Well..... not entirely fabrications. And I believe it was more a case of bad information than deliberate lies, but if you hate Bush, than nothing else will suffice to say.
While there was no active WMD program after all, there *had* been one, as we all knew, and the NY Times recently expounded on just how much of those chemical bits were lying all over Iraq; although ironically, they were safer in the hands of Saddam Hussein than ISIS.

I think you meant, "Somewhere in the world, there is a **script-kiddie** crying into his keyboard right now, because MS finally found the hole he's been exploiting for the last 10 years."

Agreed. I wasn't very interested in a "Smart" TV, my Sony BluRay player already does all that. But, I was set on a Samsung UHD 50", and they don't make a dumb TV that's UHD that I've seen. Not locally in the stores at any rate. When I got it home, I enabled Internet on it anyway, I was curious to see just what else it might offer. I was chagrined to learn of the microphone/data mining issue though.
It shouldn't be difficult to just turn off the networking, unless the TV refuses to work without it or something insidious, that would be serious problem. I'll test mine tonight.

Well, that sorta works for Douglas Adams.

Okay, tested it, it's only about 4 seconds to fire up. I can most definitely live with that.

Umm.. that's not what black humor is. Black humor isn't about black people; it's about satirizing the morbid: suffering, pain, death, disease, violence, et al. a sort of self-deprecating look at humanity and our vulnerabilities.

Sound like a lead-in to Minority Report.

The herd/fad/trend mindset. You've got the huge crowds that follow Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, etc.. Look at the yo-yo'ing that studies on coffee/caffeine do. I stopped listening to all these random flip flopping studies. Just common sense and moderation are pretty good guides to healthy living, too much of anything is bound to be bad.

Ah. Thanks. Well, considering we had a 32" CRT that my wife had on 16/7 before (goes on first thing in the morning, off last thing at night) this is probably still a power savings.
I'll try disabling it, I'm curious now to see how long it takes.

Maybe they've made some recent improvements, but I've never seen one I liked. Grainy or blocky picture. *shrug* What counts is if you're happy with it.

About .5 seconds or less. Seriously. I was pleasantly surprised. Instant On is an option in the settings that can be enabled/disabled, though I've not done any research into why anyone would want that disabled.

:-) I'm not using a wired connection currently, just wireless.. so I use the router's MAC filter, I don't broadcast my SSID, and it's of course encrypted. It's just as effective. None of my neighbors are stupid enough to run open wireless APs, otherwise I'd be concerned it might just join their network. Hmm. Now I have to see if I can just shut the wireless off completely, just in case.

Sadly, anymore,regarding "smart" vs regular, your choices get much narrower if you want a larger set, especially one that is 4K UltraHD. Everything is going "SmartTV". Eventually you'll have no choice. I just finally bought a new only TV 3 weeks ago, after using a CRT all these years (my wife is a freakin' luddite): a Samsung 50" UHD model. Just my luck.
Believe me, I was not hyped on the "smart" aspect (my BluRay player can already do all that anyway), but I was set on getting a Samsung, as I'm not really happy with the pictures I've seen from Vizios, and Sony was more expensive. A friend told me his LG did not last long, and the Samsung was on sale for the Superbowl. Their picture quality is really good, so I nabbed it. It acts like a normal TV, and powers on instantly, at least.
On the plus side, I don't use the voice control feature, in fact it can be shut it off in the system menu, which I had already done, but of course I don't know if that actually shuts the mic off entirely or just disables the commands feature.
In any case, it's easy enough for me to simply disconnect the TV from the Internet (I use a MAC filter), and just use my BluRay player for streaming.

Sony and Sharp are like day and night. Sony rules the video market for best picture quality, but I think Sharp is garbage, as is Hitachi (for video).

Or UltraEdit, but it's not free.

Who said anything about condemning them? And I enjoy a lot of the raunchy stuff on TV, Family Guy would not have been possible in the '70s or even '80s. '70s television sucked big time.
I merely made the observation that things are not as conservative as they once were. It's not the '50s anymore.