[photonthug]

What? I'm not arguing that people have the right to ignore important safety-related notices, especially if it's related to public safety.

I'm arguing that we should have the right to reliably separated channels for safety/operational notifications vs commercial content / outright scams. We don't have that though, which effectively erodes the safety you are saying you want to protect. If you're serious about safety, you should agree that using airplane PAs for emergencies instead of ads is a good idea. You should also be onboard with the idea that "service required" should actually mean "service required", not just that it's time to pay what amounts to a subscription fee to the vendor. Once a signal has degraded into pure noise, people get used to ignoring it.

The situation is mostly the same with software updates.. no way for end-users to reliably separate updates that help them vs ones that are only going to hurt them. Serious about security? Don't get too comfortable blasting your users with immaterial "news and updates" trash, or of course they want to ignore you

[vel0city]

Once again, the person I was replying to was talking about the maintenance notification on their car. Not some ad for satellite radio or some other thing, a maintenance notification. It's scheduled to go off at the scheduled maintenance interval. It's not an ad. Any knowledgeable individual can clear it if they did their maintenance by the book. It's a reminder to go look at the book and do the scheduled maintenance or pay someone else to do it for you, whether that be the dealer or any other knowledgeable shop. Having it continue to go off indicates one didn't bother doing the scheduled maintenance on it. They're continuing to operate their car probably in public spaces while ignoring the maintenance.