Since when is a willfully installed piece of adware/spyware a "bug"? Using that term is someone's attempt to pass this off as a coding error when it was actually willfully installed by the OEM in their OS image.

I think people burned by napalm and other incendiaries that lived will disagree with you

and I'm not dumb, I know why. But it's an intellectual exercise question worth asking.

Why the distinction? Many more people have been killed by the explosive/incendiary chemical than any of the "chemical" agents. The deadliness and usability of the explosive/incendiary's is much more refined and targeted (today) too.

if anywhere near practical economically

not directly changing the strength perhaps, but what if extreme corrosion resistance allowed you to reduce margins on structural members of bridges for instance (appropriately tested and vetted of course please!) or changed the durability of steel rebar in concrete? Reduced assumptions of corrosion loss over the years, that can be very significant and give an effective real world increase in the strength you are able to assume.

it would also block the most common method of recording the interaction with the cop

Handing you phone to a cop grants them implicit rights to search the phone. Therefore, having your license on the phone is a backdoor way to grant them access to search your device.

it's good for the economy as viewed by those that sell new phones, especially when it forces a contract renewal and two more years of lock in typically (in the US, if you don't want to shell out for an unlocked phone then and there)

"he'll then go in and manually corrects them "

unsure of the timing of the implementation of the supercookie, I had never thought to examine my HTTP traffic from the far side before the initial public reports. As far as voiding, with only three months left I am OK just waiting for it rather than burning work bandwidth on what I'm sure would be insane stonewalling and bureaucracy to void the contract. Would likely take longer than simply waiting and leaving, although that doesn't have much "protest effect"

my attorney examined it, while exploitation was a possible angle, assigning a value to it for a civil suit was damned near impossible, or gave results that were only in the fraction of a penny zone per user. Making the whole suit process impractical even for a millions of users class action, unless you are able to find a "white night" attorney willing to take it on based on principal alone (EFF?), not likely.

injected at the network layer, nothing you can do to prevent it locally. Perhaps salt it with false UIDs that look like Verizons to confuse the system, but you can't prevent their addition of the supercookie.

I've done the FCC complaint, FTC complaint, contacted a lawyer for possible civil action or even class action (not practical since you can't "prove" damage), contacted the FBI for a CFAA violation, all of it. No results at all. Voting with my wallet when the contract expires and using nothing but HTTPS and VPN otherwise until then.

that about sums it up I think