Then get 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures to go along with removing it.

Except, of course, that some business-critical sites will ONLY work with IE. It sucks, but until the vendors fix them, it is what it is.

6.2 GJ is also the heat content of a whopping 51 US gallons of gasoline. I use that much per month commuting to and from work.

For some people, it's likely that a single payment per month that includes the phone and the service is a nice and convenient way to make the purchase, especially if they are likely to upgrade the phone every couple of years anyway. For others, the a-la-carte purchase of phone and service is more appealing.

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting distracted driving. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws
which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(x) It blocks calling the cops on other drivers who pose a real threat
(x) Telling a passenger from a driver isn't possible
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop distractions for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of phones will not put up with it
( ) Google & Apple will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from drivers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Drivers don't care about crashing
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority
(x) Affecting non-drivers
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Other forms of distraction that are even more dangerous
( ) Unpopularity of weird new laws
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Willingness of users to install inconvencing apps
(x) Bluetooth tethering to the car's audio for handsfree use
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who text while driving
(x) Dishonesty on the part of drivers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Using a power button works better

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Phone use should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to drive however we want
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) I don't want the government tracking my phone
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Actually, it is more like solving a huge jigsaw puzzle, but without an actual picture of how it is supposed to look when it is completed, and with a picture that changes while trying to put it together.

My question is: where the HELL is the Labor Department and the Commerce Department on all this? The small company I work at went through a month of poking, prodding, audits, etc. by the Dept. of Labor looking for overtime violations or miscategorizing employees as salary vs. hourly, and all they found was $2000 over 3 years, and even that was questionable.

Actually, modern vehicles are actually pretty much immune from an EMP attack. Radio front-ends might get fried, but that's really about it. Vehicles are designed to withstand a quite nasty EMF environment from the ignition coil.

Nobody can type "yum update openssl"?

So, we're seeing the fingers of the horn-hairs pointing at each other for a failure that their brown-nosed underlings caused on both sides. Don't blame the geeks, blame the suits.

Keep in mind that all his script actually accessed was the login page itself, that the user agent string can be set to anything on any browser, and the request itself was no different from trying to access "http://the.site.com/p?000001" then "/p?000002"... etc. It didn't actually get to the *protected* data itself, and there isn't really any privacy interest or expectation in an email address itself, either.

Case sensitivity is the one big turn-off to using C-syntax to me. If I am going to deal with it, then I want my damn pointers back, so I'd just as soon work in C++ and have some actual power to go with the inconvenience. Otherwise, for just business-logic and general DB stuff, VB.NET is quite nice to work in.

Uh, a Tesla doesn't have valves to time... just saying.

I am in the gearhead category. I'm just waiting for my little 328i to go out of warranty so I can start playing with some go-faster mods.

This looks like a great sign that Microsoft may finally be recovering from the terrible case of recto-cranial inversion that Ballmer had inflicted on the company for so long. At least we can have some hope of it.