Rotundus.com

The upgraded exhaust builds on this characteristic and gives owners push-button control over their cars aural signature. Porsche says that with a touch on a console-mounted button, the optional exhaust gives the customer an opportunity to take in a more sporting and emotional sound, thereby adjusting the car to their own preferences. The system operates with an exhaust flap built into each main silencer.

Put simply, it gives push-button access to a higher degree of exhaust sound that will tickle the driving enthusiast's soul.

- Auto123.com

I would love to see legislation introduced to either (a) keep these things off the streets entirely, or (b) require drivers to have this set at the lowest possible setting while on public roads. Perhaps in some sense it already is with public nuisance laws.

It would be nice if noise regulations were more strongly enforced, not just regarding cars: e.g. arresting bagpipers if they play too long

How well you make friends obviously depends to some degree on heritable personality traits such as whether you are gregarious or shy.

But in a paper published in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday, researchers at the University of California San Diego and Harvard Medical School say heredity also strongly influences whether your friends know each other, and it helps determine your standing in social networks.

“Basically, we think there's a gene that causes some people to be more likely to introduce one friend to other friends, with the result being that some people create denser clusters of social networks around them than others do,” said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard.

Source: SignOnSanDiego

At 51, Tippett is broken, bankrupt and bunking in the guest room of his parents' Burlington home after a divorce settlement that's left him $75,000 in debt and racking up $1,000 more each month. Today, he'll appear in court at a default hearing to try to explain why he can't afford to pay his ex-wife (the couple had no children) $3,300 a month, $16,000 in retroactive alimony and $42,000 of her court costs out of a complex case he himself still doesn't understand.

... Since last April, he has been on disability leave because of medical problems he says have been brought on by the stress of the case, which means his $90,000 a year in salary and commissions is now significantly less. While Cormier is now getting just over $2,000 a month of his disability pay, technically Tippett is on the hook for $3,300, so each month his arrears are climbing.

Source: Toronto Star

Let's see: alimony is currently set at 165% of income. At least this guy has a court date and the potential that there might be something done about this.

On the other hand there's the absolute insanity of Oklahoma law: you may have been able to prove that you've never even met the mother and have DNA evidence that you're not the father of the child, and yet still be legally required to make child support payments without any opportunity to have this fixed by a judge.

The guy in the original story also seems to be doing slightly better than a former NFL star who due to injury was forced to start a new career as a school teacher and was sent to jail as a "deadbeat dad" after having paid in excess of $1.3 million in child support payments (Consider that US Government figures suggest that it takes a high income family on average $1,340/month to raise a child).