What gets me every time I talk to a Comcast representative is that when i ask them "how much will this cost me per month?" they cannot give me a dollar amount. They always say "$149 plus taxes and fees." They do not seem to know, or be able to derive, at the time of the sales call, that figure that they are perfectly happy to compute and print on the monthly bill.

My policy is that if you can't tell me how much you will charge me, I cannot figure out if I am going to pay you. I'm forced to pass.

Comcast is accountable?

My Comcast has a board of directors. They only listen to their friends. They only answer to their friends. And, no surprise, many of their friends have lots of money.

With a Comcast, you have to wait for the next election, assuming you even have a chance of throwing out the previous office holders.

Well, it's a tad late now. Years ago when they were raising my rates while degrading my quality they told me over the phone that I am lying and video quality is much better now that it is HD and perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about and watching SD.

Glad to hear they've finally admitted its an issue that needs to be addressed, though, and, possibly addressed it. My neighbor though still has really shit video quality on Comcast compared to OTA, even as late as last month when he commented how vastly different my PBS feed looked. He asked if I had some sort of 4k feed or something (right!). I went down to his apartment and saw what he was watching and yeah, still night-and-day difference. Perhaps they haven't rolled out switched digital video to my area yet.

Yes, but the quote implied that non-infosec professionals did *wish* to install secondary offers. They made no statement about understanding the situation but about desire. "Desire" is the problem with that quote and what Penguinisto was pointing out.

It's not even a start. In fact, using such incredibly naive and faulty methods brings into question the rest of your post and weakens your argument.

Guilty or not, Valve reserves the right to take away from the user every purchase they have ever made on Steam, for any reason, with no legal recourse. Why anyone would agree to those terms I do not understand.

What one controls in this situation is to whom one shares one's account number. Not sharing financial information with the likes of PayPal is the solution.

Changing my bank account to get PayPal to comply with my wishes is silly. Not to mention that a closed account still permits withdrawals for 90 days or more, reopening the account, drawing it negative, incurring banking fees and requiring a rigmarole of banking paperwork to rectify.

This is why I would never give any company I do not trust fully my bank account number. PayPal is not a company I trust fully as they've shown they use obscure internal rules to determine which accounts they freeze and unfreeze with no oversight.

If you read what denis-The-menace wrote, you'll see Facebook could ask users to give their private key to their (presumably closed-source) client, which could do anything with it. Responding with suspecting them of having some method of deriving the private key, or that uneducated users would really only give Facebook public keys, or Facebook hacking desktops does not address denis-The-menace's actual concern: public-key cryptography is very easy to exploit when the user-base is uneducated in its use, and Facebook offering such a new service to the masses is exactly the path one would follow to inspire users to feel secure all the while sabotaging them.

I am not sure I agree with denis-The-menace, but I wanted to point out that you didn't actually address his actual concern.

If they did, were ad free, and had a back catalog of things to watch, I'd pay that. Sadly, they don't offer that and the ads are a deal breaker. They instead get no viewership from me, paid or otherwise.

I would.

The HBO ads shown in their Now streams can be skipped, at least. I wonder if the same is true for Netflix ads.

I don't know. I don't need to decrypt anything. The television I watch is unencrypted. I don't pay anything per month for renting hardware or subscribing to channels which are already beamed through my home.

I used to pay for cable channels which, to make room for more internet bandwidth, were further and further compressed every month until compression artefacts were so common as to be distracting. It wasn't long before the service they were providing, which was getting worse over time, was not worth the cost they were asking, which was getting worse over time. That was ten years ago now.

If I were recording it, we would be talking about something different than live TV. I was replying to a comment about how a HTPC was necessary to watch live TV.

Why does one need a PC sitting next to the TV to watch TV? My TV has a tuner.