You mean a modern country like the USA? I hear they are doing a great job of providing clean water, and reliable utilities, and I'm sure there are a bunch of AT&T customers in Florida that would love to tell you about the quality of phone service that they no longer have available, since it was too expensive for the private telco to maintain. After all, it's easy to show 13% growth in the short-term while you still have assets to sell and people to fire.

Well if after $1,000,000 you'd be handing most of it over to Uncle Sam that probably encouraged business owners to instead reinvest into the company more than taking profits for themselves while looking for more ways to cut costs and shaft the employees.

You are absolutely correct. The higher tax rates were a great incentive for companies to invest in CAPEX and actual tangible growth. The company could avoid taxes by spending money on infrastructure and workers that would increase share value by creating greater productivity. The current trend in "trickle down economics" is for the corporations to increase share value by moving money overseas to dodge taxes and showing a bigger bottom line while decreasing productivity and crippling future growth.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that only one of these strategies is sustainable in the long-term.

So, to back the OP. If one of the UEFI design goals was "eliminating boot code malware." Having run-time writeable boot code looks like an EFI design bug.

I couldn't agree more. Although that doesn't mean the registration needs to be an onerous process.

The difference is that When Ford brings out a new model, you can usually count on the old one working for another 5, 10, even 20 years. iPhone, not so much. Usually when Apple ships a new product, they target updates to the operating system for the latest platform, while failing to address manufacturing defects (yes, bad software is paramount to a manufacturing defect) and ceasing support the previous generation. In fact the updates are ofter to the detriment of the older platform, causing huge performance degradation, despite the fact that the phone is perfectly suitable for most people's needs, thus people are in fact forced to buy the new phone.

  At least with a car, once it is out of warranty, and the manufacturer has ceased to support it, there are plenty of after-market vendors that are still willing to support it. I can still buy newly manufactured parts to operate and maintain my 1972 vehicle without getting sued into bankruptcy and thrown in jail.

So to counter your supposition,

I do have a very effective strategy for wiping mobile devices using a third party device. Unfortunately it tends to reduce the resale value a bit :)

Maybe they paid off the departing employees with stock, until they ran out.

actually latency is a HUGE issue for ALL internet connections. It's know as Bandwidth Delay Product and high latency links create problems with TCP window sizing, such that a typical internet link using geostationary satellites is limited to under 200Kbps. So that 20MB Power Point presentation is going to take about 15 minutes to download.

HFT is not about reaction times to public information. It is about exploiting timing so that a customer placing a single large order that can be fulfilled only through many different stock exchanges is taken advantage of by predatory stock scalpers. Scalpers, upon noticing the order would not be able to be fulfilled by one single exchange, instead buy the securities on the other exchanges, so that by the time the rest of the large order arrives to those exchanges the scalpers can sell the securities at a higher price. All these events happen in milliseconds not perceivable to humans but perceivable to computers. It really is about exploiting information before anyone else has had a chance to see it, which is essentially insider trading.

I think it's a Soviet thing.

Just because PayPal decides to tell you that they have the right to murder your baby and eat your dog, doesn't mean they can do it without consequence. PayPal does not have the authority to dismiss federal legislation.
In Canada, at least, we still actually have some semblance of a real justice system that is not for sale to the highest bidder. Robo-calling and spamming are quite explicitly opt-in only in Canada, and they MUST provide a means to opt-out.

Something similar was done by Miami drug smugglers in the 80's. They used to spray entire warehouses with marijuana residue so the dogs would trigger on every single box. Eventually, the cops just gave up using the dogs. Well, that, and the drug smugglers eventually just bought off the cops.

I think that is the point the OP was making. The US government (and it's various arms, subsidiaries, et al.) have made so many of those steps they have become tyrannical.