Except that he can get broadband; he just can't get it quite a cheap as he wanted. Either this story or yesterday's mentions that he was paying $5 a GB for cellular data (3G?), and running up about 30 GB a month in usage. So, $150 per month. The hookup he wanted would have probably cost, what, $40 or $50 a month? If he's living so close to the edge that an extra hundred a month puts him on the street, then he couldn't really afford to live in that house anyway. (Some of us are out of pocket more than a hundred a month for a bus pass to get to work. We suck it up; it's a cost of doing business and living where we choose.)

Of course, this guy also claims to have offered to pay "a good chunk of the cost" of installing the cable to his house, which would have run into the tens of thousands of dollars. If he was willing to splash out for that, then he could have afforded to pay even utterly ungodly cellular data rates for years. Bluntly, the only plausible explanation is that there's more going on here than meets the eye--the financial and technical case don't credibly add up to being "forced" to sell his house. Either he's got additional reasons that he wants/needs to move that he isn't sharing, or he just really craved some attention.

If you're innocent, why would you resist talking to investigators all by yourself?

Really?

Yes, I realize that this isn't a criminal investigation, but honestly. If I knew there were a chance that any offhand remark or misstatement I made could end up being quoted on C-SPAN by a Senator with an axe to grind...yeah, I'd be pretty damned reluctant to talk. Even if I weren't bright enough to figure that out for myself, I'm pretty sure I can see why my employer would have similar concerns.

So...meh. At the $5 per gigabyte we keep seeing tossed around, that's $150 a month to work from home, with occasional trips into town for supplies and groceries he probably needed to get anyway. Some of us are out of pocket that much for a transit pass to get to work.

Given that it probably costs north of ten thousand dollars in legal fees, commissions, and taxes to buy or sell even an inexpensive home (and the sky's the limit if the property is more valuable), moving out solely to save even a couple of grand a year in bandwidth fees is a pretty dubious move, financially speaking. Bluntly, there's more to this story than is being reported.

Giving them an old beater doesn't really solve the problem from the standpoint of the rest of society. A jackass driving a car from 1996 can do just as much damage to pedestrians, cyclists, other cars, and other people as he could driving a car from 2016.

Heck, the 1996 vehicle may encourage more reckless behavior (because the jackass driving doesn't care about the car, and isn't afraid of a few scratches and dents). The 1996 vehicle may be more likely to be involved in a collision even if driven the same way as the late-model vehicle (since safety equipment and systems may be absent, outdated, worn, or broken). The 1996 vehicle may be more dangerous in a collision (predating modern standards for protecting both its occupants and other vehicles or pedestrians).

I'm also a bit surprised by the assumption that so many people here seem to be making that this car will be the teen's own car, or that the teen must be the principal driver. I would imagine that the much more likely scenario is that this will be Mom's or Dad's car (or just the lone family vehicle), and Junior is allowed to drive it from time to time. Mom and Dad also don't want to do all their own driving in a crappy car just to make sure that Junior suffers sufficiently; these systems add some more teeth to the "We'll let you drive the family car, but we have our eyes on you."

Besides, this year's brand new car is next decade's beater anyway. Might as well have a feature that adds value for the resale market.

I didn't really believe that the fire department would come when I pulled the alarm, so I ran a "test".

Who do all these people keep insisting that my actions have to have consequences?

It's very fortunate that that isn't what happened, then, isn't it?

At the very beginning of any police investigation, police don't - or at least aren't supposed to - start out suspecting anybody at all. They are given (or they collect) information which leads to suspicions: testimony by victims or other witnesses, surveillance video, credit card and phone records, fingerprints, blood or semen at the crime scene.

In this case, the police found one line of evidence - DNA from semen - that strongly suggested the crime was committed by one member of a family. They then used a number of other, independent types of evidence to narrow down that original list, and eventually to get a warrant to test their single best suspect's DNA. What is your preferred outcome here, that the police ignore the DNA information that they did have? Or that a warrant to test DNA be denied unless the police have already specifically considered and ruled out all seven billion other people on the planet? Should police not be allowed to investigate cases when their first (or only remaining) lead is DNA evidence?

The police presented a plausible case - not an airtight, conclusive case, but enough to be probable cause - to suspect that the individual at hand was involved in the crime at hand. On the strength of that limited but suggestive evidence, a judge granted a warrant allowing the police to test a DNA sample (not search a house, not seize a vehicle, not throw a man in jail) to rule in or out a match with the DNA they had from their crime scene.

As I noted in my original comment, I can see the potential for a slippery slope type of argument, but the system actually seems to have worked properly in this particular instance. I agree that the situation is vulnerable to errors--but that's true of any criminal trial. A lot of cases have turned on eyewitness testimony that later turns out to be mistaken (often demonstrated by DNA analysis, ironically); does that mean that police should not use witness descriptions to identify suspects to investigate?

Your summary may be a bit too brief for the nuances here. It appears that the police found a partial DNA match with the suspect's father (in, remarkably, a privately-maintained - not state-controlled - DNA database), which in turn suggested that a close relative would be match. The police then examined publicly-available genealogy information to identify candidate relatives. From the genealogy records the police narrowed their search to three candidate individuals. Using various other circumstantial information they finally sought a warrant to collect a DNA sample from just one individual.

While I agree that there are legitimate "slippery-slope" concerns, based on the (admittedly brief) description in the linked article, it seems that in this particular instance reasonable steps were taken to minimize the scope and inconvenience (to potentially-innocent individuals) of the investigation. It wasn't a scattershot "We must test the DNA of all your male relatives!", but rather "We want to test the DNA of your one male relative whom we also suspect for reasons (a), (b), and (c)."

Hard to say, actually. My understanding is that his appointment was a "soft money" position, which means that he would have been entirely dependent on outside grants for all of his funding--including the salaries for himself and any staff or trainees. I wouldn't be surprised if $120K per year, less administrative overhead, doesn't even fully cover his own salary.

Having a conflict of interest is understandable; hiding a conflict of interest is problematic.

Scientists who receive funding from, for example, the pharmaceutical industry are expected to fully and explicitly disclose potentially conflicting interests--and by golly, they do. It's taken quite seriously, actually. If you look at any article in a respectable medical journal today, you'll find a section of the manuscript that's explicitly headed with Conflicting interests: or something synonymous. It will appear on every article, even on the ones where it's followed by "None declared" or the like, just so that it's clear that the journal asked for and got an on-the-record response from the article's authors. It doesn't remove the potential bias associated with outside funding, but it at least makes the potential for bias transparent.

Lying about competing interests - even through omission - is looked on very poorly by serious, credible medical researchers. Interestingly, one of the many, many types of misconduct engaged in by Andrew Wakefield was his failure to disclose significant financial interests when he published his (now-retracted and thoroughly discredited) Lancet paper suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. (Wakefield wasn't receiving pharmaceutical money, of course; he collected almost half a million pounds from lawyers involved in an anti-MMR lawsuit.)

And while the practice of mandatory disclosure started with the medical journals, the expectation has gradually bled across into other fields as well, particularly among top-tier journals.

Well, "handy" is in the eye of the beholder. He's really just "software handy", which is a different thing, for people who don't like to manipulate physical objects. It's kind of like the difference between a real engineer and a "software engineer".

To be fair, it was probably intended to be a very temporary installation and test. (Though it wasn't fair for him to complain about problems caused by his own shortcuts, I suppose.) And he did try to install a switch replacement at one point, with unfortunate results that weren't exclusively his fault.

I fear you may be grossly underestimating the cost of a Moon base. I mean, the Chinese Chang'e 2 lunar orbiter mission cost around $150 million; I can't find a price tag for their unmanned Chang'e 3 rover, but I can't imagine it would be cheaper. Forget putting a man on the Moon--either to live, or especially if you're concerned about getting him back again....

Back in the mid-2000s when you could buy a seat on a Soyuz launch for a week or two on the International Space Station, the quoted prices were between $20 and $40 million. So I guess you could do that with your $40 million win, but only if you were comfortable with (a) going by yourself, and (b) not having much left over afterward. With $500 million, you could afford to live very comfortably and make a return visit to the ISS every few years, just on the investment income.

I am vaguely amused that the good old Grope and Flail is now considered communist left. I mean, seriously?

Quite true. But keep in mind that this might not be free of cost (or effects) for those of us at the middle-to-high end. There's probably a bunch of "infrastructure" and overhead-type costs that are currently shared across different market segments.

For instance, Canon uses the same DIGIC signal and image processing chips across a bunch of different models: professional and consumer DSLRs as well as whole lines of point-and-shoots. If big pieces of the point-and-shoot market evaporate, then the cost of developing those chips and sustaining shorter production runs for them has to be carried by the DSLR market alone.

Aside from the direct economies of scale, there are going to be some more subtle business and technical reasons why losing a market segment will hurt the whole company. The fruits of R&D investment typically show up first at the high-end SLR market, and then trickle down through the prosumer and consumer SLRs, then make their way from the high to the low end of the point-and-shoot cameras. A smaller market overall means either less R&D or more expensive SLRs.

Heck, just having a wider product line means fewer boom-and-bust cycles when the company is between new models (with the accompanying bursts of new sales and marketing buzz.)

This is true. As the linked article notes, a remarkable number of early 747s are still in service in Iran, either with the Iranian Air Force or as part of the fleet of Iran Air. These airframes date to before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I didn't really want to open that can of worms, though--given the diplomatic situation between Iran and the United States, one wonders at the level of support that Boeing would feel it had to provide (or even would be allowed to provide, as a U.S. company).

I would wonder if there were any parallels to the situation in, say, Cuba, with its large population of Batista-era (pre-Castro, pre-Communist revolution) U.S.-built "classic" automobiles. Though you'll still see them on the roads of Havana, I wouldn't expect Ford to still have parts for, say, the 1957 Fairlane.