instructions unclear; got tumour stuck in revolving door

(For anyone actually wondering, 95.45% is actually the percentage of data expected to fall within two standard deviations of the mean in a Gaussian distribution. Five standard deviations is much, much more stringent—and not really standard outside of particle physics. As we all know, most amateur scientists have the knowledge and ingenuity to discover novel quantum interactions and particles on a regular basis, and merely lack the necessary funding to access synchrotrons to test their theories.)

I really don't think his intention was to discredit amateur science by linking to the search results of "proof that amateur science sucks."

Well, it's sort of complicated.

On one hand—it's probably worth pointing out that the American punitive system is absolutely insane, and the mildness of this should not be taken as evidence of a defective process simply because it doesn't follow suit. Indeed, there are some fairly involved legal and philosophical reasons as to why the punishments aren't more extreme. Here is a paper on it. (I haven't read all of it, but it seems sensible enough from the first few pages.) One of the key points is that a lot of money goes down the toilet on dead ends and genuine errors anyway; another is that scientific misconduct isn't actually illegal, so the power of funding bodies to defend themselves is somewhat limited. In the end, the top priority is still getting them out of science.

It's not. After this no one will touch him; his career as a researcher is over. For professors, three years of no federal grants is generally enough to kill the entire lab, and a three-year lapse in publishing is enough to kill any career on its own, with the possible exception of the most hard-boiled tenure.

Somewhat irrelevant trivia: in Toronto there is a moving company called "El Cheapo." Their motto is "Don't be a shmoe call EL CHEAPO" (replete with missing comma.) Ecce!

That is the definition of uncool.

Yeah, that's strictly the domain of the Orthografiejugend.

Possibly there are a lot of other problems.

So that's why you never see a fat rich person...

The link is in TFA, too, but followed by "(NSFL danger: do not click that link)".

Satire is ancient. If it unnerves you, that is unfortunate.

I was going for "you can't, you can only show it's safe under a large range of likely circumstances—unless you can trick people into thinking you've 'proven' something by lying to them." Nice guess, though? I guess?

Regulatory capture and biased media coverage, mostly.

Well, it depends. Obviously running cable through a conduit is somewhat more labour-intensive than pulling it out, especially if the conduit isn't vertical. In this case I'm not sure it was all that inaccessible, though, given that the thieves went through a manhole cover; surely that suggests at least a reasonable passage to crawl through.