Now get off my lawn.

So get out, Monsanto, you dirty capitalist pigs!

Seriously, though, this means little. China will use their own knockoff version now and market it, as well.

I'm looking at you, CNET... you used to be cool.

Pretty much any site requiring a "file downloader" is simply evil and should be expunged by or at least blacklisted by browsers. That would help fight 80% of the delivery of malware that I've seen infecting friend's and family's computers.

It's high time we started calling out these "representatives of the people" who are really nothing of the sort. Republican or Democrat, nobody in Washington seems to be concerned for the welfare of the American PEOPLE. They only seem interested in doing whatever the lobbyists who line their pockets tell them to do.

I had a cancerous tumor on my retina.

After treatment, which included radiation (Chip sewn on the lower back part of my eyeball for a week) and lasers, along with the ongoing process of the optic nerve dying from the radiation exposure, I suspect my retina is quite different, and still changing, from 4 years ago when the tumor was treated.

Retinal patterns DO change some times. It's rare, but it happens.

I think it is intended to be "arose from"

...and he's also apparently arguing that, knowing Autonomy is cooking the books, and about to implode, HP thought it would be a great idea to buy them.

Whatever one can say about the competence of HP's board, nobody could seriously claim they'd buy a company if they knew that was going on.

I know they have some large cash reserves, but how long can you bleed $100 million every 4 months?

The Gameboy/DS line is the only thing keeping them afloat, but even that looks to be winding down, bowing to smart phones and tablets.

It's a disease that needs to be stomped out, mercilessly. Allowing the NSA, DHS and CIA (hell, even the IRS, for that matter) to continue to operate as they are allowed to will swallow up the last vestiges of America and its dream.

The dystopia exists now but it's not too late to turn back.

Exactly. I would do much the same as you.

I suspect there is a large number of science fiction fans that do not watch SyFy any more... they stream or watch the few shows they like from that network through on-demand and forego actually tuning into the network. I don't even know, off-hand, what the channel number is on my cable box.

They get good ratings for wrestling, but it has driven the fans away from the rest of the programming, which suffers because of it, and draws viewers that do not stick around for any other programming. The junk programming they have (Ghost Hunters type shows) is like going to a fine dining establishment to be served hamburger helper - it also drives away the base.

For every decent SyFy show on the air, there are three or four terrible ones. The Wil Wheaton Project is a great show, because he celebrates and respects the fandom, but when I watch it, I'm reminded of all the crap SyFy inflicts as well. At least it gives Wil some fodder to joke about.

This is why you put an executive in charge of a channel that actually likes the genre. Bonnie Hammer only saw SciFi Channel as a stepping stone to a more mainstream network (USA), and installed another idiot who didn't really care for the shows they were peddling when she left.

They should be funding movies based on classics, whenever possible, instead of the crappy creature-of-the-week and pseudo-reality crap they shovel out every week. These days, its possible to deliver quality science fiction programming without busting your budget, too - but somebody at the top has to be motivated to deliver this to the fans (the network's viewer base), rather than dump garbage none of the fan base wants to see in order to draw more "mainstream" viewers.

It must be nice to take a stranger's word and believe entirely in their side of a story.

This passenger intended to intimidate the gate agent for following the rules - that becomes obvious when you know he had to inform them of the tweet. It seems more likely that he was overbearing and pitching a bit of a fit, and the agent might have felt threatened.

There is a lot more to this story we will never know, but if you try and see it from the agent's perspective, you become aware of other possibilities - some of which are more likely. At this point, we only have the passenger's word that they threatened to call the police, and for that matter, the same can be said about removing the tweet.

Who's to say another agent suggested they call security over the guy ranting and throwing a tantrum over not being granted special privileges, and he realized what that meant, and suddenly decided to back down - until he could go to the press with his horror story after the fact (thus completing his threats and gaining his "revenge"); removing the tweet was just a temporary gesture to placate the agents that he had "calmed down" while he plotted to "expose the rude bitch" later. (Just a theory here)

Not really likely, right?

So logically, the agent had to be informed that the passenger was making his angry tweet, which, as you imply, the passenger was actually using the tweet to blackmail the agent into bending the rules for him.

I think it is very key, and very telling that this is not addressed in the story. There is no way for Southwest employees at that gate to have known this guy tweeted anything, without the passenger informing of it, and once we get to that obvious fact, to what end was he doing this? The obvious reason is to intimidate the agent he felt was "rude" - which seems rather petulant.

Now it gets more interesting if you start to wonder if there was a reason why the agent threatened to call the police on this guy... was it an overreaction, or was this passenger just being such an incredibly overbearing, pompous ass in his blackmail attempt, that the agent felt threatened? It might be that they never requested him to remove the tweet, but were instead responding to his petulant tantrum.

I can easily see it playing out that he was informed he needed to calm down and back off or they would call security. We only have his word that they threatened to have him arrested, and that he had to remove the tweet... it seems more reasonable, knowing this passenger intended to intimidate the agents, that he was in a threatening posture, and realizing he was about to get a royal TSA probing, "calmed down" and offered to remove his tweet as a gesture - all the while plotting to tell the story we see presented here, in all of its one-sided glory.

I hate to side either way on this story, but I'm more inclined, given this key missing item of the story, to believe that the "more to this story" involved the passenger being a LOT more in the wrong than the gate agent.

My phone does this, it's called "Speaker mode"

Seriously, saying "fiber optic cables from thin air" is an idiotic statement. IR remotes have been doing this for decades, and using lasers to do so has also been done for ages.

...that's all I need, an avatar to browbeat me for an hour over my poor credit history that is partially due to my poorly-paid job working on a government contract.