"It can be hard to institute these sorts of checklists onto an existing system, though. People often take it as an insult to their skills and intelligence ("Yes, I know how to upgrade a server. I've done it a thousand times." "Yes, I know how to perform bypass surgery. I've done it a thousand times."). The trick is finding a way to get people to want to do it."
Exactly!!! the key to checklists is to make them good enough that the job is performed more easily and reliably with than without them and that is obvious to anybody. It takes a lot of planning to make the checklists, but pays off in the long run.
and we know how to fix mistakes on machines.. why not use that procedural tool on people as well, it's proven to work. The point is that if you KNOW you will have 1% mistakes, then you have a duty to learn new tools to fix those mistakes. If a company found out they were losing 1% of every dollar taken from customers they'd try like hell to find out why. Accepting 1% of new cars being broken would be intolerable... why do you think we have an automaker crisis?
a checklist is something you have and review BEFORE you start a task, or in this case touch a patient. This is why "more paperwork" fails, because it's still trying to catch the evidence after it's left the barn, rather than having the page ready to go and seeing if you get the right outcome or not. Proper computerized checklists would be generated automatically each set of rounds and filled out before the nurse leaves the room, then she's done with that patient and can focus on the next.
It's just like in IT, stop putting out fires and being interrupted.. focus on getting tasks done completely, and documented before moving on and you become 100% more productive working less time... but the "hero" complex has to go because there's not heroes in good process planning.
he TRACKED 2 mistakes per patient per day. That might be forgetting to fluff your pillow, that might be grabbing a medicine you're allergic to that adds complications and causes treatment not to work.. the point is that you just don't know! Therefore science is not happening.
Medical professionals are very much luddites when it comes to things like computerized lists. 90%+ of diseases have known research as to the process and outcomes to heal the person. That's precisely what checklists are for, and to track information. In the age of computers, the computer should create the list from known research for each patient. Then when the data is input the results can be measured against the research to see if the person is being cured or has another problem, or a mistake was made.
This has nothing to do with the quality of people's training or work. People WILL make mistakes... failure to understand that, and use tools to prevent, catch, or undo that is a lack of scientific procedure. Remember two articles ago when we said that people don't pay attention to science, that vaccines might cause harm, etc.. the answer was science... and now those same people don't want to follow procedures that affect car, cheeseburger, and Lego brick trying to say they won't work on people, who's not interested in science now?
The issue is that proper SCIENCE has little room for heroes. If science and engineering is performed correctly and documented, you catch mistakes before they cause problems. 90%+ of all things treated at the hospital have a regimented treatment laid out by mountains of research.. the trouble is matching the proper research to the problem, then executing the treatment exactly as the research was proofed.
Your example is exactly the kind of non-engineer thinking that needs to stop. Somebody, has generally already done the research. It's up to the doctor to apply the research... it's boring, tedious work, with a result from a book.. like what engineers do. 75%+ of engineering work is hitting the books to find parts that are already for sale to do what you want, the rest is spend defining the problem and running tests very little time is actually spend designing physical devices anymore.
The same with medial science, people need to use computerized systems to track their progress against the mountains of research already done. Science only works with control groups... if you make 2 mistakes per day, you do not have your patient's treatment under scientific levels of control... there for you are not doing science, you're doing art.. like an english major.
no, even the best people WILL make mistakes even if they're just small ones. That's the whole point of things like ISO or QS that somebody ELSE is looking for those mistakes. Imagine if GM made one mistake per worker, and they allowed 2 mistakes per Auto off the line... oh, wait that happened and they nearly died. 1 mistake per worker each day is intolerably high in a world class environment.. and Nurses and Doctors are all Bachelors degree or higher, that's the top 15% of all workers already. You don't get better without scientific help.
but here's where ISO or CMMI help you hire the RIGHT nurses and not just more nurses. You have to identify problems that recur, things that make the current nurses inefficient. The whole "work smarter not harder" is a scientific fact.. just like brushing your teeth. The medical profession needs to really identify with controlling their processes. Which is kind of funny because a good chunk of statistics research came from the medical profession, but the everyday line workers (doctors, nurses, janitors) don't really follow scientific procedure when they do their job every day. That's all ISO really is.. just a way of documenting that you follow some pre-planned procedures... if you can't do that you're not really a scientists and that PHD should be taken away just on principal.
That's what computers are for!! Then each checklist can be personalized to that patient's care.
The medical profession is about 30 years behind in using modern project planning and Process Control systems that mom-n-pop machine shops are expected to use. Process control, and checklists are scientifically proven methods of improving quality. They are just as scientifically proven to work as any medical procedure... people get Phds in this stuff because billions of dollars are at stake.
I think the 1 error per person per day is pretty good... that's about what GM was doing in the 70's when every car went out the door to the customer with 2 things wrong. See how big a problem 1 mistake per day is!!!! Medical professionals don't want "extra paperwork" and they don't want to work to a "list". But in human experience 85% of what you do is routine.. that means it needs a list because you won't even know you made a mistake because what you do is so routine.
watch COPS some time... half the chases, and wild pubic endangerment, are because somebody has a little bag of weed or rock on them and some cop is illegally trolling traffic based on if they can get lucky and seize something under Federal drug rules. Being an avid Slashdot reader it's like the absolute worst show on TV in any decade.
you can't tax pot though. People can grow it naturally in all 50 states for some part of the year. If there's no tax incentive, or control incentive, and people can do it all by themselves then there's no reason to make it legal.. of course that type of thing would usually be something called a "inalienable RIGHT" in older times.
but the point is that under today's conditions if YOU run a clean house but your kid brings home drugs from school, the last thing you want to do is ask for any kind of professional help unless they commit a crime. Because "using" drugs is a crime, your family member is under suspicion as soon as they go into rehab. Rehab is about not committing the crime of drug use so they can not put you in jail for it, not actually helping people fix problems.
If we got rid of some of the legal stigma, and the constant attempts to twist the drug laws on innocent bystanders, perhaps more people might use drugs, but more people might ask for help before they get desperate. Of course alcohol users usually need a DUI or fist fight to see the need for AA, but just admitting you need AA doesn't mean you admit to committing a crime like going to NA.
it's all about control. Most drugs like Prozac and Ritalin are far worse than marijuana but because they are made in a large company, they can be controlled even though they're given out like candy. Even though they legalized alcohol in 33 it still took nearly 60 more years for many states to give up state-owned warehouses and many states still regulate beer and liquor differently, and to allow a PERSON to make their own beverages at home without fear of prosecution or tax evasion charges.
There's also too much blind trust in "FDA approved" going on. For instance things like autism spectrum disorders are highest in the group of middle class kids who's parents do everything right, eat right, no drugs, feed the kids according to what the doctor says to do, get their shots on time, etc. It's not that any of those things are to blame, but the medical establishment tends to outright reject any claim something is questionable out-of-hand with no more research. People want some kind of serious answer and don't want to be patronized... I'd add to the "people aren't interested in science" and raise you a "professionals want blind faith in science".
but that's for their lawyers to figure out, right now they are not acting ethically in the courts. What the RIAA is doing is every bit as "liberal" as other groups that have used the courts to rewrite laws for their agenda.
The shell companies set up to rat out infringers are every bit as illegal as the Pirate Bay, but like Napster, somebody just has to get the right "hooks" to get them shut down. They've been careful to keep the search company and the lawyers separate, even though they're both acting under the same direction. It would be fun to see the whole thing unravel in discovery, we just need one sympathetic judge that will hold the large companies to their mistakes same as the "country lawyers" get held to theirs.. or allow allow discovery for the "court" in spite of what the lawyers ask for.
That's the beauty of corporations that can write scripts to troll the tubes. The person who wrote the script really isn't guilty because it was "just a job", they didn't choose to use the tool. The admin that loaded the script really isn't guilty because it was "just a script" the manager told him to load on the server, he wasn't responsible for choosing targets. The manger isn't responsible because he can't know all the laws for all the place the script might go in real space, he can't be responsible for "errors" in the code that make the script patrol computers it should not. The lawyers work from data sets generated by these scripts from MediaSentry and comes to his own conclusions about how to proceed. Obviously "MediaSentry" is committing illegal PI activities, but only people can break criminal laws so which one did it? The MediaSentry thing is exactly like the HP "spying" thing except they use computers, so there's no pesky individual to pin the points of broken law on.
Which of these people performed the illegal PI activity?
exactly, the problem is that the punishment for infringing in this manner is not properly put into law. It is corporations of lawyers exploiting out of date laws for profit. While it's nice to think that you won't get caught, or even you don't download stuff you're not supposed to, fact is that companies like MediaSentry are in many cases committing computer trespass and other things that are worse than catching somebody who downloads or even uploads a few songs.
Their model is much like the ones for dealing with drugs, they want to burn down the houses of the little people so there won't be any big players. That's not how the US legal system was founded. Lawyers to date for the RIAA have kept most of the cases to civil court as "debt collection" proceedings, they've carefully avoided putting on the record their method of collection, the facts used to sue, etc used against 10,000 users, while making 10 year-old kids face invasive personal deposition and the witness stand for downloading a few songs. You don't get to depose your accuser because they are lawyers representing a corporation that passed a database of information along.. they can't and won't present the person that wrote the scripts to collect the information, or produce records of collection. They are a professional law firm, paying employees to sue from other means of income, they don't really "pay" if they lose. You have to defend yourself by paying a lawyer up front. It's all very double standard and needs to be stopped.
The very mention of the corporate lawyers getting involved means that the corporate "mission" is about to be compromised and "one" of their lawyers may open the door to internal records. Once that happens the gig is up and they have to actually prosecute cases on the merits instead of bullying. I'd say the person should be allowed say, but only to testify in open court as they are all part of the same corporation. If he wishes to defend his position, then the other lawyers should get to cross examine him like any other witness! (remember, we depo 10 year old kids about their online habits... a professional lawyer in charge of 10,000 cases is certainly fair game!)
Along the same lines, the whole cloud computing thing got started really because companies like Amazon really went out and bought all the servers they needed to hit their peaks.. which is a lot of overkill 50% of the time. So they started renting it out to little people.
The thing the article's author misses is that regular small-medium businesses don't want to be web experts and they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for web server farms or analysis. They want to get some usage numbers for now, maybe add some sales functions and put the web site someplace they don't have to worry about it. Most sites are fairly low volume but would like to be bigger. Of course professional web architects think everything should be planned and measured within an inch of it's life. But in reality the web is just another media source for most companies, as long as it's getting the message to the users, it's working.
As far as slashdotting or DDOS attacks I would expect some planning for such things. First, DDOS attacks should be dealt with by the host, not the website. In a cloud there's no such thing as attacking only one site because that takes away from the others, I'd expect the cloud maintainer to deal with that. As far as slashdotting, I think cloud sites could have a way of dealing with that gracefully. His worry about losing 10 minutes really isn't founded because that's not what the slashdotting curve looks like when seen from other sites. It's a ramp up over an hour or two, and has a peak, then a second smaller peak a day later. This is exactly what cloud computing is designed to handle. I think cloud computing could handle it even better because only the slashdotted part of the site would need to be replicated which should be easy to figure out how to build the cluster in such a manner.. again, once Amazon figures that out the customer will upload the site in the way specified and not worry about details.
If the law can't curb the problem people will start hunting down and shooting copper thieves on their own! Problem solved!
These people are willing to do tens of thousands of dollars of damage to property to get at a few hundred dollars of metal if they think they can get away with it... foreclosed houses are a prime target also, locks don't work when they're willing to bust out windows. How'd you like to live in a neighborhood with bars and boars on the windows... what would that do to property values?
but most of the geographic area of the USA a simple padlock, chain link fence and "keep out" sign is enough to protect most things like electrical transformers, phone boxes, and stuff stored in truck yards. It's impossibly expensive to protect everything that these clowns are stealing.. it's better to have society be "honest". Or severely punished.
tampering with traffic signals or utility stations is an automatic felony due to the higher than $5K value of the damage. Any damages resulting from committing a felony are also non-disputable, maximum punishment felonies. If you damage a $5k traffic light and somebody is killed at the intersection, being caught with the copper wire would be automatic felony murder -- murder in commission of a felony-- which is above second degree and slightly less than first, premeditated murder.
I would say damaging utility boxes and street signage would be at least industrial sabotage... a felony that put the perp on the hook for felony murder should a hospital get affected and somebody die, or somebody die in a traffic accident at a damaged traffic light (or even severely injured). That's not extreme, that's well with in the spirit and letter of current case law.
crooked scrap dealers aren't that big of a problem. Nobody that buys copper for remelting is interested in orders under dozens of tons.. that means the companies melting copper are paying in $10k+ checks which mandate federal reporting... which means they don't have to worry about tracking you because their bank will do it for them.
The problem is the local junk yards that have a hard time knowing who's contracting to remodel and who's stealing. Thieves are clever and will only take 2-3 loads to small junkyards per month across 10 counties and work out in the country where nobody can hear them working. They're only dropping off a few hundred bucks at a time and half of them are illegals/felons using fake licenses anyway even if you did write it down.
A chain around your neck gilded in gold is still a chain around your neck that doesn't need to be there. Since when has university work required NDA, corporate sponsorship, and IP assignment... then wonder why nobody wants to be part of such programs.
I think the underlying problem is that universities are there to educate STUDENTS first and to equip the STUDENTS with tools for later in careers. Everything else is secondary. Universities started taking corporate money to use students for cheap or free instead of companies hiring junior level employees after they graduate to do the same work for experience. I think it's a bit of a double standard that academically they expect you to do original work then double deal and claim ownership for private interests. Like you say, why is university stuff not directly related to research not under GPL, MIT, or BSD style licenses, then the tool is "owned" by the university and "owned" by the student to continue their research. The most glaring double standard is that faculty generally aren't expected to sign their work over, yet use student assignments, student research aids and college labs and networks to accomplish their research... and collect large sums for texts based on the work!!! yet expect students to be "indentured" to them.
Of course most of the "growth" in the economy has been in the form of wall street and investment banks...(you know the ones that have been inflating their numbers for 5 years now!) not money in the pockets of little people and that has been going on for some time... the little people finally ran out of money and now rich people are realizing there's no more blood to squeeze by firing employees or cutting benefits unless they actually start closing companies... i.e taking money from other rich people to get rich.. oops!
Slashdot Mirror
"It can be hard to institute these sorts of checklists onto an existing system, though. People often take it as an insult to their skills and intelligence ("Yes, I know how to upgrade a server. I've done it a thousand times." "Yes, I know how to perform bypass surgery. I've done it a thousand times."). The trick is finding a way to get people to want to do it."
Exactly!!! the key to checklists is to make them good enough that the job is performed more easily and reliably with than without them and that is obvious to anybody. It takes a lot of planning to make the checklists, but pays off in the long run.
and we know how to fix mistakes on machines.. why not use that procedural tool on people as well, it's proven to work. The point is that if you KNOW you will have 1% mistakes, then you have a duty to learn new tools to fix those mistakes. If a company found out they were losing 1% of every dollar taken from customers they'd try like hell to find out why. Accepting 1% of new cars being broken would be intolerable... why do you think we have an automaker crisis?
a checklist is something you have and review BEFORE you start a task, or in this case touch a patient. This is why "more paperwork" fails, because it's still trying to catch the evidence after it's left the barn, rather than having the page ready to go and seeing if you get the right outcome or not. Proper computerized checklists would be generated automatically each set of rounds and filled out before the nurse leaves the room, then she's done with that patient and can focus on the next.
It's just like in IT, stop putting out fires and being interrupted.. focus on getting tasks done completely, and documented before moving on and you become 100% more productive working less time... but the "hero" complex has to go because there's not heroes in good process planning.
he TRACKED 2 mistakes per patient per day. That might be forgetting to fluff your pillow, that might be grabbing a medicine you're allergic to that adds complications and causes treatment not to work.. the point is that you just don't know! Therefore science is not happening.
Medical professionals are very much luddites when it comes to things like computerized lists. 90%+ of diseases have known research as to the process and outcomes to heal the person. That's precisely what checklists are for, and to track information. In the age of computers, the computer should create the list from known research for each patient. Then when the data is input the results can be measured against the research to see if the person is being cured or has another problem, or a mistake was made.
This has nothing to do with the quality of people's training or work. People WILL make mistakes... failure to understand that, and use tools to prevent, catch, or undo that is a lack of scientific procedure. Remember two articles ago when we said that people don't pay attention to science, that vaccines might cause harm, etc.. the answer was science... and now those same people don't want to follow procedures that affect car, cheeseburger, and Lego brick trying to say they won't work on people, who's not interested in science now?
The issue is that proper SCIENCE has little room for heroes. If science and engineering is performed correctly and documented, you catch mistakes before they cause problems. 90%+ of all things treated at the hospital have a regimented treatment laid out by mountains of research.. the trouble is matching the proper research to the problem, then executing the treatment exactly as the research was proofed.
Your example is exactly the kind of non-engineer thinking that needs to stop. Somebody, has generally already done the research. It's up to the doctor to apply the research... it's boring, tedious work, with a result from a book.. like what engineers do. 75%+ of engineering work is hitting the books to find parts that are already for sale to do what you want, the rest is spend defining the problem and running tests very little time is actually spend designing physical devices anymore.
The same with medial science, people need to use computerized systems to track their progress against the mountains of research already done. Science only works with control groups... if you make 2 mistakes per day, you do not have your patient's treatment under scientific levels of control... there for you are not doing science, you're doing art.. like an english major.
no, even the best people WILL make mistakes even if they're just small ones. That's the whole point of things like ISO or QS that somebody ELSE is looking for those mistakes. Imagine if GM made one mistake per worker, and they allowed 2 mistakes per Auto off the line... oh, wait that happened and they nearly died. 1 mistake per worker each day is intolerably high in a world class environment.. and Nurses and Doctors are all Bachelors degree or higher, that's the top 15% of all workers already. You don't get better without scientific help.
but here's where ISO or CMMI help you hire the RIGHT nurses and not just more nurses. You have to identify problems that recur, things that make the current nurses inefficient. The whole "work smarter not harder" is a scientific fact.. just like brushing your teeth. The medical profession needs to really identify with controlling their processes. Which is kind of funny because a good chunk of statistics research came from the medical profession, but the everyday line workers (doctors, nurses, janitors) don't really follow scientific procedure when they do their job every day. That's all ISO really is.. just a way of documenting that you follow some pre-planned procedures... if you can't do that you're not really a scientists and that PHD should be taken away just on principal.
That's what computers are for!! Then each checklist can be personalized to that patient's care.
The medical profession is about 30 years behind in using modern project planning and Process Control systems that mom-n-pop machine shops are expected to use. Process control, and checklists are scientifically proven methods of improving quality. They are just as scientifically proven to work as any medical procedure... people get Phds in this stuff because billions of dollars are at stake.
I think the 1 error per person per day is pretty good... that's about what GM was doing in the 70's when every car went out the door to the customer with 2 things wrong. See how big a problem 1 mistake per day is!!!! Medical professionals don't want "extra paperwork" and they don't want to work to a "list". But in human experience 85% of what you do is routine.. that means it needs a list because you won't even know you made a mistake because what you do is so routine.
watch COPS some time... half the chases, and wild pubic endangerment, are because somebody has a little bag of weed or rock on them and some cop is illegally trolling traffic based on if they can get lucky and seize something under Federal drug rules. Being an avid Slashdot reader it's like the absolute worst show on TV in any decade.
you can't tax pot though. People can grow it naturally in all 50 states for some part of the year. If there's no tax incentive, or control incentive, and people can do it all by themselves then there's no reason to make it legal.. of course that type of thing would usually be something called a "inalienable RIGHT" in older times.
but the point is that under today's conditions if YOU run a clean house but your kid brings home drugs from school, the last thing you want to do is ask for any kind of professional help unless they commit a crime. Because "using" drugs is a crime, your family member is under suspicion as soon as they go into rehab. Rehab is about not committing the crime of drug use so they can not put you in jail for it, not actually helping people fix problems.
If we got rid of some of the legal stigma, and the constant attempts to twist the drug laws on innocent bystanders, perhaps more people might use drugs, but more people might ask for help before they get desperate. Of course alcohol users usually need a DUI or fist fight to see the need for AA, but just admitting you need AA doesn't mean you admit to committing a crime like going to NA.
it's all about control. Most drugs like Prozac and Ritalin are far worse than marijuana but because they are made in a large company, they can be controlled even though they're given out like candy. Even though they legalized alcohol in 33 it still took nearly 60 more years for many states to give up state-owned warehouses and many states still regulate beer and liquor differently, and to allow a PERSON to make their own beverages at home without fear of prosecution or tax evasion charges.
There's also too much blind trust in "FDA approved" going on. For instance things like autism spectrum disorders are highest in the group of middle class kids who's parents do everything right, eat right, no drugs, feed the kids according to what the doctor says to do, get their shots on time, etc. It's not that any of those things are to blame, but the medical establishment tends to outright reject any claim something is questionable out-of-hand with no more research. People want some kind of serious answer and don't want to be patronized... I'd add to the "people aren't interested in science" and raise you a "professionals want blind faith in science".
but that's for their lawyers to figure out, right now they are not acting ethically in the courts. What the RIAA is doing is every bit as "liberal" as other groups that have used the courts to rewrite laws for their agenda.
The shell companies set up to rat out infringers are every bit as illegal as the Pirate Bay, but like Napster, somebody just has to get the right "hooks" to get them shut down. They've been careful to keep the search company and the lawyers separate, even though they're both acting under the same direction. It would be fun to see the whole thing unravel in discovery, we just need one sympathetic judge that will hold the large companies to their mistakes same as the "country lawyers" get held to theirs.. or allow allow discovery for the "court" in spite of what the lawyers ask for.
That's the beauty of corporations that can write scripts to troll the tubes. The person who wrote the script really isn't guilty because it was "just a job", they didn't choose to use the tool. The admin that loaded the script really isn't guilty because it was "just a script" the manager told him to load on the server, he wasn't responsible for choosing targets. The manger isn't responsible because he can't know all the laws for all the place the script might go in real space, he can't be responsible for "errors" in the code that make the script patrol computers it should not. The lawyers work from data sets generated by these scripts from MediaSentry and comes to his own conclusions about how to proceed. Obviously "MediaSentry" is committing illegal PI activities, but only people can break criminal laws so which one did it? The MediaSentry thing is exactly like the HP "spying" thing except they use computers, so there's no pesky individual to pin the points of broken law on.
Which of these people performed the illegal PI activity?
exactly, the problem is that the punishment for infringing in this manner is not properly put into law. It is corporations of lawyers exploiting out of date laws for profit. While it's nice to think that you won't get caught, or even you don't download stuff you're not supposed to, fact is that companies like MediaSentry are in many cases committing computer trespass and other things that are worse than catching somebody who downloads or even uploads a few songs.
Their model is much like the ones for dealing with drugs, they want to burn down the houses of the little people so there won't be any big players. That's not how the US legal system was founded. Lawyers to date for the RIAA have kept most of the cases to civil court as "debt collection" proceedings, they've carefully avoided putting on the record their method of collection, the facts used to sue, etc used against 10,000 users, while making 10 year-old kids face invasive personal deposition and the witness stand for downloading a few songs. You don't get to depose your accuser because they are lawyers representing a corporation that passed a database of information along.. they can't and won't present the person that wrote the scripts to collect the information, or produce records of collection. They are a professional law firm, paying employees to sue from other means of income, they don't really "pay" if they lose. You have to defend yourself by paying a lawyer up front. It's all very double standard and needs to be stopped.
The very mention of the corporate lawyers getting involved means that the corporate "mission" is about to be compromised and "one" of their lawyers may open the door to internal records. Once that happens the gig is up and they have to actually prosecute cases on the merits instead of bullying. I'd say the person should be allowed say, but only to testify in open court as they are all part of the same corporation. If he wishes to defend his position, then the other lawyers should get to cross examine him like any other witness! (remember, we depo 10 year old kids about their online habits... a professional lawyer in charge of 10,000 cases is certainly fair game!)
Along the same lines, the whole cloud computing thing got started really because companies like Amazon really went out and bought all the servers they needed to hit their peaks.. which is a lot of overkill 50% of the time. So they started renting it out to little people.
The thing the article's author misses is that regular small-medium businesses don't want to be web experts and they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for web server farms or analysis. They want to get some usage numbers for now, maybe add some sales functions and put the web site someplace they don't have to worry about it. Most sites are fairly low volume but would like to be bigger. Of course professional web architects think everything should be planned and measured within an inch of it's life. But in reality the web is just another media source for most companies, as long as it's getting the message to the users, it's working.
As far as slashdotting or DDOS attacks I would expect some planning for such things. First, DDOS attacks should be dealt with by the host, not the website. In a cloud there's no such thing as attacking only one site because that takes away from the others, I'd expect the cloud maintainer to deal with that. As far as slashdotting, I think cloud sites could have a way of dealing with that gracefully. His worry about losing 10 minutes really isn't founded because that's not what the slashdotting curve looks like when seen from other sites. It's a ramp up over an hour or two, and has a peak, then a second smaller peak a day later. This is exactly what cloud computing is designed to handle. I think cloud computing could handle it even better because only the slashdotted part of the site would need to be replicated which should be easy to figure out how to build the cluster in such a manner.. again, once Amazon figures that out the customer will upload the site in the way specified and not worry about details.
If the law can't curb the problem people will start hunting down and shooting copper thieves on their own! Problem solved!
These people are willing to do tens of thousands of dollars of damage to property to get at a few hundred dollars of metal if they think they can get away with it... foreclosed houses are a prime target also, locks don't work when they're willing to bust out windows. How'd you like to live in a neighborhood with bars and boars on the windows... what would that do to property values?
but most of the geographic area of the USA a simple padlock, chain link fence and "keep out" sign is enough to protect most things like electrical transformers, phone boxes, and stuff stored in truck yards. It's impossibly expensive to protect everything that these clowns are stealing .. it's better to have society be "honest". Or severely punished.
tampering with traffic signals or utility stations is an automatic felony due to the higher than $5K value of the damage. Any damages resulting from committing a felony are also non-disputable, maximum punishment felonies. If you damage a $5k traffic light and somebody is killed at the intersection, being caught with the copper wire would be automatic felony murder -- murder in commission of a felony-- which is above second degree and slightly less than first, premeditated murder.
I would say damaging utility boxes and street signage would be at least industrial sabotage... a felony that put the perp on the hook for felony murder should a hospital get affected and somebody die, or somebody die in a traffic accident at a damaged traffic light (or even severely injured). That's not extreme, that's well with in the spirit and letter of current case law.
crooked scrap dealers aren't that big of a problem. Nobody that buys copper for remelting is interested in orders under dozens of tons.. that means the companies melting copper are paying in $10k+ checks which mandate federal reporting... which means they don't have to worry about tracking you because their bank will do it for them.
The problem is the local junk yards that have a hard time knowing who's contracting to remodel and who's stealing. Thieves are clever and will only take 2-3 loads to small junkyards per month across 10 counties and work out in the country where nobody can hear them working. They're only dropping off a few hundred bucks at a time and half of them are illegals/felons using fake licenses anyway even if you did write it down.
A chain around your neck gilded in gold is still a chain around your neck that doesn't need to be there. Since when has university work required NDA, corporate sponsorship, and IP assignment... then wonder why nobody wants to be part of such programs.
I think the underlying problem is that universities are there to educate STUDENTS first and to equip the STUDENTS with tools for later in careers. Everything else is secondary. Universities started taking corporate money to use students for cheap or free instead of companies hiring junior level employees after they graduate to do the same work for experience. I think it's a bit of a double standard that academically they expect you to do original work then double deal and claim ownership for private interests. Like you say, why is university stuff not directly related to research not under GPL, MIT, or BSD style licenses, then the tool is "owned" by the university and "owned" by the student to continue their research. The most glaring double standard is that faculty generally aren't expected to sign their work over, yet use student assignments, student research aids and college labs and networks to accomplish their research ... and collect large sums for texts based on the work!!! yet expect students to be "indentured" to them.
Of course most of the "growth" in the economy has been in the form of wall street and investment banks...(you know the ones that have been inflating their numbers for 5 years now!) not money in the pockets of little people and that has been going on for some time... the little people finally ran out of money and now rich people are realizing there's no more blood to squeeze by firing employees or cutting benefits unless they actually start closing companies... i.e taking money from other rich people to get rich.. oops!