That's a silly excuse. The main issue is that this secureEFI requirement is cumbersome and will create problems for some people.

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!