That seems to help some of the afflicted.

..or being decent parents. My kid is very respectful of others, almost to a fault.

Personally I like to throw myself down to the sidewalk and feign a grand mal seizure, that manages to get their attention usually.

But seriously, when I'm on the correct side of the walkway, observing proper etiquette and leaving others room, and some rude asshat feels that the rest of the world revolves around him (or her), and decides that I'm moving out of their way because, I dunno, they're a more important human being, we may have an issue, because that kind of rudeness pisses me off. I think the truth is, a fair number of these people are in fact aware of you walking their way, via peripheral vision, but they choose to ignore you, and be a jerk. And now that we see people behaving this way without their phones, I think it reinforces that notion.
If a person is genuinely unaware and walks into you, they're more likely to apologize sincerely, and I can forgive that (though it's still annoying). It's the asshats that cop an attitude of self-entitlement that really irritate me. That's not how a civilized society should operate.

Obviously you never even actually watched Fox (which really had nothing to do with this conversation) because they've talked about Putin and the Ukraine situation quite a bit, actually. 10 years ago, everything was Bush's fault, now it's Obama's fault. Seems fair.

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.