It wouldn't be so much overkill if they dropped the perks to every other level, or every 3 or 4 levels, as in the original. The perks are WAY too plentiful in F3.

How is being poor supposed to be an excuse? I have nothing but sympathy for the working poor, but this has been coming for a long time, and people have known about it; you can't turn on a TV now without being blasted with the "transition" messages. If TV is that important to your friend, he should have been squirreling away his nickels and dimes for the last couple of years. If he starts right now, he only needs to save a dollar a day and he can buy a converter the day the transition occurs. If he can't do that, then he really has no business watching TV anyway, because it obviously isn't that important to him. And if you want to make the claim that he is so poor that he can't save a dollar a day, then remember that he could have been saving up for much longer than that. It's not like he didn't know.

What good would another delay do anyone? In another year, people will still be making the same argument and the same excuses. The same will happen a year after that, and a year after that, ad nauseum.

"Marrying" and "having offspring" are not necessarily the same thing.