You're quoting an article based on a report from one strident advocacy group (Center for Consumer Freedom), published in one of the Britain's least trustworthy media outlets (The Daily Mail), criticising another stident advocacy group (PETA).

It's sad that such a cesspit of sources rates as "informative".

My first impression of the situation described in the summary is it sounds somewhat similar to a web host shutting down a user's account because their site was a magnet for DDoS attacks - a response which would be uncontroversial. Another analogy that comes to mind is the removal of users' comments in a discussion forum, following a legal threats to the site operator.

The fundamental similarity in all three circumstances seems to be the website operator not wanting to deal with a website user's "baggage", as an earlier poster here termed it. But the next question in my mind is what the differences are in the Kickstart case. Notwishtanding the fact that it's "their site, their rules", is there a point at which nature of the "baggage" may be trivial enough to deal with (e.g. a user being targeted by a spammer, rather than a DDoS botnet) that it's fair to criticise the website operator for being too ready to wash their hands of the victim?

The NYT and BBC prefaced their stories with the qualifiers "probably" and "may have", while these disappeared from the Slashdot summary. The reports may well turn out to be true, but the summary is assigning a level of certainty about the claims that does not yet exist.

Acceptance of this sort of distortion seems to have become so routine in Slashdot's selection of story submissions, it sometimes feels a bit like reading the Daily Mail.

I recently bought an ASUS netbook which not only came with no recovery discs, but no utility to create recovery media (either optical or USB). If the hard disk dies or the recovery partition is corrupted (e.g. by a failed test restore of your self-created drive image), there's no way to restore the system to its factory state yourself. This has been raised in the ASUS forums and their response is sorry, but you have to return the system to them if you need it restored. Remarkably, people who noted this issue in Amazon.com reviews had their criticism thumbed-down, and ridiculed by "most helpful" reviews containing the narrowminded suggestion that recovery media is unecessary because you can "simply restore from the hard disk!".