Even all but the most insane Libertarians understand that some regulation is necessary to prevent bad outcomes. I once heard a speech by Ron Paul, of all people, defend environmental regulations on the grounds that one doesn't have the right to pollute their neighbor's air or water.

Network neutrality is that sort of regulation.

There do exist other sort of "gotcha" regulations like HIPAA that are so detailed as to be nothing more than a paperwork minefield designed to crank the costs of compliance through the roof for smaller players, while adding maybe the paperclip budget to the cost of the bigger ones, while generally serving little to no real-world purpose.

Even today, China's manufacturing is still mostly in the low-value parts of the market. Assembling circuit boards or making PC cases isn't quite like our still vast superiority in real heavy industry. The problem is that our productivity is off the charts via automation instead of labor - we just don't need a big enough labor force in manufacturing to support a large middle class based on those industries.

AMD has historically made huge gains in a stair-step fashion where they are flat or declining for a long period, then leapfrog way ahead of Intel, who then catch up and pass them in a more linear fashion.

I have done extensive work with Access, but almost never used it as the actual storage. Instead, the back-end was on a MySQL, MSSQL, or Postgres server and Access just used as a quick-development environment in the same manner as VB6 would have been.

Nowadays, I usually use MSSQL or Postgres as the backend, and build the front-end in VB.NET or C#. Once your tables are designed, just add a function that has the appropriate bunch of CREATE TABLE statements and initial INSERTs to set up a default schema, and the deployment is pretty easy.

Telling a client how to reach the backend only requires a server name (or IP), database username, database password, and database name. These are variables that are easily set in a simple "setup form" then stored in the registry. Heck, if you want to get fancy, just encode that into a structure and write it to a binary file that they can then load after setup.

You can also roll out an MS Access solution that uses Access Runtime. That doesn't require an MS Office license.

Pushing the button with the fob in the dash and foot off the brake will turn on ignition and not crank the engine. Pressing it a second time will put the car in ACC mode. Pushing it with a foot on the brake starts the engine. At least that is how BMW does it.

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.