Do I just go down to the local police station and ask them to give up all their cool body armor and to please refrain from raiding unarmed civilians in full gear with automatic weapons drawn? Do I write my congress critter and ask them to quit sending millions of dollars to local police forces (and then be called out by their colleagues for "not being tough on terrorism")? Not to be cynical - I seriously would like some recommendations for a course of action for the average man.

But as Corporate America now rules Congress, the chance of regulations in favor of the consumer is close to zero.

This is sort of the idea behind the Paranoid Linux distro that Cory Doctorow envisioned in his young adult novel Little Brother. Anybody working on it?

Telling people they can opt out by turning off their phones is not an option, and the only way to fight it is to opt out of shopping there. When will these tiny-minded corporations realize that we know our data has value, and you can't take it at will to use any way you see fit?

Where do you find a thousand years of modifications? It's my understanding that modern translations have been found to be remarkably similar to the Dead Sea Scroll texts and other ancient copies (meaning very little difference between texts that have been passed down for centuries and ancient texts recently discovered).

Are you sure you got the title right, there? The title you cite is Harlan Ellison (unless this is some weird Slashdot thing where you're trying to skew the Google results for an Ellison search with those for a Thoreau search, in which case, carry on).

Well, I guess that solves that.

I had a similar experience at work (IT company). I was complaining about how nobody seemed to care about learning new technology, and one of my staff said "most people are not like you. They want to go home at 4:30, plop on the couch, and not worry about this stuff." It struck me that's the difference between a real professional and everyone else --- a professional does want to keep up with technology, does want to learn better ways of doing things, does want to succeed. Many people in white-collar positions (yes, even in the tech industry) have no other desire than to collect a paycheck while doing the least amount of work they can get away with. Maybe that's also the difference between tech-geeks and say, the marketing department.

If you have a Mac, I hear Notebook works well for all your requirements: http://www.circusponies.com/