While I'd love to imagine the hilarity that would ensue if Russia were to attempt to completely disconnect the internet in order to run their own entirely isolated private one, I doubt this is in reality what would happen. Even if they managed to keep most or all of their population from getting traffic from international social/news networks in, I have the sneaking suspicion that somehow the SPAM would still find its way out.

Lack of regulation and oversight breeds rampant victimization of the labor force?!

Only if you ask a Republican.

Maybe next they could invent an artificial organ that would make me less angry.

To be fair, you do partially have a point there; the official Canon printer drivers certainly support more of their own printers than CUPS does. I can tell you that without even looking at Canon's official driver install. However, the total amount of printers supported by CUPS, since it includes a sampling of most major manufacturer's printers (and all of the features of most of said printers) utterly dwarves what any one manufacturer supports currently in their own drivers in Windows. Yes, the average age of the list doesn't necessarily include as many printers released THIS YEAR (another partial point to your statement) but it also doesn't exclude printers that used to work simply because they're old enough that Canon wants you to buy a new one so they simply merged out support. What you're getting in that 17MB (probably less than 10MB really, for normal users - my installation case is an exception because I use multi-arch and compile a lot of packages on my own) is basic or complete support for a broad cross section of printers going back for more than a decade, not just the most recent offerings of one manufacturer's last 2 years of flagship products. Note this figure also includes the documentation.

But that doesn't really mean Canon's software is in and of itself bloated and horrible necessarily. If I had to bet on it, my guess would be that 28MB of the 30MB used by the Canon driver install is a hidden video of the developers eating birthday cake.

You forgot the part where they'll also come up with a lame, poorly-concocted excuse to bill the customer extra for it anyway, and get away with it.

Well I too have a bunch of optional stuff that objectively speaking, I REALLY don't need, like bluetooth support (not to mention all the extra drivers and the development headers for compiling stuff, and a bunch of filters packages that I don't even know what they're for, in both 64-bit and 32-bit format due to compiling multi-arch stuff on this system) but I'm still sitting on a total install base of a bit less than 17MB. If Canon actually needs 30MB just for their own drivers and presumably the printing system itself is part of the Windows kernel, I think something is REALLY REALLY wrong.

Before you just sign off and assume that 30MB is a completely acceptable install size for a single printer driver or a single group of drivers from a single printer manufacturer simply because HP somehow manages to waste a whole order of magnitude more space, compare that to the installed size of the Linux CUPS printing subsystem and its ENTIRE DRIVER SET FOR ALL SUPPORTED DEVICES.

My parents are both dumber than dirt but I'm way smarter than them.

More like people 20-50 who work somewhere there is a job requirement to adhere to a dress code that isn't safe/legal to bike in and not be gross and sweaty upon arrival every morning, lest they be sent home/fired. Usually these companies provide assigned/designated parking too, invalidating your second point. Not everyone in the world who drives a car to work is an overweight night shift Janitor at McDonald's, despite what you may think.

This really confused me. Was there a point?

Microsoft made a solid business for many years simply from tricking morons into thinking that being a smart, savvy computer user just requires spending enough money on the software. Their power is visibly waning, but won't evaporate any time soon.

... and I don't even use it.

Yea, but that's pretty standard these days, as is the "You're not allowed to publish bad things about us, or say them in public." clause.

Yea that's fair. I omitted "automatic Windows updates" too, but you can stuff a lot under the bucket of #8.