Update: I'm moving this to the drupal.org site as a sandbox project: http://www.drupal.org/sandbox/studiozut/2303677
Removes the "promote to front page" and "sticky" checkboxes when creating or editing content. Does not the change site functionality, only removes the option to make sticky/unsticky or promoted/demoted when creating or editing content.
Permissions allow selected user roles to override the change and continue to use the "sticky" and "promote" options.
This was designed to simplify content creation and editing for content users of sites that are not using these features, especially for content editors with limited experience with a CMS.
(thanks to Roger Codina and his fork: https://github.com/rogercodina/hide-sticky-promote and Elijah Lynn's post at http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/4612/how-to-disable-promote-to-front-page-and-sticky-options)