Travelling from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit is one of the most energy intensive steps of going anywhere else. This first step, about 400 kilometers away from Earth, requires half of the total energy needed to go to the surface of Mars
It also mentions the mass to fuel ratio into earth orbit for the Saturn V was 4% whereas for the Space Shuttle (due to its heavy reusable reentry vehicle) it was only 1%.
Sorry to say it, but humankind cannot afford tourism into space until we have a space elevator.
Yes and I think this will put slashdot back at the forefront of securely readable (well, after some conversion) news sites. Although soon we will see an arms race between bookmarklets for decoding and increasingly complex encoding schemes. XOR $ff, anyone?
A sentence from the cited article might explain the different behaviour experienced when running the "Ultimatum" game with the Machiguenga
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
So if one offers a valuable and rare commodity to people living a life near sustenance, one gets other results than if one does the same experiment with people who have most of their needs (over)fulfilled and do not need the stakes of the game? That is IMHO not surprising but quite in line with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maybe social scientists (and economists) should start to evaluate the context of their experiments more carefully. Alas they are missing the 'laws of nature' whose violation leads to checking every plug.
How 'good' or 'bad' this database is depends IMHO partially on its query interface. If one can only ask for single (FQDN) URLs (with a query rate limit) and gets the vulnerabilities of that specific URL as an answer (plus maybe some pointers on what the vulnerable software likely is), it might actually be useful for the somewhat technically-inclined web owner. The proposed list of vulnerable software would probably not help them as they would have to remember which SW their site runs.
If on the other hand one can simply search the database for "give me all sites suffering from vulnerability X", that is not helping a web site owner at all but a cracker very much.
The OP's site seems to be slashdotted (seems Hadoop is not applied in the frontend) so I cannot check but from the comments here it seems it implements the second option. That is definitely something that should be changed.
The other thing any web site owner should take from this article is that Mass vulnerability spidering has reached mainstream. Much better to announce that on slashdot (and as many other news sites, magazines, periodicals as possible) than have people discover it in a year on their own. Now the next useful topic on slashdot would be a discussion on: "Should I host my own site, blog, shop,... or better use a service (doing all the security stuff)." But I have to check on my wordpress software version;-)
If you're not prepared to go to jail for 124 years then you shouldn't be involved in crime.
The principle idea behind punishment proportional to the severity of the crime is that it gives criminals an incentive not to escalate:
Pickpocket someone - Have to pay penalty or a short visit to the prison (depending on how often caught)
Threaten someone to rob them - Potentially get into prison for few years
Kill someone to get their money - Go to prison for a very long time
Raising the punishment for 'stealing' or for 'threatening' (depending on how one interprets LulzSec's actions) to the same or even higher level than killing means the next group of crackers will make sure to erase their tracks, even if it means killing a few people here or there. It's not going to make punishment worse for them but increases their chance to get away. And the US will finally have their home-grown terrorists it has always been waiting for.
Why the hell ELSE would you post a question on slashdot?
I think the point of the parent is that the question has this nice, fuzzy "I didn't do my research, please do it for me." feel, which will get you into trouble on any serious forum. One can even see it in the question. It asks: "Any fun, off-beat party apps this middle-aged suburban dad hasn't heard of?" But never lists which apps he has heard of.
The OP also asks for a ROM but never tells us the modell of tablet (except that it is 7'' and from MID, hope they have only one of those). Basically it asks at least two questions where IMHO the only answer a self-respecting nerd seeing the lack of research can give is LMGTFY:
What custom ROMs are there for my device - Google leads in its first entry to xda-developers the ROM source.
What MP3 player apps are there - (ignoring the play store) Google finds quite some
Mentioning Gentoo in a negative conotation doesn't help either (and no I am not using any beta ROMs either but neither do I compare them to Gentoo).
You can have a look on the possible plagiats on http://schavanplag.wordpress.com/ (google translation might be necessary for non German speakers). Note that this is basically the 'prosecutors' position (except that in this case the prosecutor is a community of people on the net) not the findings of the university. How many of them would you have found without computer help?
And I don't believe that "important officials" are less likely to have their degree revoked in Germany. I think it is actually more likely for them. If she wasn't a politician, nobody would have spent all the work necessary to come up with the above list. If she wasn't, the university wouldn't have to make absolutely sure that nobody suspected them of granting her a favor. If she wasn't, the internal analysis of the university prosecutor wouldn't have been leaked making this a year long affair.
How does a university not know a dissertation is full of plagiarism? [...] So how could this happen?
A) The Ph.D. thesis in question was submitted 1980. Long before computer checks and internet groups gathering to check Ph.D.s. B) It was not "full of plagiarism". You might want to fetch (non-marked) copy from the net and find the sentences in question before you accuse others of intent.
Well, I don't know whether a potential resignation of a (education & research) minister counts a "major political implications" in the first place.
The potential break-up of the CSU-FDP coalition in Bavaria over the (non)-abandoning of university tuition fees, that is something which could have major political consequences.
Mr. Guttenberg resigned because his whole Ph.D. - done outside the university while he was already a politician - was a lousy Copy&Paste job including copying papers done by the research arm of the parliament for him. Especially also in places where he claimed original thought.
Mrs. Schavan did the Ph.D. at the university before she started her career and seemingly ca. 15 years before she went into heavy politics. As far as I understand her Ph.D. was revoked because of incorrect citations (i.e. she named sources but not marked text as direct citation) in her literature section.
The only commonality is that both lost their Ph.D..
You want no international treaties and world trade organization?
You are aware that US coyright only has world-wide consequences due to those treaties? So feel free to ask the US government to remove them but do not expect Antigua to cower in fear of the day the US does it.
There seem to be quite some studies lately showing that temperate increase "had leveld off". E.g. German Sueddeutsche Zeitung recently cited an English Institute with such a study.
Criticism of other climate scientist seems to be that the used intervall is too short to make any statements on speed of change, especially since 1998 had been an extremely hot year globally due to El Nino (see second page of above article). Longer term trends seem to be steady at 0.16 C per decade. So don't get your hopes too high on being able to continue driving SUVs along the coastline.
No "compressed air" is not misleading as that seems to be exactly what is used for storage. From the PSA page about it (who should know intending to produce it):
--- snip --- What is it exactly?
A new type of full hybrid powertrain that uses petrol and compressed air:
- An innovative combination of tried and tested technologies: a petrol engine, a unit to store energy in the form of compressed air, a hydraulic motor-pump assembly and an automatic transmission working with an epicyclic gear train. --- snip ---
I agree to the lack of details. There is some additional information on the PSA page about this, including two presentations (the press presentation is actually better than the "technical" one). But nowhere can I find how much energy they can store with compressed air. I would imagine it is not very much so the "Zero emission" runs mentioned on the PSA page might be quite short.
The USA can definitely block payments from its citizens by enacting an appropriate law. But then there is the rest of the world. And with it comes a catch. If the US goverment forced e.g. American Express to not process transactions from non-US citizens with Antigua, it might cause those non-US citizens to change to e.g. Master Card or another non-US based payments processor, weakening American Express and thus the US economy. Of course the U.S. could threaten any payment processor - U.S.-based or not - with sanctions but since Antigua's move seems to be a WTO-approved measure, those sanctions would probably be found illegal again by the WTO allowing further compensations. And soon we are in a full-scale economic war.
All that just because of $21 million yearly revenue loss of the US media industry (which is what the WTO allowed Antigua)?
For Reichskristallnacht (or Reichsprogromnacht) the pretense used was the shooting of a member of the German embassy in Paris by a local Jew.
The building you might remember is probably the Reichstag (in Berlin) which wasn't bombed but burned (5 years before Reichsprogromnacht) and the alleged arsonist's connections to left parties were used as pretext to repeal several citicen rights, pursue left parties and thereby ensure the victory of NSDAP at the next election.
In Munich threre was a failed coup by the Hitler and others about 10 years earlier.
So first we get an report on the near completion of the EOMA board. Three months later, before it has time to prove itself (how many have been sold?), lkcl (probably Luke Leighton) gets into the limelight again with a seemingly not so well thought out proposal to build his own microcontroller . Standard quote of lkcl (paraphrased): "I don't know nothing, so I can't discuss how to overcome that well known restriction.". And now, a week later, an - bascially unannounced and unprepared - interview with this self-declared revolutionary.
All to give more spotlight to Rhombus Tech,
This is not News for nerds. This is product placement.
> Yes, this is probably going to lag. at least there will be source code which we know already works. > not having complete documentation has worked out quite well for the Allwinner A10 SoC, wouldn't you agree?
I don't know the A10 with the euphemistic name but I know that the typical SoC MCU I know has documentation in the thousands of pages. And most of it on internal blocks, not external connections which might see a reduced need by delivering it only on a board - although then you need to document the board. An SoC MCU is not a PC CPU. It has lots of internal (I/O) modules which all need documentation. And that documentation normally 'ripes' while select customers get engineering samples of the MCU and - for the priviledge of getting them - have the fun of suffering through and reporting all the inconsistent or non-understandable parts which get into the documentation because it is just a bunch of individual module descriptions forced together.
> it's a building-block exercise. the existing design is already proven in 65nm under the MVP Programme... > all we're doing is asking them to dial up the macros to put down a few more cores, and surround it with additional well-proven hard macros If I understood you correctly you want to shrink it to 40nm. Then there is no proven design as a shrink normally means a new libary. Also you should have your mentor at Samsung have you get in contact with one of their SoC Design leads and have him tell you how 'easy' it is to just "dial a few macros" and connect them. Any new thing you add to an existing SoC has the chance of causing ripple effect, be it problems with your bus architecture (e.g. not enough ports on your bus for the new cores), larger power supply (internal to external, linear to switching), timing violations because the die size grew,.... .
On the danger of doing a Bill Gates: Open Source SW is useful because every halfway intelligent person can extend it and make use of it within a few days of installing a development environment. Open Source semiconductor designs on the other hand are not, because the market access barriers in that area are not the knowledge of the design but (the cost of) the technology and the people needed to execute it and make something useful of it. Until nanotechnology delivers there is no "Brew your own core in the backyard".
>The deadline: > July 2013 for first mass-produced silicon > >The cost: > $USD 10 million
This poster has either no idea or is dreaming. In 6 months he will not have an SoC through potentially several tape-outs, having first done System Engineering, Design, Synthesis, Layout, Verification, Validation, Documentation,... and seemingly all without an existing organization. Or are SoC manufacturers lately doing short-term build-to-order processors. And the 10 million are not going to cover the necessary cost for all of the above. The masks alone might be that expensive depending on the number of tape-outs necessary (which - without an existing organization and working design flow - will be a lot).
Yes, this is the real problem of the argument about the robotic laws: It requires a (self)-concious being to execute. If we ever have such electronic things, there might be other problems.
Also Moglen's arguments are very much centered around privacy. But Clarke has explored in his stories and novels many situations where harm was coming from unexpected directions so it would be imaginable that a real smartphone with the three laws implemented might reduce the privacy of his owner if it thought that it was harmful for the owner. And, as Clark demonstrated, the owner would not necessarily agree.
So while it is nice food for thought, the three laws don't really have anything to do with Moglen's privacy agenda. There it is more the first law human interrelationship: Don't harm your neighbours (and by extension also your customers).
An alas German article about the whole debate (including Pro and Contra position) can be found in the c't 17/10 (online http://heise.de/-1447608). They also have a news article on the most recent development ( http://heise.de/-1447608 ) but that is not really anything new except that the government now started to make internal plans on how to realize such a law. Note that obviously Heise would profit from such a law but they are typically quite impartial.
Main argument for introducing the law is that for many news simply quoting headlines and a few excerpted lines of text is all someone wants to know. Thus the argument goes that the news aggregators do not direct (sufficient) traffic to the authors of the news but mostly keep the traffic - and thus the ad profits - for themselves.
Includes a report on an air condition failure (admittedly that specific failure lead to 9 people having to be brought to a hospital). At least in Germany we _would_ most probably know if a train had derailed due to a cyber attack.
Unless Zothecula=Ben Coxworth (which one never knows nowadays) this looks very much like a copyright violation. It is a 1:1 copy of the first paragraph of the referenced article from Ben. And Ben at least took some effort to reformulate when he took it from http://www.ohgizmo.com/2011/11/08/this-clipboard-could-save-your-life/.
But then, does crowdvertisement care about copyright?
Require full reserve (as opposed to fractional reserve) banking.
Sorry but this cannot work. What you are saying is that banks can only lend out their net equity but not any money from liabilities they have (e.g. from savings accounts or bonds they issued). Where will the money for interest on savings accounts come from in that case? Or is the idea that there will be no savings accounts anymore and everyone who wants interest has to buy bank stocks. Not the best for people who want a risk diversification.
* Prohibit risk-sharing between the then investment banks (lest one failing may pull down all).
* Make it clear to everyone that investment banks can and will go bankrupt from time to time and there will be no replacement of losses.
* Set maximum credit rating investment banks can have against the 'real' banks (lest all the money ends up at the investment banks again and they need bail outs to save grandma's savings
* Have a whitelist of dealings the 'real' banks are allowed to do.
* Make creative interpretations of regulation by 'real' banks punishable as defraud (claimant: the government due to increased risk of bail-out)
* Demand risk sharing (e.g. insurance) between the 'real' banks so less government bail-outs are necessary should an individual bank fail despite the low risk dealings they are only allowed to do.
Result: The investment banks can do whatever pleases them but will have massive problems of getting capital. Especially after the first goes bankrupt due to some 'rogue trade' (of course completely against company policy)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, indeed. From a very interesting article at NASA:
Travelling from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit is one of the most energy intensive steps of going anywhere else. This first step, about 400 kilometers away from Earth, requires half of the total energy needed to go to the surface of Mars
It also mentions the mass to fuel ratio into earth orbit for the Saturn V was 4% whereas for the Space Shuttle (due to its heavy reusable reentry vehicle) it was only 1%.
Sorry to say it, but humankind cannot afford tourism into space until we have a space elevator.
Yes and I think this will put slashdot back at the forefront of securely readable (well, after some conversion) news sites.
Although soon we will see an arms race between bookmarklets for decoding and increasingly complex encoding schemes. XOR $ff, anyone?
A sentence from the cited article might explain the different behaviour experienced when running the "Ultimatum" game with the Machiguenga
The stakes Henrich used in the game with the Machiguenga were not insubstantial—roughly equivalent to the few days’ wages they sometimes earned from episodic work with logging or oil companies.
So if one offers a valuable and rare commodity to people living a life near sustenance, one gets other results than if one does the same experiment with people who have most of their needs (over)fulfilled and do not need the stakes of the game? That is IMHO not surprising but quite in line with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maybe social scientists (and economists) should start to evaluate the context of their experiments more carefully. Alas they are missing the 'laws of nature' whose violation leads to checking every plug.
Now let's not get too harsh.
How 'good' or 'bad' this database is depends IMHO partially on its query interface. If one can only ask for single (FQDN) URLs (with a query rate limit) and gets the vulnerabilities of that specific URL as an answer (plus maybe some pointers on what the vulnerable software likely is), it might actually be useful for the somewhat technically-inclined web owner. The proposed list of vulnerable software would probably not help them as they would have to remember which SW their site runs.
If on the other hand one can simply search the database for "give me all sites suffering from vulnerability X", that is not helping a web site owner at all but a cracker very much.
The OP's site seems to be slashdotted (seems Hadoop is not applied in the frontend) so I cannot check but from the comments here it seems it implements the second option. That is definitely something that should be changed.
The other thing any web site owner should take from this article is that Mass vulnerability spidering has reached mainstream. Much better to announce that on slashdot (and as many other news sites, magazines, periodicals as possible) than have people discover it in a year on their own. ... or better use a service (doing all the security stuff)." But I have to check on my wordpress software version ;-)
Now the next useful topic on slashdot would be a discussion on: "Should I host my own site, blog, shop,
If you're not prepared to go to jail for 124 years then you shouldn't be involved in crime.
The principle idea behind punishment proportional to the severity of the crime is that it gives criminals an incentive not to escalate:
Raising the punishment for 'stealing' or for 'threatening' (depending on how one interprets LulzSec's actions) to the same or even higher level than killing means the next group of crackers will make sure to erase their tracks, even if it means killing a few people here or there. It's not going to make punishment worse for them but increases their chance to get away.
And the US will finally have their home-grown terrorists it has always been waiting for.
Why the hell ELSE would you post a question on slashdot?
I think the point of the parent is that the question has this nice, fuzzy "I didn't do my research, please do it for me." feel, which will get you into trouble on any serious forum. One can even see it in the question. It asks: "Any fun, off-beat party apps this middle-aged suburban dad hasn't heard of?" But never lists which apps he has heard of.
The OP also asks for a ROM but never tells us the modell of tablet (except that it is 7'' and from MID, hope they have only one of those). Basically it asks at least two questions where IMHO the only answer a self-respecting nerd seeing the lack of research can give is LMGTFY:
Mentioning Gentoo in a negative conotation doesn't help either (and no I am not using any beta ROMs either but neither do I compare them to Gentoo).
You can have a look on the possible plagiats on http://schavanplag.wordpress.com/ (google translation might be necessary for non German speakers). Note that this is basically the 'prosecutors' position (except that in this case the prosecutor is a community of people on the net) not the findings of the university.
How many of them would you have found without computer help?
And I don't believe that "important officials" are less likely to have their degree revoked in Germany. I think it is actually more likely for them. If she wasn't a politician, nobody would have spent all the work necessary to come up with the above list. If she wasn't, the university wouldn't have to make absolutely sure that nobody suspected them of granting her a favor. If she wasn't, the internal analysis of the university prosecutor wouldn't have been leaked making this a year long affair.
How does a university not know a dissertation is full of plagiarism? [...] So how could this happen?
A) The Ph.D. thesis in question was submitted 1980. Long before computer checks and internet groups gathering to check Ph.D.s.
B) It was not "full of plagiarism". You might want to fetch (non-marked) copy from the net and find the sentences in question before you accuse others of intent.
Well, I don't know whether a potential resignation of a (education & research) minister counts a "major political implications" in the first place.
The potential break-up of the CSU-FDP coalition in Bavaria over the (non)-abandoning of university tuition fees, that is something which could have major political consequences.
Mr. Guttenberg resigned because his whole Ph.D. - done outside the university while he was already a politician - was a lousy Copy&Paste job including copying papers done by the research arm of the parliament for him. Especially also in places where he claimed original thought.
Mrs. Schavan did the Ph.D. at the university before she started her career and seemingly ca. 15 years before she went into heavy politics. As far as I understand her Ph.D. was revoked because of incorrect citations (i.e. she named sources but not marked text as direct citation) in her literature section.
The only commonality is that both lost their Ph.D..
You want no international treaties and world trade organization?
You are aware that US coyright only has world-wide consequences due to those treaties?
So feel free to ask the US government to remove them but do not expect Antigua to cower in fear of the day the US does it.
There seem to be quite some studies lately showing that temperate increase "had leveld off". E.g. German Sueddeutsche Zeitung recently cited an English Institute with such a study.
Criticism of other climate scientist seems to be that the used intervall is too short to make any statements on speed of change, especially since 1998 had been an extremely hot year globally due to El Nino (see second page of above article). Longer term trends seem to be steady at 0.16 C per decade. So don't get your hopes too high on being able to continue driving SUVs along the coastline.
No "compressed air" is not misleading as that seems to be exactly what is used for storage. From the PSA page about it (who should know intending to produce it):
--- snip ---
What is it exactly?
A new type of full hybrid powertrain that uses petrol and compressed air:
- An innovative combination of tried and tested technologies: a petrol engine, a unit to store energy in the form of compressed air, a hydraulic motor-pump assembly and an automatic transmission working with an epicyclic gear train.
--- snip ---
I agree to the lack of details. There is some additional information on the PSA page about this, including two presentations (the press presentation is actually better than the "technical" one).
But nowhere can I find how much energy they can store with compressed air. I would imagine it is not very much so the "Zero emission" runs mentioned on the PSA page might be quite short.
The USA can definitely block payments from its citizens by enacting an appropriate law. But then there is the rest of the world.
And with it comes a catch. If the US goverment forced e.g. American Express to not process transactions from non-US citizens with Antigua, it might cause those non-US citizens to change to e.g. Master Card or another non-US based payments processor, weakening American Express and thus the US economy.
Of course the U.S. could threaten any payment processor - U.S.-based or not - with sanctions but since Antigua's move seems to be a WTO-approved measure, those sanctions would probably be found illegal again by the WTO allowing further compensations. And soon we are in a full-scale economic war.
All that just because of $21 million yearly revenue loss of the US media industry (which is what the WTO allowed Antigua)?
Aren't you mixing up your history books a bit?
For Reichskristallnacht (or Reichsprogromnacht) the pretense used was the shooting of a member of the German embassy in Paris by a local Jew.
The building you might remember is probably the Reichstag (in Berlin) which wasn't bombed but burned (5 years before Reichsprogromnacht) and the alleged arsonist's connections to left parties were used as pretext to repeal several citicen rights, pursue left parties and thereby ensure the victory of NSDAP at the next election.
In Munich threre was a failed coup by the Hitler and others about 10 years earlier.
So first we get an report on the near completion of the EOMA board. Three months later, before it has time to prove itself (how many have been sold?), lkcl (probably Luke Leighton) gets into the limelight again with a seemingly not so well thought out proposal to build his own microcontroller . Standard quote of lkcl (paraphrased): "I don't know nothing, so I can't discuss how to overcome that well known restriction.". And now, a week later, an - bascially unannounced and unprepared - interview with this self-declared revolutionary.
All to give more spotlight to Rhombus Tech,
This is not News for nerds. This is product placement.
> Yes, this is probably going to lag. at least there will be source code which we know already works.
> not having complete documentation has worked out quite well for the Allwinner A10 SoC, wouldn't you agree?
I don't know the A10 with the euphemistic name but I know that the typical SoC MCU I know has documentation in the thousands of pages. And most of it on internal blocks, not external connections which might see a reduced need by delivering it only on a board - although then you need to document the board.
An SoC MCU is not a PC CPU. It has lots of internal (I/O) modules which all need documentation. And that documentation normally 'ripes' while select customers get engineering samples of the MCU and - for the priviledge of getting them - have the fun of suffering through and reporting all the inconsistent or non-understandable parts which get into the documentation because it is just a bunch of individual module descriptions forced together.
> it's a building-block exercise. the existing design is already proven in 65nm under the MVP Programme ... .... .
> all we're doing is asking them to dial up the macros to put down a few more cores, and surround it with additional well-proven hard macros
If I understood you correctly you want to shrink it to 40nm. Then there is no proven design as a shrink normally means a new libary.
Also you should have your mentor at Samsung have you get in contact with one of their SoC Design leads and have him tell you how 'easy' it is to just "dial a few macros" and connect them. Any new thing you add to an existing SoC has the chance of causing ripple effect, be it problems with your bus architecture (e.g. not enough ports on your bus for the new cores), larger power supply (internal to external, linear to switching), timing violations because the die size grew,
On the danger of doing a Bill Gates: Open Source SW is useful because every halfway intelligent person can extend it and make use of it within a few days of installing a development environment. Open Source semiconductor designs on the other hand are not, because the market access barriers in that area are not the knowledge of the design but (the cost of) the technology and the people needed to execute it and make something useful of it. Until nanotechnology delivers there is no "Brew your own core in the backyard".
From TFA:
>The deadline:
> July 2013 for first mass-produced silicon
>
>The cost:
> $USD 10 million
This poster has either no idea or is dreaming. In 6 months he will not have an SoC through potentially several tape-outs, having first done System Engineering, Design, Synthesis, Layout, Verification, Validation, Documentation, ... and seemingly all without an existing organization. Or are SoC manufacturers lately doing short-term build-to-order processors. And the 10 million are not going to cover the necessary cost for all of the above. The masks alone might be that expensive depending on the number of tape-outs necessary (which - without an existing organization and working design flow - will be a lot).
Yes, this is the real problem of the argument about the robotic laws: It requires a (self)-concious being to execute. If we ever have such electronic things, there might be other problems.
Also Moglen's arguments are very much centered around privacy. But Clarke has explored in his stories and novels many situations where harm was coming from unexpected directions so it would be imaginable that a real smartphone with the three laws implemented might reduce the privacy of his owner if it thought that it was harmful for the owner. And, as Clark demonstrated, the owner would not necessarily agree.
So while it is nice food for thought, the three laws don't really have anything to do with Moglen's privacy agenda. There it is more the first law human interrelationship: Don't harm your neighbours (and by extension also your customers).
An alas German article about the whole debate (including Pro and Contra position) can be found in the c't 17/10 (online http://heise.de/-1447608). They also have a news article on the most recent development ( http://heise.de/-1447608 ) but that is not really anything new except that the government now started to make internal plans on how to realize such a law. Note that obviously Heise would profit from such a law but they are typically quite impartial.
Main argument for introducing the law is that for many news simply quoting headlines and a few excerpted lines of text is all someone wants to know. Thus the argument goes that the news aggregators do not direct (sufficient) traffic to the authors of the news but mostly keep the traffic - and thus the ad profits - for themselves.
> How will we know the difference between an attack and normal operations?
We would know because each accident on the railroads is meticiously investigated.
See e.g. the web page of the Accident Investigation Office of the German Federal Railroad Agency [German knowledge required]:
http://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/cln_031/nn_316888/EUB/DE/Publikationen/Untersuchungsberichte/__Function/untersuchungsberichte__tabelle.html
Includes a report on an air condition failure (admittedly that specific failure lead to 9 people having to be brought to a hospital).
At least in Germany we _would_ most probably know if a train had derailed due to a cyber attack.
Unless Zothecula=Ben Coxworth (which one never knows nowadays) this looks very much like a copyright violation. It is a 1:1 copy of the first paragraph of the referenced article from Ben. And Ben at least took some effort to reformulate when he took it from http://www.ohgizmo.com/2011/11/08/this-clipboard-could-save-your-life/.
But then, does crowdvertisement care about copyright?
Require full reserve (as opposed to fractional reserve) banking.
Sorry but this cannot work. What you are saying is that banks can only lend out their net equity but not any money from liabilities they have (e.g. from savings accounts or bonds they issued). Where will the money for interest on savings accounts come from in that case? Or is the idea that there will be no savings accounts anymore and everyone who wants interest has to buy bank stocks. Not the best for people who want a risk diversification.
Re-introduce the Glass-Steagall Act,
In addition
Result: The investment banks can do whatever pleases them but will have massive problems of getting capital. Especially after the first goes bankrupt due to some 'rogue trade' (of course completely against company policy)