Actually, Nokia gets it right and Android doesn't. Nokia's maps are free, and you can pre-load the whole continent on your cellphone, and use your GPS and naviagation offline (helpful for hiking in most of the US where there's no signal, to say nothing of data connection). Nokia also offers turn-by-turn navigation with text-to-speech in real time, while many cheaper navigation devices don't. In short, you can't even compare Nokia Maps to Google Maps; the latter is much better for looking POI, but for navigation Nokia Maps takes the cake.

Indeed, that would have been the best. Also, how is living in an RV treated with respect to having a residence?

Why, are you saying a person without a permanent address shouldn't vote?

There's a Russian social news website called D3 that I frequent, and they even have a special member there to express precisely this sentiment.

Well, rather, he've been saying it for so long (modulo guillotine/firing squad substition), that people just refer to it as experov's Method when news like this get posted there. It's mildly surprising to see how similar the thinking is on both sides of the pond.

The counter-argument, of course, is that you don't know who will be running the guillotine - and likely, the same people will - and your head will roll first. History has many examples, but, specifically, the New Russia's government apparatus is full of the Soviet cadre - Comrade Putin of KGB being the most visible example.

...since I use it extensively as a GPS/navigation aid, as do many other people. It allows me to focus on the road more when I am driving in unfamiliar places.

For many, it is also a music player (which has been a standard component in cars for decades). I doubt that hitting a "play" button to launch a playlist with thousands of songs *once* provides more distraction than going through a CD wallet every hour.

On the other hand, SMS messaging has been present on pretty much cell phones since the beginning, and you could access the WAP web over GPRS from an old Siemens over a decade ago.

My point is that many people use smartphones in a car in a way that doesn't make their driving any more dangerous, whereas you could use an old phone in a way that does. Don't blame the device, blame the activity (e.g. communicating by text while driving). While the article actually delivers this point, the title of the article (and the post) does not. The title should have been Using social networks while driving is more dangerous than alcohol.

On the other hand, it feels good to be the recitation TA at times like this.

More on the subject, I only use my laptop during lectures as an e-book reader, and sometimes for note-taking (live-TeXing is quite hard); and I have only seen other students use it in the same manner. But then again, that's grad school; no electronics might be an effective measure in some intro undergrad courses.

I don't get why people dismiss netbooks as a thing of the past. I don't see less people using netbooks with each coming year. Sure, the demand is not growing, but that is in no small part because everyone who wanted one already bought it, and they have a long lifespan. Or are you just going to call them "10in laptops" (which is what netbooks have been for the past 3 years), and not "netbooks"? Netbook as an ultra-cheap machine that can run Skype and the browser passed away, but netbook as a low-power, long battery life, compact machine is kicking. No more they are going away than, say, laptops or desktops; it's just that the market for them isn't exploding anymore.

It's oversight. But, ironically, it helps you to make your point, assuming that the ads-on-schoolbuses system has never been activated.