Banning cell phones has not reduced their use in cars (at least on my drive). It has moved the cell phone from being held to the ear, to being held horizontally in front of the mouth.

Apparently, people have equated speakerphone and hands-free as the same thing.

Thus I would doubt we have seen any appreciable reduction in accidents.

As a driver of a very small / low car, I can say that talking on a cell phone does present a real danger to the rest of us. I have to allow a driver to drift into my lane where I was at least once a week. This is always accompanied by a driver using the speakerphone technique.

Excellent, I'll add:
Norma Stitz (sorry, she is real)
Jenna Talls
Amanda Lynne
Corey O'Graff
Dan Druff,
Duane Pipe

and everyone's favorite - Mike Hunt.

Are there any good freeware / shareware download sites left that are trustworthy?

There was a time when download.com fit this bill. They were early in supporting user ratings so you could tell what was crapware. I guess we get what we pay for though.

That system is already in place. Legislators rely on experts to bring them up to speed on the specific issues at hand.

We call them lobbyists.

System sucks, don't it.

As a farm owner, I have to respectfully disagree. Check out the H2-A program. Though many labor contractors choose to not use this program, when they do, one requirement is to advertise the job to US citizens first. Typically, they can fill about 10% of the applications, and then a small fraction of those will actually complete the job.

Good wages and benefits don't alleviate the work involved with many farm labor jobs (try picking avocados commercially, or hand weeding a field for a day sometime). For better or worse, Americans are not physically capable of doing the work that the Mexican laborers are doing. We used to be able to, but life has gotten too easy for us and we don't have the same fortitude.

That is not meant as a slight to the American people (I am one also), it's just the same as not being able to drink the water in Mexico as a gringo. We don't do it, so we can't do it.

If we change our attitude toward work, there is certainly nothing stopping us from regaining this ability, but you fool yourself if you think you can do it now.

So what you are really saying is the population will be much lower since it will be too warm to support life?

That's great! Now we don't have to worry about that pesky global warming problem. Mother nature already has a plan all worked out. Once our population reduces, we won't have the ability to push as much carbon into the atmosphere, thereby cooling the planet. :-)

Sorry to be pessimistic, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

If you ever coded Conway's game of life, you know there are only two possible outcomes - infinite (the earth will cool to the point of absolute zero at some point or heat to the point of turning to a vapor and dispersing) or it will reach a governed stasis (the earth has some naturally occurring phenomenon that moderates our temperature). Historically, it looks like the latter, since we have had both ice and warm ages which it has recovered from. Therefore, while I wholeheartedly agree we are experiencing a climate change, we are mere children when it comes to understanding the real causes and ultimate effects. We may do our best (worst?) to try to overheat the planet only to find it cools as a result because the cloud cover ultimately shades out the sun (or some other completely unexpected outcome).

Thanks, I was trying to figure out what San Francisco authors had to do with science fiction. Must be a local thing to think of SF as San Francisco.

There are cars that can detect if you farted and adjust the air conditioning accordingly. http://www.automobilesreview.com/auto-news/2011-infiniti-m-forest-air-conditioning-system/19071/ I'd say intelligent cars are here, or at least that's what my wife told me to say.

Great idea! I'll start towing my 25' travel trailer with my BMW Z3. That should be a lot safer!

One small suggestion - don't drive in front of me if I need to emergency stop. If I am towing using a subcompact, I'll have to use you as an intertia reducing device.

This could be a real boon to photography, even for us photo snobs who like to take very small depth of field pictures for the artistic effects. Sensors are getting to the point where they are being restricted by the granularity of the glass, so we seem to have pixels to spare compared to the viewing medium (mostly our PC screens these days) - http://www.dpreview.com/news/1008/10082410canon120mpsensor.asp

It would be great if these two technologies can dovetail in a way that I can get a high resolution (6-8 megapixel equivalent in current terms) picture with the ability to pick both my depth of field and focal point post processing.

Whoosh.

Sorry, you lost me in the middle there. I agree that a lot of businesses use Asterisk, and in my business (call centers), a lot of companies use Asterisk in interesting ways such as bridging between systems.

What was the bit about Avaya though? Avaya does not use Asterisk in any way that I am aware of. They build their own proprietary (yes some are Linux based) systems, not open source / Asterisk based.

If I missed something, I'd love an update.

Hardwood is also a real possibility. I am in the process of testing frames made of baltic birch ply, and have achieved 2.6 pound frames so far with good rigidity. It's not ground breaking, check out http://renovobikes.com/ for real works of art that are very ridable.

As an application designer, I'd like data this too. It would be great to get feedback on long pauses when in the middle of a process. For a real example, most of us suffer from the ribbon bar in Microsoft Office. What used to be a 3 second task is now a minute wasted trying to find the option in the ribbon bar, followed by resolving it in 3 seconds like before.

If they got feedback that the first time it was this slow, but then subsequently it took 2 seconds every time, great - we can chock it up to learning curve. However, I suspect they would find it consistently takes longer to poke around the ribbon bar and would come to the conclusion it sucks and we could go back to the perfectly useful menu system.

Conversely, I watch my 3 year old nephew pick up an iphone, swipe through two pages of icons, pick the one he wants, and start playing the game. No pauses, no hesitation. That seems to me they captured how (at least a 3 year old) intuitively works.

I do focus groups all the time, but this only lets me capture users at a specific point in time. If we could get this level of feedback from a built in usage library (without affecting performance), I think we could all do a better job of UI design that is intuitive.

Don't know what your aesthetic opinion of this car is, but I am seriously thinking about this one - Tesla Model S.

I think I'll wait a year and see if it is as good in production as it is on paper. The roadster is living up to reasonable expectations, so I think its likely this will too.