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New Cable Designed To Deter Copper Thieves
Hugh Pickens writes "Pervasive thefts of copper wire from under the streets of Fresno, California have prompted the city to seal thousands of its manhole covers with concrete. In Picher, Oklahoma, someone felled the town's utility poles with chain saws, allowing thieves to abscond with 3,000 feet of wire while causing a blackout. The theft of copper cables costs U.S. companies $60 million a year and the FBI says it considers theft of copper wire to be a threat to the nation's baseline ability to function. But now PC World reports that a U.S. company has developed a new cable design that removes almost all the copper from cables in a bid to deter metal thieves. Unlike conventional cables made from solid copper, the GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel Cable consists of a steel core bonded to a copper outer casing, forming an equally effective but far less valuable cable by exploiting the corrosion-resistance of copper with the conductive properties of steel. 'Companies trying to protect their copper infrastructure have been going to extreme measures to deter theft, many of which are neither successful nor cost effective,' says CommScope vice president, Doug Wells. 'Despite efforts like these, thieves continue to steal copper because of its rising value. The result is costly damage to networks and growing service disruptions.' The GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel cable is the latest technical solution to the problem of copper theft, which has included alternatives like cable etching to aid tracing of stolen metal and using chemicals that leave stains detectable under ultra-violet light. However the Copper Clad Steel strikes at the root of the problem by making the cable less susceptible to theft by both increasing the resistance to cutting and drastically decreasing the scrap value."
It might stop them from being able to get money from the cable, but it's not like it's going to deter them from stealing the cable in the first place under the assumption that the cable is copper.
Vancouvers supervised sites more than pay for themselves just in reduced emergency room care, and when the feds tried to shut them down, the Supremes ruled that it would have been both an infringement on the provinces' right to administer their health-care programs, and an infringement on the individuals' right to security of the person by putting them at increased risk of dying.
As someone who has never been into recreational pharmacology, I say just legalize it and deal with it - it's a social, not legal, problem. Or stop being hypocrites and ban alcohol, tobacco, and every other product proven to affect brain function, including coffee, tea, sugar, breakfast cereals, any product containing corn or corn by-products, chocolate (don't you DARE!!!) etc.
Seriously - the war on drugs is hypocritical. It's also one that cannot ever be won. Seriously, the way to reduce drug use is to set an example, and to keep an open, non-judgmental attitude when talking to people who chose to use drugs - not have a bunch of drug-addicted politicians pass laws against it.
Maybe instead of making cables harder to steal we should make citizens that don't want to steal them...
At a certain point having a "welfare state" might become cheaper overall. Then most of them won't bother to steal if you provide them with food, shelter and tv/"youtube"/game consoles/parks.
Not a big difference if you're going to put those you catch in prisons where they are fed and housed...
Of course you'd also need to fix the education side to it, compulsory education for kids, free education (maybe even up to undergraduate level), free meals for school-kids. That way you don't get stuck with 20% or more of your population being under-educated and not very competitive with the rest of the world in terms of cost/ability.
I think they are more throwing a fit because he crams them into dark green korean war surplus tents in the 115 degree Arizona heat with no cooling and limited water. I think they are more throwing a fit because he also uses hot boxes as additional punishment in those conditions. I think they are more throwing a fit because he is literally running concentration camps here in the US.
Wish I had mod points. Pity the social policy says you're shit unless you can pay for your health and education. A healthy and educated population wouldn't need to steal $10 worth of copper. Side effect from screwing the population.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2620558&cid=38698508
That said, perhaps they should also do a test of the teachers, perhaps the direct reason for the difference is Finland has better teachers ;).
BUT even so Finland might have better teachers because the teachers were once students themselves, and if most of the students were well-educated, then most of the teachers would be too...
Whereas if you have crappy students each generation and most teachers coming from the "crappier end" of very unevenly educated students, you're not going to get very good results.
In a democracy if you leave too many people "behind", unless you're at the very top, you're still eventually going to pay for it one way or another, as long as those behind can still vote ;).