I agree entirely with the author's cause and I believe that the guilty-until-proven-innocent mindset of present airport security is wrong and should be unconstitutional.
However, upon reading the article I very much got the impression that the author was refusing to be scanned or searched just to make trouble. When asked why he was refusing to be searched, his answers (in his own writing) seemed to be along the lines of, "because I don't feel like it." I'm sorry, but that's just not really a valid defense. Whether you feel it's constitutional or not, the law says you have to go through these checkpoints when selected. If you're going to refuse, you need to have a much better reason than you don't feel like it.
Ultimately, it sounded to me like they escorted him out of the terminal simply because they were tired of dealing with him, not because he found a loophole in their logic or rules. Less well-mannered officials would have put him in jail for a judge to deal with in the morning.
Roundabouts make a lot of sense when designed properly, and in the right place. I love them (they're just plain fun to drive through), but these are probably the top issues:
1. We mid-westerners, by and large, have never seen a roundabout before, let alone know how to properly drive through them. They weren't even so much as mentioned in driver's training classes around here until a few years ago. Whenever a new one goes up, there's a lot of confusion. The most common problem is misunderstanding or ignoring the yield sign: Some people treat the roundabout like a circular four-way stop and others just zoom in without yielding and cut off the traffic already in the circle.
2. Inconsistent entrance and lane rules. We have two major roundabouts in this town, both installed within the last five years. One of them prohibits lane changes inside the circle, one doesn't. At one of them, traffic entering the roundabout yields to traffic in the roundabout. In the other, vice versa.
3. Building roundabouts in an area for no good reason. On I-75 outside of Saginaw, there's an overpass with on and off ramps. A few years ago, they tore out the traditional traffic signal used on every single other on/off ramp in the state and instead put a roundabout on each end of the bridge. This was a very silly thing to do because the traffic volume was not that high in the first place. Moreover, it's a very industrial area with lots of big trucks and oversize loads that now have to navigate the roundabout very slowly and very carefully just to stay in the lane and not run into passenger vehicles whose drivers aren't paying attention.
Chances are exceedingly good that Arch package maintainers will be checking their Python applications and updating them to use /usr/bin/python2 if they don't run under Python 3. Actually, this should have already happened since the change has apparently been in testing for awhile.
It's not to do with shortage of labor. Their salaries are high because being a cop is a life-threatening and potentially psychologically damaging profession. Some go their entire careers unscathed, some get killed, almost all have close calls every now and then. Most of them have families that care about them and know the sacrifice they might have to make one day. They deserve good salaries for their service.
Believe you me, I have many gripes about the quality (or lack thereof) of law enforcement in this country. But how much they are paid isn't one of them.
I'm very happy with my ARP Networks VPS. Their prices are very competitive, but it's definitely not a "managed" solution. They support just about any Linux distro as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Once your VM is spun up, you just log in and go. Support seems to be email only, but I've never had a second of downtime in the 9 months or so I've been there.
My only gripe is that web-based management of the VPS is almost non-existent. Basically power on/off and reboot are all you get. I'd like to see bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU utilization, and so on. They have a text-based management interface with a few more options, including VNC console over SSH. I suppose the end result is that you basically get a low-end colo server experience at a VPS price. (Which is fine if you're like me and that's what you want.)
I also want to tip my hat to Liquid Web's cloud offering, Storm. (I'm biased because I helped build it.) Their prices are certainly not on the low end but the support team beats the snot out of any other hosting provider, period.
However, upon reading the article I very much got the impression that the author was refusing to be scanned or searched just to make trouble. When asked why he was refusing to be searched, his answers (in his own writing) seemed to be along the lines of, "because I don't feel like it." I'm sorry, but that's just not really a valid defense. Whether you feel it's constitutional or not, the law says you have to go through these checkpoints when selected. If you're going to refuse, you need to have a much better reason than you don't feel like it.
Ultimately, it sounded to me like they escorted him out of the terminal simply because they were tired of dealing with him, not because he found a loophole in their logic or rules. Less well-mannered officials would have put him in jail for a judge to deal with in the morning.