Chrome does the same thing. I suspect it is for technical reasons.

Windows Home Server is even more aggressive at telling you not to actually use it as a desktop.

No. If you've got a good long-standing relationship with a company, they'll often loan, give or sell you unreleased hardware to get a feel for how it works and (hopefully) place a large order. We have some HP ElitePads at work with "Property of Hewlett-Packard Company", "Please return to HP Dallas, TX" and "Prototype - Not FCC approved" on them just because they wanted us to try them out and maybe get some when they were released.

He said without root.

Oh, so you've seen how the system works then? I can almost guarantee that it backhauls the traffic over a separate VLAN or something using non-routable address space until it hits a CGNAT router at their CO.

The majority of the ones I've encountered nowadays (in New Zealand) are computer controlled, and internet connected (so that they can do realtime validation of credit card transactions or respond to online vending instructions issued via the smartphone apps for handling prepaid balance transactions). I can imagine these very much being programmable.

I once encountered a Coke machine that upon pressing a selection, it would proceed to vend the entire stock on that row, then reject the supplied money and drop it into the change dispenser. At which time you could get it to vend another row, and get another refund. 8 keypresses cleared out the entire machine.

Another effective mechanism, is to Decline the privacy policy. According to a recent Slashdot post, that disables pretty much every smart feature the TV has.

What people don't realise is that when roaming, everything is actually backhauled to the home network. So what happens when you roam is that your data goes to the roaming network's towers, then is carried back internationally to your home carrier, then out across the internet, then back to your home carrier, then backhauled to the roaming network, then to your phone. Every phone call, piece of data, or text message, needs to cross the world twice to get to and from you.

Your browser quite likely has a setting defining what font to use for monospaced fonts (i.e. anything within <tt> tags). Change that to be whatever font you want. I've reset mine to Consolas and find it much more pleasant to read (in Firefox, Options > Content > Advanced (under fonts and colors)).

"Moving Staircase". Escalator is/was a trademark of Otis Elevator Company.

And also because with some people, the response to that is "Oh, you don't have Coke? No, no Pepsi thanks. Can I get a water?"

If you're going to assert that, you have to admit that Microsoft is not and has never been a monopoly as well.

FTFTFY

They don't use your IP address unless you're not logged in. If you're logged in, they use your iTunes account's country (no matter where in the world you are).