I don't think anyone's out to force you to use a driverless car.

(24" iMac though was a very expensive and notable exception)

How did you manage that? I mean, if the HDD in an iMac breaks within a year it's covered by the computer's warranty. Your nearest Apple shop should just fix it.

You didn't specify what you were referring to, and I think that when people discuss the "size" of a party they generally refer to how many votes or parliament seats they have received. I believe membership is largely irrelevant when it comes to the political importance of parties, at least in Sweden (for example, some unions automatically joins their member to their peer political party (typically the Social Democrats), while most people don't care to join a party even if they're very loyal voters). It is of course impressive that the Pirate Party has gathered so many members, but it doesn't say much about their political clout or their influence on society - it just tells us that they have a high number of members in relation to their voters.

I remind you that the Pirate Party is the third-largest party in Sweden

I'm sorry to tell you that you're very misinformed. The Swedish parliament is made up of 8 parties, and none of them is the Pirate Party. They received 0.65% of the votes in 2006 and 0.63% in 2010, and 4% is required to get a seat in the parliament, making them very far away from that. (check this: http://www.val.se/)

They did however do much better in the 2009 elections for the EU parliament, where they received over 7% of the Swedish votes (making them the fifth largest party). I would speculate that this is largely due to the much lower participation (~45% in the EU election versus ~85% in the national), making the EU parliamentary elections much more prone to small parties getting an disproportionate amount of votes compared to the national parliament elections. (And I'm very happy for that, I think the Pirate Party provides some clue in areas that other parties are completely clueless about - however, in the big EU issues they anyway tend to side with the green parties, who usually also have a similar stance when it comes to tech-related politics.)

What's more, you can just copy the Lion application bundle after downloading it through App Sture (before installing it), and install it on any number of computers, distributing it using whatever tools you like. The installer has no key code or Apple ID requirements. Of course, anyone can find that out by going to Apple's web site.

Easy doesn't mean little labour. Just because it's easy to build a brick wall doesn't mean doesn't take a significant amount of time and resources to do it. It still only makes sense to build one if it adds something of value proportional to the amount of work required.

How is the Mac EFI "inaccessible"? Just put your EFI extensions (for example rEFIt or an EFI shell) on any disk with an EFI partition or a HFS+ volume with the appropriate blessings. The disk can be CD, USB or FireWire.

Of course, it is not often you need to do this, since it's very rare to see a Mac that doesn't boot OS X from any device. In out Mac cluster at work, we can almost always netboot the machine and diagnose from there, when the OS X install DVD won't boot.

It has an easy access temporary disable feature for this reason. Also, during office hours it will be automatically disabled anyway, so try to keep your work hours sane and you'll be fine. :-)

It works for me in Finland, Sweden and many other European countries I've been to. I can't recall having tried it in other parts of the world, though, but I wouldn't be surprised it worked in most urban areas.

SSL uses domain names for verification, but it does not rely on them for authentication. If you hijack an SSL-enabled website, you would also need to steel their private key.

I tried and failed (googling iphone and sexy doesn't really give the results I want in this case). Care to hand out a link or two?

Your state has invented the IRL EULA. Congratulations!

Wow, you're angry. But it makes me curious - what troubleshooting options have you tried? Booting from installation media? Reset PRAM? Booting from an external hard disk? Putting the computer in Target Disk Mode and examining the logs from another computer?

Mind you, they don't necessarily need access to the device internals to detect that it's running malware. There are products for ISP's that detect traffic patterns that indicate an infected computer, and then isolate the computer in question in a sandbox network where all HTTP requests go to a support page with cleanup tools and links to anti-virus vendors. I guess you can employ a similar strategy for wireless networks.

(My employer used to have such a product, I think it's still in use in some Finnish broadband companies.)

While this used to be true, it isn't anymore (try installing iWorks, iLife, XCode ...). For complex software (say, you want to be able to run code post install, or install several packages at once), Apple recommends using PackageMaker to create pkg or mpkg bundles that are installed using the OS X Installer application. Also, OS X has package management that keeps track of what you have installed and what files belong to which application. See man pages pkgutil(1), installer(8) and packagemaker(1) for more information. Also, read Apple's Software Delivery Guide.