The cable box is the most primitive worthless piece of technology in my apartment.
This article about Al Jazeera America reminded me of how horrible the cable monopoly is for consumers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/business/media/al-jazeera-network-in-turmoil-is-now-the-news.html
I used to watch AJA, and liked it. The problem is, it gets assigned some random channel number far away from the other news channels, and the "favorites" function on my Time Warner Box is so bad as to be useless. So over time, out of laziness, I would just go to MSNBC instead, because I got sick of forgetting the channel number for AJA and having to look it up.
This is not the only problem with the box. Its response time to remote buttons is often very slow (so even if you know the channel number, it's even a pain to key it in). It's not customizable and reconfigurable at all. And it hasn't improved much if at all in 5 plus years.
All it would take would be the government requiring that the company that runs the cable line into your home not be the same as the company that gives you the cable box. There would be tons of alternatives, there would even be some open-source Linux cable boxes. And anyone who built a cable box as bad as Time Warner's would be out of business tomorrow.
OK, rant done.
= new reply since forum marked as read
But what does she know about human interfaces. She's been brought up on some of the worst in history. I'm retired from the Tech Business and was rather good at computer interface, although most systems that I had to work on were really bad. Design is not taught to computer programmer/analysts. In any case your complaints are right on target! You can rant for me any time you want. 
