It's my favorite holiday. All the plebs stay home and the admins get to all make the Big Changeover simultaneously. Big sales in survival gear, canned food, and backup drives.

These days to save a book you have to burn it (to another medium).

If you'd spent 4200 years in a sealed pot... you'd be soup, too!

I see a number of replies to OP akin to "oh great, now there will be a new legal group trying to stop me from printing sporks."

What do you think has been happening for the last decade? There's no money to be made in fighting music pirates. Legal groups are trying to stitch up the rights to digital media and digital rights, extending copyrights and patents, and generally trying to make sure that when 3d printers come they'll have all the associated actions, rights, and empowerment neatly sewn up. That is worth a hell of a lot more than some band's playlist.

It's like the writing's on the wall and we're standing around laughing at their caligraphy.

Worse than crotchety.
You're chastising someone for using every method at their disposal to learn what they need to know, while telling them they need to go figure it out for themselves.
Your answer is akin to saying "I have enough time to answer you and yet I don't want to help you."
Do you advocate building your own car instead of taking public transit?

Besides! All those spoon-fed tools will need your $250/hr consultation expertise when things go wonky, right? More experts means less money in your pocket. You're poopooing a great opportunity, here.

Oh, you miss the opportunity. Retro fitting all cars with a jammer AND OnStar with government mandated subscriptions. They'll go where your radio used to be and they'll still provide digital satellite radio, end-to-end user restric^H^H^H^H^H^Hdata integrity checking, two-way GSP, and a nice distracting touchscreen.

I call bullshit on the greatness of hitchcock with modern tech. He did what he had to do because he had a vision. Given today's technology he'd say "can we do this?" and the crew would say "sure, we can do it in post."

The Old Ones weren't great because they were especially gifted. They were great because they were first. Several people invented lightbulbs at the same time but only one got credit. The environment was right for someone to grab the brass ring and he did.

What the industry has done for many years is buy a promising young studio and grind it into a fine paste. OP is proposing they create an environment in which innovation can flourish and design is paramount. Baby Apples and baby Valves. That environment is, by definition(?), a *rich* environment - that is to say free of the distraction of the bottom line. On the one hand they're killing the golden goose they just stumbled across. On the other they run a farm to raise geese and hope one of them starts laying golden eggs, too.

And you thought it was about the music.

I imagine TPB got a think tank together, figured out this was coming, and started planning what to do about it. Stitching up the rights now ensures no debate in the future because it will be "just the way things are".

This sounds like a great plan. Everybody knows how successful HAM radio and public television have been.

hack the systems on election day.
Get scoobey doo elected.
go to jail.
Improve the state of affairs?

Dude, it's a joke. You need to relax. Maybe try some yoga?

I'm a witch doctor. (Doctor of witching)

Honest truth: the Medical Industry wants to make a society of dependant sheep. Sheep that go for their regular checkups (ca-ching) and get treatments (ca-ching)

Eat well, exercise and get regular soul cleansings and shamanic treatments to keep your chakras open. You'll never get heart disease or cancer.

Really? Imagine spending a few million years on life support, utterly mad, unable to escape, the last of your kind. You're the old person with no right to vote.

Let the robots to the menial work. Leave the humans to do the creative part.

I'm not worried about the robots trying to kill us all. I'm worried they'll never let us die.