift. How do you evaluate and place a fair market value (think like a capitalist now) on a service or product that's given away freely? Or, can that square peg become more circular in shape. But how?
Maybe I'll get tired of waiting for the bean counters to figure that out, go back to school for an MBA and come up with a solution in my copious spare time.
On the other side of the coin, as a disguntruled, unemployed geek burned twice by dunderheaded business processes (and I've played executive roles as well), I'm going to give my work away for free now? To the community, yes, certainly not to the commercial sector, unless I'm going to get a free mortgage out of the deal somehow.
OpenSource - it's worthy, we all love, it can work... whether it will...
As an aside :
Bigots have ceased to amaze me - they're a simple, base part of life. However, I do urge everyone to do their research. For example, in order to get an H1B a company has to go through significant legal hoops. This includes checking the skillsets in with the state and federal departments of labor, getting their approval for the wages paid - which have to be in line with national averages, then submitting the app to INS for their approval. In addition to showing the employer is paying market rates, the employer also has to proove that he has searched for a similar skillset locally and posted the job opening for a period of time (several months). Companies that are in violation face fines and are prevented from sponsoring H1B's for a period of time.
Also, H1B's have to pay the same social security and medicare as everyone else, yet they are not entitled to those benefits if or until they become citizens. And the citizenship process from an H1B to a greencard is even more convoluted and painful - one I don't even pretend to begin to understand.
The jobs for anyone with quality skills and cogent speaking and writing ability ARE out there, as is the training. I've seen many Cobol'ers turn into cracker jack programmers, but I've seen an equal number of VB'ers think VB is the be-all end-all of computing. I'm also quite sorry to say that it's easier in this country to complain (God given rights, such as voting, which are never exercised) than to get retrained and given the skillsets required. Most (I emphasize not all)Americans aren't motivated and didn't bother to pay attention in their schooling to build the analytical and problem solving skills. After all, what else do you expect when you can skate through high-school on home ec and carpentry instead of busting ass on Calc? Why learn DiffEq when you could be raving... dude.
You want to get on someone's case, get on the case of companies (do your own research here) that farm their work out to foreign companies in Mexico, India and the like. If the jobs are going anywhere, the jobs are going out there. The same thing may or may not happen to computing jobs that has happened to manufacturing jobs. Labor is cheaper overseas - $35/hour for programmers that are happy to slave 12 hours a day (who doesn't) as opposed to a cost 2 or three times that. That makes economic sense, but it's still not right. The manufacturing sector got squat help from either party, what makes you think computing will? Al "Internet" Gore, W "Clueless" Bush... either way, expect more of the same...
But I'm quite happy to say that companies that go that route deservedly get what they paid for.
Of course, IMO, the smart companies will hire locally and supplement with H1B's - the work is still out there guys. Just because you're a VB scripter who can't or won't grok Java, doesn't mean there are no jobs out there, nor the training.
So... do your research first then bitch long and hard to your reps and congressmen to get laws passed to prevent this kind of behaviour.
Instead of blaming someone else for one's shortcomings and encouraging knee-jerk politics, why doesn't one look for a fix closer to home - oh yeah, 'cause it's a God given right that one is always correct and just and it is another's problem.
Doesn't the crux of your argument come down then to allowing states rights? That a matter of opinion to be decided by vote not by politicians and I think it may be time to revist that issue.
I got steamed when a commentator on PBS (or CNN - was on radio) stated that the Electoral College was conceived as a check on the people - now where does anyone get off on that? If it was SUCH a great check on the people - has it really worked in this case? Now, that being said, what is the people's check on the government, state and Federal, that works in the same passive, easily enforced way?
More so than State rights, I think, the issue here is an unwillingness to innovate processes outside of the computing and general engineering world. When was the last time that a genuine paradigm shift occured in politics, much less democracy? It seems the people expect innovation and advances out of engineering, but never look closer to home for the advances that most affect them - Government for one, Healthcare for another.
Is it adamantly carved that we shall be forever based on 18th century Democracy? I'm all for Democracy, but why has there been little fundamental revolution within the Democratic (or should I say Republican) process?
All I can say is I'm more embarrassed than usual to be living in this state now. Talk about a broken, schizophrenic state. Once this is over I think there's a case here to set a precedent for the Federal government smacking a State government for not having it's own house in order for something as critical as nationla elections. Never mind embarrassing, this is criminal negligence and irresponsibility.
Everyone who is part of the election process needs to be fined, fired and barred from ever holding public office again.
On a final note, although it was completely amusing to see Arkansaw (sic), Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia swing Republican, the fiasco in Florida, especially with Jeb Bush being governer (and not having campaigned very hard for his brother) more than balances that out.
When all is said and done though, it was nice to see a mass attack of morals - we couldn't decide which criminal to put into office.
Reliability? Netscape Gagigator? mmm. Don't think so.
Adherence to standards - both of them are as guilty as politicians for NOT adhering to standards - but like that's any great surprise where neither life, profit nor limb are at risk.
Functionality - depending on your point of view and what level of user you are; I expect Netscape to get more AOLish as time goes by and MS to try to toe the line, with options for 'advanced' users.
Interoperability - welll, no argument there, Netscape is available for more platforms. But when you're selling crap, and it's cross-platform crap, that just means you have farther to spread that crap.
Wait, so because it tries to be smart and autocorrect for mistakes, that's a heinous thing? Ever hear of a debugger, link checker to check your code? Besides, is anyone down to using one browser for development - pain in the ass as it is to use multiple browsers to check your formatting... ?
No argument about lack of compliance, but I'm not going to agree IE is harmful because it autocorrects for VB scripters who think they can HTML too *heh-heh*
Slashdot Mirror
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 :)
Most hospitals and clinicians actually want to avoid too many tests. There's always risk and safety involved. Most folks involved health care would prefer they get the right test, the first time and not repeat it.
It's not that simple.
On the one hand the health care facilities are focused on patient safety (don't kill anyone) and physicians satisfaction (we just lost our neurosurgeon because of some benefit he wanted we turned down, there goes our trauma designation).
On the other hand, most health care facilities might have a good operational and infrastructure IT staff, but they are so accustomed to vendor and COTSS solutions they're likely to have an anemic, if existing at all, software development component.
On the gripping hand, MOST HIT vendors are incompetent as hell, backwards technologically and completely uninterested in anything resembling standards (HL7 is NOT a standard, it's a recommendation, at best) or even interop with anything but the next hare-brained system they come up with.
And just because some facility implements a fancy EMR the problems don't suddenly disappear. You would be surprised at the push back from clinicians sometimes at something as modern as an EMR.
Of course, when the sun flares next we'll be back to using paper, so now who's smarter? :)
MONEY won't solve this, UNLESS money goes to the RIGHT vendors, the RIGHT facilities that are committed to modern best practices and open standards, not some throwback from 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
"what *is* happening is some bigger hospiatls are rolling there own stuff using either .NET or Linux. and thats... a good thing....
"
Damn right and Amen. If the vendors won't play ball.
Any healthcare customer who expects to see a lower cost is in for a rude surprise. Healthcare IT is shattered due to a tightly controlled vendor environment - they are the tail that wags the dog. All this will mean is increased profit margin for McKesson and the like and the same level of quality at the same price for the Healthcare consumer. Cerner, btw, is also doing the same. Moving their codebase to Java gradually and shifting their platform to RH Linux. Expect the same from them.
These are big money businesses. Somewhere along the time necrotic momentum sits in and consumer satisfaction takes a back seat.
Don't expect better integration either. That's perhaps the biggest joke amongst these vendors.
Until there's a solid council formed that bend the vendor to adopt best practices and interop, things won't change. How much of an effect this is on Healthcare costs to the consumer, much less an improved continuum of care, I have no idea. There are other factors, such as people, skills and processes that mix into it.
Regardless, nicely spun, but it's still shit in a box.
Cost of acquisition not withstanding, cost of ownership & maintenance really ends up being in the joint hands of management & implementers. Management for business ownership & goal setting, implementers for effective implementation. The worst build OSS system WILL cost you considerably more in the long run and sink your ROI, than a similar payware system correctly designed & efficiently built.
/.ers seem to forget regularly : it's not the technology (unless you're doing something patently idiotic like using Access), it's getting management buy-in.
I think that's the crux of this whole debate that all
Again, so what for Houston. If they have competent techs and it's a solid product, sure their ROI will be better. If their techs are incompetently lead (all too common) or inept (as common) then they won't see an ROI and they'll take the easy route out : blame the product\system\people\OSS.
Keeping in mind you'll be talking to a politician, who's probably a capitalist, answers like for fun are still going to leave them wondering. This has been and will continue to be a root issue for the Open Source movement: justification of a free service as a business model in a capitalist society - or how the heck do you plug a worthy square peg (Open Source) into a round hole (Modern Economic Theory - which sometimes runs 200 years back or more) which seems to be unable to shift paradigms and mature.
... whether it will ...
This is not a technology question, this is a fundamental business issue which is best answered by the tech community that propagates OpenSource (cf work by others on this btw, none of which I can currently quote of the top of my head).
Without a common basis to look out from, anyone who's not a geek is not going to understand why we do Open Source. What that common basis is and how to get there I leave for those brighter than me.
In order for OpenSource to grow to more than a niche Economic Theory & Practices need to make a radical - overdue - paradigm shift. How do you evaluate and place a fair market value (think like a capitalist now) on a service or product that's given away freely? Or, can that square peg become more circular in shape. But how?
Maybe I'll get tired of waiting for the bean counters to figure that out, go back to school for an MBA and come up with a solution in my copious spare time.
On the other side of the coin, as a disguntruled, unemployed geek burned twice by dunderheaded business processes (and I've played executive roles as well), I'm going to give my work away for free now? To the community, yes, certainly not to the commercial sector, unless I'm going to get a free mortgage out of the deal somehow.
OpenSource - it's worthy, we all love, it can work
As an aside : Bigots have ceased to amaze me - they're a simple, base part of life. However, I do urge everyone to do their research. For example, in order to get an H1B a company has to go through significant legal hoops. This includes checking the skillsets in with the state and federal departments of labor, getting their approval for the wages paid - which have to be in line with national averages, then submitting the app to INS for their approval. In addition to showing the employer is paying market rates, the employer also has to proove that he has searched for a similar skillset locally and posted the job opening for a period of time (several months). Companies that are in violation face fines and are prevented from sponsoring H1B's for a period of time. Also, H1B's have to pay the same social security and medicare as everyone else, yet they are not entitled to those benefits if or until they become citizens. And the citizenship process from an H1B to a greencard is even more convoluted and painful - one I don't even pretend to begin to understand. The jobs for anyone with quality skills and cogent speaking and writing ability ARE out there, as is the training. I've seen many Cobol'ers turn into cracker jack programmers, but I've seen an equal number of VB'ers think VB is the be-all end-all of computing. I'm also quite sorry to say that it's easier in this country to complain (God given rights, such as voting, which are never exercised) than to get retrained and given the skillsets required. Most (I emphasize not all)Americans aren't motivated and didn't bother to pay attention in their schooling to build the analytical and problem solving skills. After all, what else do you expect when you can skate through high-school on home ec and carpentry instead of busting ass on Calc? Why learn DiffEq when you could be raving ... dude.
You want to get on someone's case, get on the case of companies (do your own research here) that farm their work out to foreign companies in Mexico, India and the like. If the jobs are going anywhere, the jobs are going out there. The same thing may or may not happen to computing jobs that has happened to manufacturing jobs. Labor is cheaper overseas - $35/hour for programmers that are happy to slave 12 hours a day (who doesn't) as opposed to a cost 2 or three times that. That makes economic sense, but it's still not right. The manufacturing sector got squat help from either party, what makes you think computing will? Al "Internet" Gore, W "Clueless" Bush ... either way, expect more of the same ...
But I'm quite happy to say that companies that go that route deservedly get what they paid for.
Of course, IMO, the smart companies will hire locally and supplement with H1B's - the work is still out there guys. Just because you're a VB scripter who can't or won't grok Java, doesn't mean there are no jobs out there, nor the training.
So ... do your research first then bitch long and hard to your reps and congressmen to get laws passed to prevent this kind of behaviour.
Instead of blaming someone else for one's shortcomings and encouraging knee-jerk politics, why doesn't one look for a fix closer to home - oh yeah, 'cause it's a God given right that one is always correct and just and it is another's problem.
Doesn't the crux of your argument come down then to allowing states rights? That a matter of opinion to be decided by vote not by politicians and I think it may be time to revist that issue. I got steamed when a commentator on PBS (or CNN - was on radio) stated that the Electoral College was conceived as a check on the people - now where does anyone get off on that? If it was SUCH a great check on the people - has it really worked in this case? Now, that being said, what is the people's check on the government, state and Federal, that works in the same passive, easily enforced way? More so than State rights, I think, the issue here is an unwillingness to innovate processes outside of the computing and general engineering world. When was the last time that a genuine paradigm shift occured in politics, much less democracy? It seems the people expect innovation and advances out of engineering, but never look closer to home for the advances that most affect them - Government for one, Healthcare for another. Is it adamantly carved that we shall be forever based on 18th century Democracy? I'm all for Democracy, but why has there been little fundamental revolution within the Democratic (or should I say Republican) process?
All I can say is I'm more embarrassed than usual to be living in this state now. Talk about a broken, schizophrenic state. Once this is over I think there's a case here to set a precedent for the Federal government smacking a State government for not having it's own house in order for something as critical as nationla elections. Never mind embarrassing, this is criminal negligence and irresponsibility. Everyone who is part of the election process needs to be fined, fired and barred from ever holding public office again. On a final note, although it was completely amusing to see Arkansaw (sic), Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia swing Republican, the fiasco in Florida, especially with Jeb Bush being governer (and not having campaigned very hard for his brother) more than balances that out. When all is said and done though, it was nice to see a mass attack of morals - we couldn't decide which criminal to put into office.
There's always flash! *running, ducking, jinking*
Reliability? Netscape Gagigator? mmm. Don't think so. Adherence to standards - both of them are as guilty as politicians for NOT adhering to standards - but like that's any great surprise where neither life, profit nor limb are at risk. Functionality - depending on your point of view and what level of user you are; I expect Netscape to get more AOLish as time goes by and MS to try to toe the line, with options for 'advanced' users. Interoperability - welll, no argument there, Netscape is available for more platforms. But when you're selling crap, and it's cross-platform crap, that just means you have farther to spread that crap.
Wait, so because it tries to be smart and autocorrect for mistakes, that's a heinous thing? Ever hear of a debugger, link checker to check your code? Besides, is anyone down to using one browser for development - pain in the ass as it is to use multiple browsers to check your formatting ... ?
No argument about lack of compliance, but I'm not going to agree IE is harmful because it autocorrects for VB scripters who think they can HTML too *heh-heh*