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).

Uh, no, Swype wasn't requesting location data several thousand times a day. It was being given unsolicited location data by the OS. Because it's a background service that sometimes wants location, it's given location every time Android notifies everything running that location has changed.

iOS? The OS you could jailbreak (i.e. run arbitrary code in Ring 0) from a web page? Yeah, nah.

My iPhone randomly reboots, sometimes in the middle of phone calls. However, this does not mean it is indicative of all iPhones. The plural of anecdote is not data.

Eventually, they'll let you do it from a server and call it Distributed Component Object Model. Maybe we'll even get some kind of Dynamic Data Exchange mechanism?

You haven't seen archaic until you've tried to talk to a point of sale terminal. In 2014, these things still talk fixed length binary strings over RS232 interfaces, with comma separators and control characters.