"There's nothing like censorship by the mods to ensure that all viewpoints aren't heard equally. So with the expectation of being moderated down.."

Making sure all viewpoints have equal exposure is not why the moderation system exists.

The bigger dipshits are the cashiers who were stupid enough to fall for it.

SWA has a right to say who can and cannot occupy their airplanes, and they may place conditions upon that occupancy as they see fit.

Their plane, their rules. Property rights unquestionably trump free speech rights. If someone walks onto my property and holds up a sign, I can kick them off my property and it is not a violation of their free speech rights.

Trespassing is illegal. Without a valid boarding pass, it is illegal for them to be in the secure area of an airport.

If SWA canceled their boarding pass, they would not only be guilty of simple trespass upon airport property, but also in violation of DHS regulations for being in the secure area without a boarding pass.

I doubt the gate attendant was actually rude to him, too, in which case he would probably be found liable for slander and/or defamation as well.

All that happened here was that he got pissed because he didn't get to break the rules. I have no sympathy for him at all, whatsoever.

The reason the federal government is making recommendations for reduced testing is to decrease the cost of care it lays out for Medicare, Medicaid, and PPACA patients. The cost studies prior to the passing of PPACA revealed that not only would the cost of "standard" diagnostic testing add billions/year to the cost of the program, but also that there simply are not enough resources available for everyone over 40 to have an annual mammogram.

It looks as if the relaxed prostate, mammogram, and colonoscopy recommendations didn't really do much to stop the cost of PPACA from spiraling completely out of control, though. It will be interesting to see what happens to cancer rates as a result of reducing diagnostic coverage as well. I somehow doubt they will go down.

Don't these people know that those aren't allowed anymore? A proper study is done by massing a large amount of meta-statistics taken from other studies of large amounts of meta-statistics to create an entirely new conclusion based on the new population data.

Who the hell actually studies the relationships of cause and effect between actual variables in a real experiment anymore?

Good point.

"If you were feeling especially paranoid, but wanted to keep the hardware intact for the next user, what would you do?"

To me these are mutually exclusive. If I was feeling especially paranoid, I would probably hurl the thing into a cauldron of molten lava, because, you know, the definition of being especially paranoid is an intense fear of others invading our privacy or being out to get you.

Disposing of my tablet by giving it to another person is wholly incompatible with your premise of me feeling especially paranoid.

I rally prevent my slid out keyfob.

Seriously, please.

There is no need to believe in a phone-slowing conspiracy, just like there was no need to believe that Google or Apple was tracking users and saving location data, and there was no need to believe that Google was sniffing and storing unencrypted wifi traffic wherever its street view cars went, and there was no need to believe that government was saving all of our emails...

Sure. Tell me another good one.

I do the same thing. I let whatever wants to grow, grow, so long as it doesn't mind being no taller than about 4 inches. We have all kinds of strange things living in our yard that I am positive would not be there if we had your typical toxic waste pit of an American yard.

We're also in the woods, and I make no effort to remove felled trees (except to remove trees that are threatening falling on the house), allowing them instead to decompose on the floor of the woods like they are supposed to.

What is alarming to me is the presence of several invasive species. We have asian giant hornets, land planariums (which are ***seriously*** bad things to have), and other asian insects that presumably hopped rides in shipping containers from the far east.

These invasive species have no natural predators and their populations are soaring. We had a tree fall this summer in a period of heavy rain, and the root ball was just infested with planariums. These things compete with earthworms for resources, but do not excrete anything useful into the soil, so areas that get infested with them cannot grow flora very well, and trees can die.

Goes to show you don't necessarily have to get someone for what you want to get them for to have the same outcome.

It's really all about appearances. If an employee leaves and then wants to come back as a contractor right away, it creates the appearance of impropriety. For example, let's say you are being audited and you tell the IRS that you cannot participate in the Audit because your computer crashed two days after receiving the audit letter. The appearance there is that you received the letter and then destroyed incriminating evidence.

The IRS does not like this one bit, and takes such maneuvers seriously. Anything that an entity or person does that seems suspicious will be assumed to be criminal, especially the "convenient" loss or destruction of evidence.