This sucks for serious vintage TV collectors, or even someone with just one cool old TV they like to play with - I'm not in that situation but I really sympathize with you guys. Even with a free converter box, it kinda ruins it to have to stick some cheep plastic box on your set. I suppose you could hide it, though. And would they be usable with some of the older sets out there?
The government will likely be very successful at pulling the plug on standard def. After all, aren't they the ones that got rid of all our English measurements in favor of metric by the year 2000?
Why not allow standard def. amateur broadcasts? Now, that would be cool! Probably wouldn't be too common, but it would be kind of fun to see what pops up out there.