>One lesser technological promise which I doubted would be true was printed on the packaging of my TV - ad blocking. I still don't know how was that supposed to work, it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the manual, nor is there anything in the setup. Instead, I got one of the uversal remotes - picked the one with the biggest MUTE button I could find.

When TiVo first came out, they had an "Ad skip" button or some kind of name. When you were playing back a recording, it would automatically skip over the advertisements for you. "Big Brother" made them do away with that feature.