Wait, so do they rip the DVD/BDs, add in some ads, then re-burn them?

Of course, I still wouldn't see them, since I rip them before watching specifically to remove the ads and "unskippable" bullshit, but...

Oh! Wait - This only affects people already happily paying for a lower qual*BUFFERING*ity product. Never mind, then - Carry on with your paid inferior YouTube clone. ;)

-Keep every e-mail.

A follow-up to that - Document everything via email. Even that guy who does his damnedest to never go on the record with his requirements (and you'll meet plenty of them), summarize your conversation and email it to him for a yes/no confirmation that you understood his intent.

Of course, depending on who asks, this won't keep you from needing to fix other people's mistakes, but it can save your sanity, and possibly even your job, when Mr. Blowhard swears up and down that he told you X and you did Y.

The obvious response to which is

... "No."

I don't provide useful information to my opponent in a negotiation, simple as that.

"Oh, come now, Mr. Jones, I see from your pay stubs that you can afford a much nicer car than that Fiesta - Sorry, I must insist you buy a Fusion or Taurus!".

Other than "type var[size];" there is no primitive array type

I agree with most of what you said, but this one stumps me. You've just defined a primitive array - An array named var of type type and size size. Other than its... well, primitiveness (no fancy default conversions, no memory management, no overloads to deal with it as a whole), what about that syntax do you object to?

Perhaps, but my point was more that if you want to grow ZFS this is the ONLY way to actually do it, as far as I'm aware. You can't add individual drives to individual "vdevs."

You can replace all the drives in the array with bigger ones, resilvering after each replacement, and when you get to the last one, poof, you magically have a bigger pool. I certainly won't claim that as terribly efficient, though. :)

It has its shortcomings, no doubt. But compared to old-school RAID or even LVM, it takes a huge step forward.

I will readily admit that as a "shortcoming" of ZFS, but honestly, I don't quite see any obvious use cases for it. On the short term (months), I've only ever needed to *add* storage, never remove it.

On the longer term (years), I have found that I go back and forth on how many drives I need, but when I do eventually upgrade my home NAS to bigger and better hardware, I don't even try to salvage old drives 1/10th the size of modern ones - I bring up the new system, with however many brand new drives I consider appropriate, and clone the old one to the new one.

Ext4 should in theory be the best choice. It's widely used and has a large enterprise support. Lots of business people get angry if it does not work properly.

On a modern system with multiple disks you want to configure as some variety of soft-RAID, ZFS hands-down counts as the clear best choice (short of going for a "cluster" FS). It allows an arbitrary number of extra parity drives (think "RAID 8"), as well as arbitrarily many hot spares; it quickly and easily recovers from having someone pull out all your drives, shuffle them around, and put them back in (for a more real-world version of that - Ever updated your BIOS only to find all your drives remapped?); it detects and (usually) corrects corrupted files; it supports online snapshotting and snapshot exporting to another; it uses dynamically sized storage pools rather than fixed "partitions", and can even grow the underlying total available space.

Then reverse the wires going to the receptacle. An ANSI/SAE J563 receptacle in a positive-ground vehicle would have -12 to -15 V on the can and ground on the tip.

Great idea! Well, right up until whatever you plug in touches anything metal in your car, of course. Then at least you'll have a more exciting day...

an old diesel would be taxed more than a new Euro-5 compliant one.

Believe it or not, the biggest proponents of mile-vs-gallon based taxes in the US have exactly the opposite intent of what you describe.

Some people feel that a gallon-based tax "unfairly" punishes them for spewing 5x more pollution than someone driving an efficient modern hybrid. And don't even get them started on those bastards driving EVs.

and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them

One problem there - Humans contain the DNA for producing morphine. It works so well precisely because out body already uses it to regulate our natural pain response.

You could ask the same about why a US dollar has a higher value than a Mexican Peso.

Whoever used bitcoin is on a watch list.

Would you like some Taco Bell to go with your paranoia?

FWIW, that'd make for a preeety long list at this point... The feds might do better just using the phone book.

I believe the correct response to extremist right wing guff like this is "fuck off to Somalia then you retard".

As a liberal, do you actually approve of your tax dollars funding the killing of brown people on the other side of the planet because something something terrorism ?

download the file, pay $3.49 for it, and print it at home

Umm, no, nice try - I don't pay the original manufacturer to fix their own defective merchandise for them. I would expect them to host files like that entirely for free, the same way PC hardware makers currently let you download drivers.

Of course, I don't actually expect them to do so; but that matters not at all, since countless other sources will.

If you want to arrive unmolested you might try not taking part in an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

Unfortunately, I pay taxes in the US, thereby providing material support to a terrorist organization.

Easy to say "just don't do it", not so easy to spend a few years in Club Fed for resisting the IRS' annual shake-down.