have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

I was here before it was Slashdot...

What are you talking about? You might not have like the ads, but we never lied about anything. Our service was super clear about how it worked. And for those who didn't like the redirection, it has always been possible to create an account and disable that part of the service.

We have been building a data privacy and data usage policy document that we plan to release soon.

One of the many, many reasons to turn off ads is that we had to share some potentially personally identifiable information with ad partners (indirectly when making ad requests, they would just see it in the ad request), so by turning off ads, our privacy / data policy will be a lot more clear and will not need to have weird "certain third parties for certain services" kind of language to address the advertising business.

We're waiting to turn off ads, we'll get the document cleaned up, and we'll publish it.

-David

Nope. Never.

We wouldn't make such a case for turning off ads if this was our business model going forward. You could visit our site and see how we make money. We sell security services. We never could have done it without first being a consumer service, but we're not selling your data. Come on.

-David

Nope. Never. We've never sold our data. We've never even used it for marketing purposes internally.

We've only ever made money from one of three things: Ads, selling individuals an ad-free version, and enterprise security services.

Today, most all of our revenue, and all of our growth, comes from selling enterprise security. If you work in IT, it's worth checking out to improve your security posture. There's a lot more to it than you might guess.

-David

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

If Boeing was interested in getting people into space, more than a handful of them would be there. The fact is that it has taken a company that was outside of the system, with a tiny fraction of Boeing's funding, to make more progress than Boeing has.

And of course it's in the U.S. interest to make sure the Russians have an active and completely up-to-date source of rocket engines for their nuclear missles.

In this vein, I wonder what it is we are paying the Chinese to do?

You're of course correct. (As are the many other replies that amount to: "Just don't use the phone while driving, dummy!")

However, it's worth keeping in mind how the human mind works; in particular its limitations. Our minds and behaviours are inherently flawed. Part of being a smart and responsible person is not just modulating your behaviour, but also designing your life so as to elicit the right kinds of outcomes. A simple example is putting an item that you want to bring with you tomorrow by the door. You could "Just remember to grab it when you leave tomorrow morning!", but you're accounting for your own fallible memory by putting it by the door while you're thinking of it. Another example would be a person who puts a tempting snack on an inaccessible shelf: they buy the snack because they want to have a treat sometimes, but they purposefully make it slightly inconvenient for themselves to eat the snack, so that they don't just reflexively eat it all the time. It's part of a strategy to invoke more rational thinking, rather than just let your immediate impulses win.

There are many more examples of such behaviour. Obviously it's "better" to simply have infinite willpower and rationality; but for people who do not (and if we're being honest, this describes all of us; though our individual temptations and biases are different), it can be useful to design your life to account for your fallibility.

So, in principle a cellphone app that disables the phone while driving can be useful. It's for people who recognize that it's a really bad idea to use your phone while driving, and yet are so addicted to their phone that they cannot avoid answering it when it rings. (Or are so addicted to status updates that they will absentmindedly check when bored, even if they are driving!) These people may also not have the discipline (or memory) to (for instance) always put the phone in the trunk before getting behind the wheel. For those people, such an app can be useful.

Having said all that, I think it's unrealistic to expect an app to properly differentiate between the situations where you would want the phone disabled (while driving) and those where you don't (parked, passenger in a car, etc.). So I think the question-poster should instead investigate other ways to modulate their own behaviour (e.g. put a holder in the car, in a very visible location, that says "PHONE BATTERY GOES HERE", and always pull out the battery before turning on the car).

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?

I have to say I'm even less confident in the plan to couple it to DNSSEC.