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!".

I absolutely, positively do NOT want government requirements for labeling. If I am concerned with labeling, I will call the manufacturer of the product and ASK. I already do it because I don't consume trans fats (except for naturally occuring ones in beef). The government was "supposed" to regulate trans fat labels, but they haven't. Many items say 0 trans fats but contain a significant amount below 1 gram, and your government allows it to be labeled 0 grams. Nice. That's government at its finest. When I see 0 grams of trans fats, I will call the manufacturer and ask them to confirm the fact that there are zero, and most of the time they'll say "there's a negligible amount" which is the equivalent of saying "yeah, they're in there."

I understand someone calling a manufacturer themselves may give one a sense of self-reliance and individualistic pride, but do you really think that customer service representatives individually responding to millions of incoming enquiries from each consumer would lead to the most accurate dissemination of this sort of information? Knowing most companies, one individual will often get a different answer each time, and the fantasy they may have about suing if they receive inaccurate information certainly won't scare most companies enough to make them devote sufficient resources to responding to individual customer enquiries with the same degree of accuracy as would be required for a label.

And unless a consumer uses an unusually narrow range of produts, they'll be making an awful lot of calls or writing a lot of letters. Twenty, thirty or more on the trans fat issue alone? What happens when product formulations change? Do you have to make fifty phone calls or write thirty letters every three months or so to make sure you have up-to-date information?

That would be extremely inefficient, both for the consumers and companies - far worse than labelling regulations. The only reason companies push for this concept is that they know this concept is a pipe dream - people aren't be so diligent as to make even one call or write one letter, let alone hundreds a year.

If you believe a labelling system is flawed, responding with an absolute opposition to labelling as a concept doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a government so dysfunctional it makes improvements impossible (in which case, you have much more important issues to devote your efforts to than worrying about trivial amounts of trans fat).