Me thinks someone was just doing this for entertainment.
Almost certainly, especially since a complete success would just mean they can play video games slightly more efficiently.
This toolkit worked for them, but does using a neural networking toolkit mean that what you produce is a neural network? It looks like the output neurons are doing image matching, and the hidden layer is identifying interesting candidates from a stream. In their environment, interesting candidates are any box that ticks from dim to bright (so they can spot the re-charged state when it gets fully lit).
As described, it sounds more like a pipeline than a network. They use training data, rather than hard-coding target images, but it's not clear to me that the training feedback goes between neurons. It looks like you could do unit testing on the individual neurons, which doesn't describe neural networks as I understand them.
I still think it's a neat tool that they made, but would some AI geek out there like to comment on calling it a neural network?
What made this monument a monument was that it was a natural curiosity. Remaking it cheapens it.
I can understand that it's nothing like a replacement, but is it such a bad alternative? Rebuilding it as a stone reconstruction would really cheapen it (trying to re-create nature misses the point), but at the moment it's just a nice view that gets a number of confused tourists, right? It sounds like as good a place for a large art installation as any. Isn't the only real alternative to just leave it as a nice walking trail that will eventually fall into disuse?
In computer science jobs, a masters might get you a couple of thousand per year higher pay, but you've lived at a lower salary for a year (or two) and could have been up to that higher starting salary with normal pay rises by the time you start there with your masters. For total lifetime earnings in computer science, I doubt it will help.
On the other hand, I don't think it hurts that much either, and it's a chance to do a more in-depth study of your chosen field. It's also an opportunity to see the different views on the subject at a different university, meet interesting new people (including future professional contacts), and enjoy learning for its own sake. Once you're on a non-academic payroll, you will start needing a reason to study interesting subjects during daylight hours.
In short, I agree with wjh31: if you like to study, it's a good way to spend some time. If you just want to earn more money, get a job with prospects, work hard, and get promoted.
Don't think I ever saw a hard drive for the PET. You could slam the head of the floppy drive out of alignment (people wrote code that played music on the drive), but my friends used to have time competitions for re-aligning them. They used ratcheting screwdrivers for faster action.
The Commodore PET was one box with integrated monitor and processor, and the monitor focus could be adjusted in software. It was possible to reduce the scan of the CRT to just the centre of the monitor, which (I am told) burnt a dead area in the middle of the monitor fairly quickly.
Wouldn't meet the "useless" measure, but would be very annoying and permanent physical damage. (You could probably mess up the disk head alignment pretty badly too, but that can be fixed.)
So you'll just let revisionist historians fuck up our history with LIES?
I won't "let" them. I'll post the information with a reasonable citation; I just won't give up my whole lunch hour to proving the exact horsepower of a particular obscure engine model so that somebody can have a slightly more accurate high-school "research" paper. People who actually need to rely on the information (to re-purpose the engines as backup power generators for their Swedish datacentre) will get a copy of the manual anyhow, so the error is not likely to cause any real harm.
It's like this reply. I'll post this one clarification, but won't be giving any further time to the issue if you choose to reject it.
If I know the right value, then fixing the Wikipedia facts is not actually that important to me any more. I might offer the information and citation as a general public service, but taking a photograph of the engine, downloading it to my computer at work (which doesn't have the cable for my camera), then uploading it and justifying the interpretation just to correct some trivial error? It wouldn't be worth it to most people.
Only in the past 50 years or so has a thin veneer of "bringing out the truth" been touted as the job of newspapers. But newspapers are profit driven enterprises, just like any other business - always have been.
I agree completely, and that leads to the question of when the source of profit shifted from the readers (paying for each copy) to the advertisers. There is an interesting analysis in the first chapter of "Power Without Responsibility" (section title "The industrialization of the press") by Curran and Seaton, later expanded in "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky (also in the first chapter, section title "The advertising license to do business"). The basic thesis is that newspapers originally reflected the interests of their readership, but advertisers weren't interested in paying to advertise in publications that didn't attract the sort of people they expected to get as customers. As a result, the papers that aligned their interests with those of business got more advertisers, and could charge less per copy. The cheaper newspapers sold better, made more money, expanded, and marginalized the papers that were not aligned with business interests. They didn't go out of business, but their influence was severely restricted. I know this is over-simplified as I have written it here. The authors mentioned above do a much better analysis.
Typically, it's because it's not used properly. The protocol itself has plenty of features for reducing power draw, and has been getting better, but a surprising number of products use the manufacturer default settings for their Bluetooth chip.
For example, the clocks at the two ends need to stay synchronized to despread the signal. The more closely synchronized they are, the smaller your listening window needs to be to catch the beginning of a frame, but the more frequently you need to synchronize (depending on the accuracy of the clock you use, which also has an effect on power consumption). There are a lot of parameters that could be adjusted, and several performance measurements that you need to balance; the manufacturer defaults work well enough, so many product teams just use them.
Those that take the time to do it right get better performance, but it's not usually noticed, as people assume that all Bluetooth devices will perform similarly (which closes the cycle of not being able to justify the effort to optimize your settings).
You could say the same thing about real-world dance clubs. Lots of people think they know what a good one should look like, customers are only interested in coming if they can expect a nice sized crowd (not too crowded, but not too empty), and new ones open all the time. As an industry, dance clubs have survived this model for quite a while.
If MMOs starve to death, it will be because people got bored with them, not because mass entertainment only works with limited options available.
American healthcare, like American education, has some of the best institutions in the world. It also has quite a few that aren't so impressive, and a large number of people who don't enjoy the level of access that most western countries consider the basic minimum (some get it anyway, but bankrupt their families as a result).
The general argument of the Canadians is that allowing differential healthcare, where rich people can bypass the public system, will make it easier for the government to let the public system slide. As the author of your cited article mentions, the rich will often bypass the system by going abroad for specific treatments, but a large number of people who could afford to go abroad use the public system anyhow. Those who went abroad for care can be very vocal about how the current system is not providing the level of care that they expect. Which is the point, really.
When the current system was adopted, everyone knew that pulling the entire population to a single system would pull some down as well as up. Naturally, some people are unhappy with the system as it is. If your mother dies while waiting for surgery, it will influence your opinion (although whether that influence is towards more funding, privatization, or better management can vary). On the other hand, it's the third rail of Canadian politics. Nobody who wants to be re-elected would suggest changing it. That suggests the average voter believes that care would, for most people, get worse in a two-tier system.
Just in case someone out there has the numbers, what about the relative life expectancy of people over 65 in Canada and the United States, broken down by annual income or personal net assets? The article gave only Europe, and only for the total population.
A very interesting exploration of this exact topic is available in The Barbarian Invasions, which was nominated for the 2004 Best Writing Oscar, and won the 2004 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar.
Given the sums to be lost I wouldn't be entirely sure the whole escapade didn't get into the public domain, you know, on Slashdot.org and all that. There's a hundred and one ways to cripple large sections of a city, this being one, and all of them cost in the upper scale of millions of dollars.
Millions of whose dollars? The original article doesn't mention any fines or contract penalties paid by the phone company for this outage, so what did it actually cost them, and how does that compare to the cost of providing a more robust network? If we are going to rely on capitalism (rather than stricter regulation) to fix this, that answer is important. The extra cost of the outage (multiplied by the probability of it happening) needs to be more than the cost of guarding against it, or it won't be done. (By cost, I mean in the dollar balance to each individual organization involved; general "cost to society" doesn't count, unless it translates into fines and penalties against the providers.)
Does anyone know what a standard service-level agreement for 911 service looks like?
The difference in what you can expect as a result. If you didn't do your homework, you might think it will have some tiny effect on your final grade, which doesn't bother you much. If you blew the rent money, somebody is definitely going to notice, and you are lying to yourself when you think you can win it back before it comes home to roost.
She's not saying that skipping homework is a good way to spend your time; just that the student in question doesn't need to be "pathologically addicted" to think it's not a big deal.
I also can't buy Bose headphones from Amazon, since Amazon.com won't ship to Europe, and Amazon.de doesn't sell them. (Didn't actually try Amazon.co.uk, but you get the point.) I can buy those headphones from local electronics shops though. I assume the reason that Amazon.com won't ship them is that Bose has distribution agreements with European companies, and Amazon.com didn't think it was worth the effort and/or expense to secure those distribution rights. (Although it would be nice if they would give you pointers to affiliates who would ship to your address, rather than just saying they won't do it.)
I completely agree with the posters who complain that it's inconvenient, but if you see a product that has value, and is not available in some particular market, then it probably wouldn't be hard to set up a business, sign a distribution agreement, and start selling. Don't blame a company that has chosen to focus their marketing and distribution efforts on a market smaller than the entire world, blame the lack of local initiative (or the lack of local demand) in your country of residence.
As far as I can tell, it's only Americans who ever thought of pronouncing it that way. Germans have been saying giga with a hard G right through, and apparently it was a German who proposed the prefix in the first place. Interesting summary at Wikipedia. When I saw Back to the Future originally, it took me a few seconds to understand that he meant gigawatt (it's strange the details you can remember), so I must have been using the hard G pronunciation myself in 1985.
Of course it was to the United States. It goes with the desk in the oval office (made from the timbers of the sister ship to the source of the timber in the desk that's already there). It should go to the national archives, but if it actually looks good on the desk (and people can deal with the symbolism of having a British gift on that desk) then I would imagine it could be used there too.
This came up eight years ago, when the Clintons were accused of taking some gifts with them when they left (see here). For a sitting president to accept a large personal gift would really not work. I bet Gordon Brown can keep the DVDs.
It's an interesting point, but I would just add that people on H1-B aren't off-shored. They are spending their money in the United States, contributing to the domestic economy, and usually bringing in education that was subsidized by foreign governments.
You don't need any particular government approval to send work abroad; you only need to go through all the H1-B paperwork if you want to bring a skilled person into the United States. Just sending the money so that person can do the work elsewhere is far easier all around, and that contrast grows with every new effort to keep the foreigners out, making the decision to off-shore easier.
Maybe I'm just a dumb foreigner, but wouldn't the bank contract out any of the jobs that pay below a living wage? If the bank is applying for an H1B, I would expect it to be for specialty workers with a university education (or there would be no point in applying, since it would be rejected). That kind of person would probably want to be offered enough to afford a warm place to live and the occasional night out before considering a move to a foreign country. The cleaning staff may be starving and freezing, but I doubt they are on H1Bs.
Recordings are a lot more likely to cause trouble in their lives than just having sex.
I often get the feeling that people forget that sex can lead to pregnancy.
I agree with the strange contradiction though. Someone posted on a thread about prostitution the other day how strange it is that one person getting paid to have sex is illegal, but both getting paid to have sex while being videotaped is protected as freedom of expression.
That's nothing; the same question asks if you have the intention of engaging in immoral activities. Next time you visit, try asking the immigration officer whose morality applies.
As for the intelligence thing, I always thought it was that this form turns any minor crime into a federal offense (false statement on an immigration document), which makes it easier to deport people for anything that seems appropriate.
My favourite part on that green form is right above where you sign:
WAIVER OF RIGHTS: I hereby waive any rights to review or appeal of an immigration officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any action in deportation.
It always struck me that if the public really wants to give immigration officers "untouchable" status, they could just vote for a law that gives it to them, instead of having every single visa waiver applicant grant it for each individual case. This line has always sounded to me like a way of bypassing the need for a law that would be difficult to get enacted.
The problem with immigration departments (and this goes for a lot of countries) comes from the fact that their customers can't vote. As long as the U.S. dollar is cheaper than borscht, people will keep tolerating the long lines and bureaucracy. If these economic stimulation packages work, you may see the tourist business need to focus much more strongly on domestic tourism.
Inter-cultural (even within Europe) differences would be a wonderful thing to teach. The standard German engineer seems to try to convince by using as technical and complicated a description as possible, and simultaneously acting as if the work is beyond question. In university, we used to describe this as "proof by intimidation." It's fair enough, so long as everyone is playing by the same rules.
A German-speaking Swiss, on the other hand, tends to really dislike the haughty attitude (although the accent doesn't help), and will look for any excuse to criticize a person who presents in this way. An American will distrust anyone who can't explain something at a high level (going to technical details later is good, but don't start with them), since starting with the technical details suggests you either don't really understand how it fits together, don't want your audience to understand, or don't care if your audience understands. (Although the German accent may be a plus with Americans, since Hollywood has built up the stereotype "good engineer or scientist" based on Wernher von Braun and Albert Einstein.)
We're not going to change engineering culture any time soon, but for someone to at least be aware of the differences can only help.
A standard isn't software; it's how to exchange information. That includes data formats, but also includes protocols and an awful lot of context. The standards work is a big job, and people have been working on it for years (see HL7). As eln points out below, it's boring as hell, but that doesn't make it unimportant. The industry has been in the process of moving from HL7 v.2 to v.3 for about a decade now.
If you want to get into the software part of the solution, have a look at the OHF Project. There are others, but that's a starting place.
I agree with tnk on the benign reason; the system as a whole will save money, but which individual players will save how much? Hospitals already spend very little on IT compared with other businesses, so spending a big whack that may end saving money for some insurance company isn't going to happen.
You want one big reason for doing this? If it can free up nurses from doing secretarial work chasing down documents in the mail and phoning around, it just might keep enough staff at the hospitals to serve the public. The U.S. department of health and human services prepared this report on the subject. It's worth reading.
Slashdot Mirror
The Lindt & Sprungli chocolate factory in Zurich, Switzerland uses waste heat from the factory to heat a public swimming pool across the road.
Me thinks someone was just doing this for entertainment.
Almost certainly, especially since a complete success would just mean they can play video games slightly more efficiently.
This toolkit worked for them, but does using a neural networking toolkit mean that what you produce is a neural network? It looks like the output neurons are doing image matching, and the hidden layer is identifying interesting candidates from a stream. In their environment, interesting candidates are any box that ticks from dim to bright (so they can spot the re-charged state when it gets fully lit).
As described, it sounds more like a pipeline than a network. They use training data, rather than hard-coding target images, but it's not clear to me that the training feedback goes between neurons. It looks like you could do unit testing on the individual neurons, which doesn't describe neural networks as I understand them.
I still think it's a neat tool that they made, but would some AI geek out there like to comment on calling it a neural network?
What made this monument a monument was that it was a natural curiosity. Remaking it cheapens it.
I can understand that it's nothing like a replacement, but is it such a bad alternative? Rebuilding it as a stone reconstruction would really cheapen it (trying to re-create nature misses the point), but at the moment it's just a nice view that gets a number of confused tourists, right? It sounds like as good a place for a large art installation as any. Isn't the only real alternative to just leave it as a nice walking trail that will eventually fall into disuse?
In computer science jobs, a masters might get you a couple of thousand per year higher pay, but you've lived at a lower salary for a year (or two) and could have been up to that higher starting salary with normal pay rises by the time you start there with your masters. For total lifetime earnings in computer science, I doubt it will help.
On the other hand, I don't think it hurts that much either, and it's a chance to do a more in-depth study of your chosen field. It's also an opportunity to see the different views on the subject at a different university, meet interesting new people (including future professional contacts), and enjoy learning for its own sake. Once you're on a non-academic payroll, you will start needing a reason to study interesting subjects during daylight hours.
In short, I agree with wjh31: if you like to study, it's a good way to spend some time. If you just want to earn more money, get a job with prospects, work hard, and get promoted.
Don't think I ever saw a hard drive for the PET. You could slam the head of the floppy drive out of alignment (people wrote code that played music on the drive), but my friends used to have time competitions for re-aligning them. They used ratcheting screwdrivers for faster action.
Ahh, geek reminiscences...
The Commodore PET was one box with integrated monitor and processor, and the monitor focus could be adjusted in software. It was possible to reduce the scan of the CRT to just the centre of the monitor, which (I am told) burnt a dead area in the middle of the monitor fairly quickly.
Wouldn't meet the "useless" measure, but would be very annoying and permanent physical damage. (You could probably mess up the disk head alignment pretty badly too, but that can be fixed.)
So you'll just let revisionist historians fuck up our history with LIES?
I won't "let" them. I'll post the information with a reasonable citation; I just won't give up my whole lunch hour to proving the exact horsepower of a particular obscure engine model so that somebody can have a slightly more accurate high-school "research" paper. People who actually need to rely on the information (to re-purpose the engines as backup power generators for their Swedish datacentre) will get a copy of the manual anyhow, so the error is not likely to cause any real harm.
It's like this reply. I'll post this one clarification, but won't be giving any further time to the issue if you choose to reject it.
If I know the right value, then fixing the Wikipedia facts is not actually that important to me any more. I might offer the information and citation as a general public service, but taking a photograph of the engine, downloading it to my computer at work (which doesn't have the cable for my camera), then uploading it and justifying the interpretation just to correct some trivial error? It wouldn't be worth it to most people.
Only in the past 50 years or so has a thin veneer of "bringing out the truth" been touted as the job of newspapers. But newspapers are profit driven enterprises, just like any other business - always have been.
I agree completely, and that leads to the question of when the source of profit shifted from the readers (paying for each copy) to the advertisers. There is an interesting analysis in the first chapter of "Power Without Responsibility" (section title "The industrialization of the press") by Curran and Seaton, later expanded in "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky (also in the first chapter, section title "The advertising license to do business"). The basic thesis is that newspapers originally reflected the interests of their readership, but advertisers weren't interested in paying to advertise in publications that didn't attract the sort of people they expected to get as customers. As a result, the papers that aligned their interests with those of business got more advertisers, and could charge less per copy. The cheaper newspapers sold better, made more money, expanded, and marginalized the papers that were not aligned with business interests. They didn't go out of business, but their influence was severely restricted. I know this is over-simplified as I have written it here. The authors mentioned above do a much better analysis.
Typically, it's because it's not used properly. The protocol itself has plenty of features for reducing power draw, and has been getting better, but a surprising number of products use the manufacturer default settings for their Bluetooth chip.
For example, the clocks at the two ends need to stay synchronized to despread the signal. The more closely synchronized they are, the smaller your listening window needs to be to catch the beginning of a frame, but the more frequently you need to synchronize (depending on the accuracy of the clock you use, which also has an effect on power consumption). There are a lot of parameters that could be adjusted, and several performance measurements that you need to balance; the manufacturer defaults work well enough, so many product teams just use them.
Those that take the time to do it right get better performance, but it's not usually noticed, as people assume that all Bluetooth devices will perform similarly (which closes the cycle of not being able to justify the effort to optimize your settings).
You could say the same thing about real-world dance clubs. Lots of people think they know what a good one should look like, customers are only interested in coming if they can expect a nice sized crowd (not too crowded, but not too empty), and new ones open all the time. As an industry, dance clubs have survived this model for quite a while.
If MMOs starve to death, it will be because people got bored with them, not because mass entertainment only works with limited options available.
American healthcare, like American education, has some of the best institutions in the world. It also has quite a few that aren't so impressive, and a large number of people who don't enjoy the level of access that most western countries consider the basic minimum (some get it anyway, but bankrupt their families as a result).
The general argument of the Canadians is that allowing differential healthcare, where rich people can bypass the public system, will make it easier for the government to let the public system slide. As the author of your cited article mentions, the rich will often bypass the system by going abroad for specific treatments, but a large number of people who could afford to go abroad use the public system anyhow. Those who went abroad for care can be very vocal about how the current system is not providing the level of care that they expect. Which is the point, really.
When the current system was adopted, everyone knew that pulling the entire population to a single system would pull some down as well as up. Naturally, some people are unhappy with the system as it is. If your mother dies while waiting for surgery, it will influence your opinion (although whether that influence is towards more funding, privatization, or better management can vary). On the other hand, it's the third rail of Canadian politics. Nobody who wants to be re-elected would suggest changing it. That suggests the average voter believes that care would, for most people, get worse in a two-tier system.
Just in case someone out there has the numbers, what about the relative life expectancy of people over 65 in Canada and the United States, broken down by annual income or personal net assets? The article gave only Europe, and only for the total population.
A very interesting exploration of this exact topic is available in The Barbarian Invasions, which was nominated for the 2004 Best Writing Oscar, and won the 2004 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar.
Given the sums to be lost I wouldn't be entirely sure the whole escapade didn't get into the public domain, you know, on Slashdot.org and all that. There's a hundred and one ways to cripple large sections of a city, this being one, and all of them cost in the upper scale of millions of dollars.
Millions of whose dollars? The original article doesn't mention any fines or contract penalties paid by the phone company for this outage, so what did it actually cost them, and how does that compare to the cost of providing a more robust network? If we are going to rely on capitalism (rather than stricter regulation) to fix this, that answer is important. The extra cost of the outage (multiplied by the probability of it happening) needs to be more than the cost of guarding against it, or it won't be done. (By cost, I mean in the dollar balance to each individual organization involved; general "cost to society" doesn't count, unless it translates into fines and penalties against the providers.)
Does anyone know what a standard service-level agreement for 911 service looks like?
The difference in what you can expect as a result. If you didn't do your homework, you might think it will have some tiny effect on your final grade, which doesn't bother you much. If you blew the rent money, somebody is definitely going to notice, and you are lying to yourself when you think you can win it back before it comes home to roost.
She's not saying that skipping homework is a good way to spend your time; just that the student in question doesn't need to be "pathologically addicted" to think it's not a big deal.
I also can't buy Bose headphones from Amazon, since Amazon.com won't ship to Europe, and Amazon.de doesn't sell them. (Didn't actually try Amazon.co.uk, but you get the point.) I can buy those headphones from local electronics shops though. I assume the reason that Amazon.com won't ship them is that Bose has distribution agreements with European companies, and Amazon.com didn't think it was worth the effort and/or expense to secure those distribution rights. (Although it would be nice if they would give you pointers to affiliates who would ship to your address, rather than just saying they won't do it.)
I completely agree with the posters who complain that it's inconvenient, but if you see a product that has value, and is not available in some particular market, then it probably wouldn't be hard to set up a business, sign a distribution agreement, and start selling. Don't blame a company that has chosen to focus their marketing and distribution efforts on a market smaller than the entire world, blame the lack of local initiative (or the lack of local demand) in your country of residence.
As far as I can tell, it's only Americans who ever thought of pronouncing it that way. Germans have been saying giga with a hard G right through, and apparently it was a German who proposed the prefix in the first place. Interesting summary at Wikipedia. When I saw Back to the Future originally, it took me a few seconds to understand that he meant gigawatt (it's strange the details you can remember), so I must have been using the hard G pronunciation myself in 1985.
Of course it was to the United States. It goes with the desk in the oval office (made from the timbers of the sister ship to the source of the timber in the desk that's already there). It should go to the national archives, but if it actually looks good on the desk (and people can deal with the symbolism of having a British gift on that desk) then I would imagine it could be used there too.
This came up eight years ago, when the Clintons were accused of taking some gifts with them when they left (see here). For a sitting president to accept a large personal gift would really not work. I bet Gordon Brown can keep the DVDs.
It's an interesting point, but I would just add that people on H1-B aren't off-shored. They are spending their money in the United States, contributing to the domestic economy, and usually bringing in education that was subsidized by foreign governments.
You don't need any particular government approval to send work abroad; you only need to go through all the H1-B paperwork if you want to bring a skilled person into the United States. Just sending the money so that person can do the work elsewhere is far easier all around, and that contrast grows with every new effort to keep the foreigners out, making the decision to off-shore easier.
Rote memorization of the answers without comprhension of why the answers are correct will get you a piece of paper.
If that's true, then you are at the wrong school.
Maybe I'm just a dumb foreigner, but wouldn't the bank contract out any of the jobs that pay below a living wage? If the bank is applying for an H1B, I would expect it to be for specialty workers with a university education (or there would be no point in applying, since it would be rejected). That kind of person would probably want to be offered enough to afford a warm place to live and the occasional night out before considering a move to a foreign country. The cleaning staff may be starving and freezing, but I doubt they are on H1Bs.
Recordings are a lot more likely to cause trouble in their lives than just having sex.
I often get the feeling that people forget that sex can lead to pregnancy.
I agree with the strange contradiction though. Someone posted on a thread about prostitution the other day how strange it is that one person getting paid to have sex is illegal, but both getting paid to have sex while being videotaped is protected as freedom of expression.
That's nothing; the same question asks if you have the intention of engaging in immoral activities. Next time you visit, try asking the immigration officer whose morality applies.
As for the intelligence thing, I always thought it was that this form turns any minor crime into a federal offense (false statement on an immigration document), which makes it easier to deport people for anything that seems appropriate.
My favourite part on that green form is right above where you sign:
WAIVER OF RIGHTS: I hereby waive any rights to review or appeal of an immigration officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any action in deportation.
It always struck me that if the public really wants to give immigration officers "untouchable" status, they could just vote for a law that gives it to them, instead of having every single visa waiver applicant grant it for each individual case. This line has always sounded to me like a way of bypassing the need for a law that would be difficult to get enacted.
The problem with immigration departments (and this goes for a lot of countries) comes from the fact that their customers can't vote. As long as the U.S. dollar is cheaper than borscht, people will keep tolerating the long lines and bureaucracy. If these economic stimulation packages work, you may see the tourist business need to focus much more strongly on domestic tourism.
Inter-cultural (even within Europe) differences would be a wonderful thing to teach. The standard German engineer seems to try to convince by using as technical and complicated a description as possible, and simultaneously acting as if the work is beyond question. In university, we used to describe this as "proof by intimidation." It's fair enough, so long as everyone is playing by the same rules.
A German-speaking Swiss, on the other hand, tends to really dislike the haughty attitude (although the accent doesn't help), and will look for any excuse to criticize a person who presents in this way. An American will distrust anyone who can't explain something at a high level (going to technical details later is good, but don't start with them), since starting with the technical details suggests you either don't really understand how it fits together, don't want your audience to understand, or don't care if your audience understands. (Although the German accent may be a plus with Americans, since Hollywood has built up the stereotype "good engineer or scientist" based on Wernher von Braun and Albert Einstein.)
We're not going to change engineering culture any time soon, but for someone to at least be aware of the differences can only help.
A standard isn't software; it's how to exchange information. That includes data formats, but also includes protocols and an awful lot of context. The standards work is a big job, and people have been working on it for years (see HL7). As eln points out below, it's boring as hell, but that doesn't make it unimportant. The industry has been in the process of moving from HL7 v.2 to v.3 for about a decade now.
If you want to get into the software part of the solution, have a look at the OHF Project. There are others, but that's a starting place.
I agree with tnk on the benign reason; the system as a whole will save money, but which individual players will save how much? Hospitals already spend very little on IT compared with other businesses, so spending a big whack that may end saving money for some insurance company isn't going to happen.
You want one big reason for doing this? If it can free up nurses from doing secretarial work chasing down documents in the mail and phoning around, it just might keep enough staff at the hospitals to serve the public. The U.S. department of health and human services prepared this report on the subject. It's worth reading.