I was consciously avoiding mention of this, but unfortunately, it doesn't look like the issue is going to blow over. You might have seen the doodad on the right on Gizmodo or your local news. It's called TV-B-Gone (catchy!) and it does what you'd expect: it turns off televisions. It's basically a universal remote with a single button that cycles through all of its available codes.

Fan-fucking-tastic. It was bad enough to have to listen to the people with a pretentious philosophical opposition to TV. Now these people have been given an actual weapon in the battle to save us from ourselves. Make no mistake, these are the exact same people who shine laser pointers on movie screens. Self-righteousness and a subscription to the New Yorker are the only things separating the two ends of this particular demographic.

Hating TV is fine -- hell, I resent it, although I'm definitely in its thrall. But clearly this thing is designed primarily to irritate people whom the owner deems stupider than himself.

So what's the solution? Our options are somewhat limited. Remote controls use a binary infrared signal that looks kind of like this:

Only longer. As anyone who's had to program a universal remote knows, there's not much standardization in the industry -- different brands use different codes.

The solution will likely require the creation of a signal format that allows a TV work with only one (or a couple) of specific remotes at a time. This is complicated somewhat by the slowness of the hardware used in TV sets. Higher-end consumer IR receivers like the one in your phone or laptop can handle speeds of at least 9600 bps, but the one in your TV was probably made using less than two dollar's worth of parts. They may not be able to handle a fast signal. An even more important consideration is the noise that real or artificial light can introduce. The signal needs to be loud and slow, like those punk kids ahead of you on the escalator.

This speed limit means you've got to keep the signal short, to allow quick responses. But it still has to be long enough to accomodate bits that differentiate not only all of a device's functions, but the different devices themselves (so that your DVD player knows to ignore your VCR's "play" command). It may be tricky to accomodate the necessary changes and keep your channel surfing as spry as it currently is.

In a way I hope the TV-B-Gone really takes off, forcing the industry to finally sit down and draft an ISO standard. Presumably they'd add a privacy code to the signal large enough to prevent jerks like the inventor of the TV-B-Gone from messing with your stuff more often than every few minutes (during which time they'd have to cycle through all potential values for the privacy code).
From a practical standpoint, this means that when you buy a new remote, you'll have to introduce it to your TV through some onscreen menu, telling it to trust its signal -- similar to how Bluetooth pairing works, if anyone here owns any BT gadgets.

On the upside, this would mean that, once introduced, any modern TV remote could work with any modern TV without any configuration. But I wouldn't hold your breath for this. In the meantime, I think we'll start seeing a lot of black electrical tape being discreetly applied in restaurants and bars.