They can work if the owner forgets to lock out that mode. I have tried and tested it successfully on one machine and another machine said "feature disabled".

Modern vending machines are hybrids, they have their electro-mechanical component but there is a basic CPU that collects statistics and also can control the vend prices depending on the model. Modern vending machines can also be USB, serial and Ethernet connected which only increases their hackability.

It should never be that painful. What kind of crap DRM is so tightly interwoven into the OS that it requires a complete reinstall to fix it? I can't play Netflix on this PC either due to Silverlight DRM being hosed. I'm not going to spend countless hours trying to fix it either, I'll just wait for HTML5 support and use a different PC in the meantime.

AMD A6-5400K. 3.6GHz (3.8 Turbo) and Radeon HD 7540D. $65

As others have said it is a slower processor than the intel but with faster graphics. The AMD only gets a 2100 CPU Mark (Passmark software) which is about the same as an old Phenom II X2 or a few year old Intel i3 mobile chip.

I assembled it as a low-end system for a parent that basically does email and web surfing along with some basic image editing and cheesy games.

I agree that we aren't there yet for it to make financial sense for the majority, but right now it can make financial sense for a small percentage of people.

I don't really consider the Volt a true EV, it is more of a hybrid. It has all the drawbacks of a traditional ICE with some minor benefits of the electric.
To get an EV for the masses there needs to be cheaper and denser battery/energy technology. When there is an EV with 300 mile range $25K then it will become the people's car. Tesla has the right idea and may get there someday, to do it they need to scale up production 10x and increase battery density by 75% while reducing battery cost 50%.

No, he is talking about total cost of ownership which includes fuel and maintenance. People with longish commutes are spending $80-$100 a week on gas, which can add up to $5000 a year plus a few hundred in maintenance. If you keep the car for 4 years and then sell it, the total cost of ownership is the original purchase price minus the re-sale price plus what you've spent. Or in lease terms if you are spending $300-$400 a month in fuel then you add that to your monthly lease payment to get the monthly TCO. Of course electricity isn't free either but it is an order of magnitude less. Bottom line is it can make sense if you drive enough.

ISP traffic has always been asymmetrical, 90% down, 10% up. It wasn't until peer-to-peer networking took off that the balance started to swing a little, and then the ISP's were complaining because their up-link bandwidth was getting saturated over the coax nodes.

Now that streaming video is becoming a common place thing the percentage has swung back up and we are probably 95% down, 5% up on the ISP network. They're all upgrading their last mile connections so you can have 50Mbit+ to the home, but if you're streaming from Netflix you're lucky if you get 2Mbit due to congestion at the inter-connects. We're paying these ISP's a shit-ton of money (comparatively), they should be able to maintain a respectable level of service. They've upgraded every part of their network except the part that is really important, because they think they can make a buck. And since they effectively have a monopoly the customer is being held hostage.

Bottom line is the ISP is responsible for getting the customer's traffic from point A to point B, that's what we pay for. It doesn't matter where it comes from, they should be able to adapt their network to suit the customer's needs.

I know it's from the movie, but in the movie he is referring to the optimized distance travelling through the Maw Cluster and not time directly.

Parsec is a unit of distance (like light-years), without an expression over time it is not defining any speed.