This isn't police state stuff, because Southwest Airlines is not a police organization but a private corporation.
"Failure to comply with the orders" of a flight attendant, gate attendant, or just about any other airline employee while in any area they "control" (e.g., the airplane, the gate, etc.) is a felony in the US.
So, yeah, it's "police state stuff", because these people know they have that kind of power.
If he wanted to complain about the agent by name, he should have filed a complaint with the airlines rather than post it for anyone to see.
Do you seriously think that she would have reacted the same way (pull him off the plane and ask him to delete the tweet) if she had let the kids join him and he tweeted positively about how great she is at customer service?
The situation would be identical in that she would be named personally and an opinion would be stated about her. Just because that opinion might be a "bad" one doesn't give her the right to use her very real authority to attempt to bully him into retracting the post.
The other is that - as the articles say - he named her in the very public tweet, and might have threatened to escalate further and encourage people to harass, threaten, or do worse to her.
So if he had named her in a tweet full of praise, it would be OK? Wouldn't she then feel threatened that wackos might want to propose to her because she's such a great person? He's not responsible for what other people might do in regards to a truthful but opinionated twitter post, regardless of whether that post is positive or negative.
I would be OK with your idea if she only requested that he remove her name from the post, and explained her personal discomfort. If she then also offered contact information for her supervisor so that he could complain about her personally if he wished, that would have been just about the perfect way to react. But, none of this should have involved pulling him off the plane. That was done solely as leverage to get her way.
That's not government authority, that's the authority of a privately owned company to refuse service to anyone.
As others have pointed out, "failing to follow the instructions of a airline/TSA/whatever employee" when at an airport is a felony in the US. Thus, if he refused to remove the tweet, he technically could have been arrested.
Whenever the government says "you can't do X" and "X" is exercising one of your inalienable rights, it's a Constitutional issue, which in this case is 1st Amendment.
low cost carriers charge extra for any checked luggage, incentivizing those bulging Texans.
Surprisingly, Southwest has some of the lowest prices and still allows you to check up to two bags (up to 50 lbs. each) for free.
I think he figured he didn't want to pay the extra money to upgrade his kids and that he could slip them into boarding with himself counting on the fact that either he felt entitled due to his frequent flying status, or that the gate person wouldn't call him out on it.
Actually, I suspect that he felt that instead of boarding first and then saving the seats for his kids (which the flight attendants will let you do), he felt that letting them board at the same time would have the same net effect on other passengers but allow him to keep his kids with him the whole time.
The gate agent was correct in telling him he could move back in the line to join his kids, but they couldn't cut in line and move up to join him. That's the policy and they tell you this when asking you to line up.
No, SW doesn't tell you this when you line up, and specifically allows "families" to board together first. In addition, for groups that don't qualify as a "family" that have different boarding assignments, the flight attendants have no problem with the first persons to board saving seats in the same rows for later people. They won't let you save random seats all over the aircraft, though.
There are dozens of solutions that the gate attendant could have chosen that would have resulted in the man feeling he had received good customer service and thus never posting a bad review. After the tweet was out there, the gate attendant then chose the very worst method to try to resolve the situation in her (but not Southwest Airlines) favor.
I (an American) just went on a vacation where I entered Russia, then France, then Russia, then the US on my way home. It went like this:
Russia: "What plane did you get off of?" "OK, [stamp]"
France: "Welcome! [stamp]"
Russia: "Welcome back, Tovarish! [stamp]"
US: "Spread 'em, Cocksucker. What's this in your bag? Get in this line - no, the other line! Papers, please! Is this your family? Who packed your suitcase? Look into the camera. Make your wife look into the camera. Submit to bacterial scanning. Put your bags in the X-Ray machine and leave them there until they start to smoke. OK, Meatwad, we'll let you in, but consider this a warning!"
This place has gotten so xenophobic it's silly.
It's not xenophobia. It's eleutherophobia. I'd almost say fear of fellow citizens, but that's just paranoia, and not entirely accurate.
The article, headline, story and comments are all bullshit.
Assuming the graph is not also bullshit, the correct story is that in the first 6 months of 2014 (1H 2014 on the graph), IE has had more vulnerabilities than all of 2013. IF this keeps up, then by the end of 2014, IE will have had more than a 100% increase in the number of vulnerabilities over last year.
Love is over.
I was redirected to http://java-update-us.com/index.html?sid=42&aff_sub=wb-playanma-us&aff_sub2=am1&aff_sub3= which dropped a java_installer.exe into my Downloads folder from some ad playing on http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/07/24/1357256/empathy-for-virtual-characters-studied-with-fmri-brain-imaging around 2:30PM central time 7/24
so that users do not have to Google, tweak and retweak things to get a game to run
Minus Google, that was three quarters of the game back in the 90's!
Shouldn't the DIAF acronym work into your analysis somewhere?
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
