There were locks on the cases and the BIOS was secured but CD booting was not disabled.

You are so immensely full of shit...
To prove that you CAN edit files in /etc using the TextWrangler downloaded from the Mac App Store I have recorded a video of me doing JUST THAT! I even opened TextWrangler using sudo to show that I can write to a config file.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWAKQjJWJvk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvULnO52RY0
I suspect that you didn't notice the Enable: All TextWrangler Documents drop down menu. Don't ask me why that's necessary, but changing it to everything made all the .conf files selectable. So yeah, you're full of shit and yet you've been modded +5 insightful...

That's a serious problem. The requirement of explaining to people running all kinds of different hardware with all kinds of different UEFI setup screens is adding a massive hurdle to Linux adoption.

My CompSci teacher in high school routinely set up Linux dual-boots on the basic Windows machines so he could actually teach his class. Of course he routinely butted heads with the district's asinine IT department. The BIOSes on the school machines are always password locked and they head administrator refused to give him access. If those machines were replaced with systems running UEFI secure boot, I can guarantee he wouldn't be able to run Linux anymore. He wouldn't even be able to boot the systems every morning with a LiveCD like he did for an entire year when he was forbidden to install anything to the hard drives.

By that logic, it's inevitable that in every industry one business will eradicate all other competition and become a de-facto monopoly. A business like that most certainly has absolute power in the ability to grossly inflate prices. Without external control there is what can best be described as a competitive business entropy.

You don't need to use brute force to deprive people of their freedoms. In the "Walmart town" the Evil Big Business(TM) is using economic force in the form of predatory pricing to destroy local competition.

I'm slightly confused as well. In my high school AP calculus-based physics class we did projectile motion with air resistance and gravity at the beginning of the year. In fact, my teacher used that particular topic to "weed out" the students that probably wouldn't be able to handle the remainder of the course. He taught the material way above the actual AP requirement and make the topic exam so hard that a few kids switched into the lower-level physics course afterward.

Hah, I wish! I'm still designing pages that are compatible with IE5.5+ which means accounting for all sorts of annoying css render bugs. Even recent versions of IE exhibit things like the float overflow drop bugs. The IE developers seem to have this terrible notion that no matter what the CSS standard actually says, web designers and other web browsers are supposed to follow their lead as to how certain properties behave. That's what it seems like at least, considering the number of layout bugs that have been in every IE since around 5 to the latest versions.

I would imagine that they've received significant pressure from the cable companies precisely to not do that. There might even be some terms in their contracts with the cable companies that somehow prohibit them offering subscriptions themselves.

Personally I think HBO is actually the most forward-thinking of the cable-related services. HBOGo has their entire library available for streaming. Sure it's a bummer that you have to have a cable subscription with one of a few providers to use it, but I'm sure if they could sell cable-less HBO subscriptions they would. As it is I'm sure the actual cable companies are kicking and screaming about HBOGo. I don't even pay for the subscription, I'm using a friend's cable account (with permission) to log into it. I don't have cable TV myself because there's virtually nothing I ever want to watch on TV that's not on HBO (or another premium service).

Keep it up HBO!

I definitely think email is better then sending letters and sometimes better then calling on the phone, yet idiotic chain-mail and the like still really annoys me. No matter the communication medium, there's always a subset of people using it in an entirely trivial and unnecessary (often annoying) way. Granted those annoying people are going to send more annoying communications with a method that is easier to use. Sending chain-mail to your entire address book is a bit harder with the postal service than with email.

Personally I'm not a fan of the social atmosphere that seems to permeate things like Facebook. On the rare occasions I log into my account I feel as if am bombarded with a torrent of a rough equivalent to annoying chain emails.

TotalFinder and TotalTerminal are two of my favorite Mac OS X "hack" apps. One of these days I'm planning on trying out TotalSpaces, as Lion's removal of grid spaces really annoyed me. Mac OS X's UI is certainly not perfect but in my dual-boot setup I most definitely prefer to be using the Finder over Explorer any day.

The one that worked for me is Opera Mini, so I suppose it probably is offloading rendering to a server.

I just so happen to have a couple alternate web browsers installed on my iPad. I had a problem with how Safari was rendering a page with a frame-embedded PDF, so I found one that didn't use the iOS UIWebView backend.

As it happens, the Hackintosh community as a whole was very pissed off at Psystar because Psystar had stolen some of the open source emulator/decrypter driver code that our members created and sold it closed-source (violated the copyright) and without attribution.

My family has used Macs for ages. I built a couple Hackintoshes for myself and I love them. I can run regular software updates on them and they're totally stable. However when my mother wants a new Mac I will not build her one.

Also, the DMCA was passed in 1998. Psystar appeared on the scene in around 2008. So no, they were not doing this before the DMCA was enacted. In fact, Macs have only been Intel since around 2005.