1) "Gubmint Bad", or
2) General ignorance, or
3) Billions of lobbying dollars from the manufacturers ensuring that the cost of each unit doesn't go up $1, or
4) ...
5) PROFIT

It is odd that PC manufacturers are willing to ruin their brands just to earn a few extra bucks.

Not really. Consider the following:

Over-promoted walking haircut (with "Executive" in his/her title somewhere) hears something about this "Superfish thingy". They get it in their hard-wired little business-school brains that "duuh Superfish = money = good", he/she grills someone with actual knowledge about it and selectively listens to how they can make money with it, and how it can be installed on every laptop they ship. (They deliberately ignore the person with actual knowledge when they try to tell the pointy-haired little twit how it's 'illegal' and 'unethical' and 'bad faith' etc etc etc.) So, exec orders people who do actual work to incorporate Superfish into the builds, despite how bad an idea it is. The builds start shipping, Superfish starts paying out, revenues are up, everyone's happy (except for the people doing actual work who know it's bullshit.) Quarterly profits go up, exec gets bonus, builds third summer house. Sooner or later someone notices what they're doing (see TFA) and calls them on it. Exec realizes this is bad, they're going to get held accountable for something, and as we all know that's the worst thing that can ever happen to some over-promoted suit. Exec pulls eject handle, lands softly with a golden parachute. Everyone left gets to clean up the mess and attempt to rehabilitate the brand. But it's ok, the executive got a bonus.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Nobody learned anything from the Sony rootkit thing, other than "Hey, we can make money doing this, and all we have to do is violate the trust of our customers! Fuck them, how did our money get in their pockets anyway?"

You got the warranty separate from what the manufacturer offers? Who did you get it through? I've also done that (5 years) but I hear that Squaretrade is pretty squirrely when you actually want them to pay a claim. What I've seen is that rather than fix your TV, they'd rather give you your money back for the warranty itself. Which makes sense from a business point of view; if your TV craps out in a way that is covered, they are on the hook to repair or replace it, which is far more expensive than just giving you your money back for the warranty.

Makes sense. But instead of a dongle gadget, I'm more likely to use the apps on my Xbox for streaming. That also has the advantage that I already own the 360 :)

I agree in principle, but find me a 40-50 inch 4k TV that ISN'T a smart TV. Not much of a choice.

Unfortunately, you'd have to charge more for your product than the competition to make up for the lost revenue from advertising and strategic alliances. I'd pay it, but the great unwashed want cheap, not good.

No kidding. Ever seen Minority Report? The stuff that assaulted the characters from all sides when walking through a public space? That's what I remember from that movie, not the interface or the story.

Thanks for the info. Looks like I have some research to do.

I agree about the extended warranty. I buy 5 year plans on my TVs, and let me tell you, it bailed me the fuck out on my Sony when the picture engine went bad in my front projection TV. They finally just gave me a new TV because the old one would be more expensive to fix.

Who sells that? What kind of warranty?

I don't use the smart features on the one I have, either. It's not just about being subjected to these ads myself, though. It's about using the only vote we really have: we can vote with our dollars. Samsung (and any other huge multinational) does not give a single fuck about pissing off its customers; they know that their customers will rarely be motivated enough to get off the couch and do anything about it. But, if their sales suffer as a result of this move, then they are more likely to not try to pull something like that again.

All that means, though, is that they go back to the drawing board and try to find another way to make money that isn't obnoxious enough to hurt sales, but is obnoxious enough to make them money. Ain't capitalism great!

That also crossed my mind. However, everyone there would have to be massively, forget-to-breathe, pants-on-head stupid to think that nobody would notice this. There is a possibility that this is the case; to me, EVERYONE's that stupid until I know otherwise..

Samsung is a big enough company to be able to ignore annoying things like "the law". And there's a long and storied history of companies pissing their customers off in the name of profits.

If that's the case (and keeping in mind that you shouldn't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence) then that's some pretty shitty QA that let that out the door. If it was just there for focus group testing, why the hell did that code make it into the release?

I suppose it's possible that Samsung outsourced the programming on this and is now reaping the benefits (shit code, bad maintainability, broken functionality, poor communication) of doing so. Saved on the up-front costs, I'm sure, but this is going to hurt their revenues more than they saved. Typical short-sighted corporate bullshit.

IIRC Vizio is Best Buy's house brand. If I can't buy it from Crutchfield, I don't want it.

What they mean by that is that they didn't intend for people to object to the ads or for their poor behavior to be called out.

It's really too bad, I have an older Samsung HDTV and it's really great. I was considering buying another Samsung when the time came to replace it. Now what am I going to buy? Sony? Vizio?