That was not a normal M1000. It was clearly (badly) hand made or modified. I know this because I used to make fireworks as a hobby until the ATF started hiking it's skirt up and doing the mousey dance every time someone sneezed.

This is an actual M-1000.The message is clear, don't set off fireworks on the patio furniture.

Some of the ones I made might BARELY qualify as a small bomb but those involved 4 oz. of black powder and a well reinforced tube.

You should note that commercial fireworks are mortar shells, not skyrockets.

Now, how many times has your house burned down in all of that? How many skyrockets in your windows?

I can understand you not wanting it daily for months, but surely on the actual holidays it might be nice to not get all bunched up over it.

Sounds like someone hasn't a single fact to back up his bald assertion.

Whatever gets you through the night.

Excuses are dirt cheap. As long as the firing can be plausibly claimed not to be motivated by racial or gender discrimination, it's not much problem. Examples seen in the wild include "not meshing with the workplace culture", "poor attitude", "not a good fit for the job", "cutbacks", etc.

And that's not even including the tactic of creating so many workplace rules that pretty much every employee will routinely violate one or more of them (and at the manager's discretion, be forgiven).

Bald assertions aren't very convincing, sorry. I might as well reply that the moon is made of cheese. There is a cost in the sense that a replacement will need time to get up to speed, but any other costs are self-inflicted damage.

It doesn't cost anything when you do that. That's what I mean by drop of a hat. You should focus on understanding what someone is saying rather than looking for excuses to be a condescending ass.

OMG you must tremble for hours every time a car backfires! A skyrocket through a window? I have NEVER heard of such a thing happening. Unless you mean an open and unscreened window.

Many people in my neighborhood shoot fireworks every year on the 4th and there has never been a fire.

Your description of a firecracker as a "small bomb" tells me you are permanently set to "overreact".

I don't know where you live, but in most of the U.S. you can be fired at the drop of a hat with no reason given.

Sure it does. You for some reason ASSuME that the fireworks will inevitably set your house on fire (apparently it has yet to happen), so you kill the fun for everyone else. Water your lawn that afternoon and hose down the roof, it'll be fine.

Strenuously disagree. This is more than a billing error here, it is an implicit threat of expensive legal action wrapped in a takedown that at the least interferes with someone's free expression. They need to take it seriously or go away.

Civilization has long understood the dangers of crying wolf and even has a number of fables about it in order to teach young children not to do it.

They are welcome to use their algorithm as a screening test, but they shouldn't be claiming ownership of things without human verification. Since their algorithm must have some 'idea' what it thinks the work is, it should only take a few seconds per filing to have a human verify that what is playing is what the algorithm thinks it is.

Perhaps the ban on the easy method of making a claim should expire after a time, but the message is fairly clear: If they prove they are unable to responsibly use a largely automated system, they will be forced to do it manually in order to force them to consider each case more carefully. It may even be acceptable to grant them 3 strikes rather than 1, but only if they issue a personal (hand written) apology from their CEO to the person they wrongly claimed against.

Now I'm quite sure you've never done any embedded work. Debian USED to be a good base for an embedded system.

That just means you must make more than one cut to isolate the segment you're working on, or you have to get your splice in while the trucks are on the way to the decoy cut.