Every time I see one of these topics the overwhelming opinion, irrespective of the proposed fix to the problem, is that the problem is not texting, but distraction. I think most sane people are willing to agree that "Texting while driving" is not inherently a problem, but "Driving while distracted", be it by your phone, the person next to you, or the 20 ounces of vodka running through you, is in fact a problem.

While on one level it would be nice to actually solve the problem, and this is where we get into the applications of speech-to-text, remote controlled steering wheels, and other awesome nerdy crap we love to talk about, I think on some level you'll never be able to fix this with law.

It seems to me that whenever you're defining a standard - be it a law, a work procedure, a use case, whatever, you need discrete, finite data. You need something that says "If X, then Y". That's why its so easy to create, pass, and most importantly enforce a law that says "You can't text while driving". This is easy to enforce. It's another thing entirely to say "Driving while distracted is now illegal". Great. What the hell does this mean?

As much as I think it's ridiculous, and in this case, potentially harmful - to have a law preventing a symptom of the problem rather than the core issue, I think this is one of those cases where you can't regulate something, or restrict it, because the core issue isn't really enforceable by law.

Get these people into an Information Technology role immediately.

It sort of compromises everything - but that doesn't mean it's a bad form of authentication, does it?

Once your machine, token, credentials, anything have been physically compromised, it's generally accepted that you're hosed (at least for that one factor).

Seems like a step in the right direction.

From TFA:

"To be sure, there's wiggle room in these estimates, which comScore bases on a combination of reports from a panel of two million users around the world and data from websites' servers. But the time spent posting photos, updating status messages and scrolling through news from friends has at least grown to rival just about everything else people do online."

Two million sure sounds like a lot, but when you take into account the apparently 400 million users facebook has (And god knows how many people have a google account), that's statistically pretty irrelevant (0.5% of facebook users).

It's probably "close enough", but there's no mention of how their statistics are gathered, whether or not idle time matters, and what they're using for their methodology.

Maybe I'm just too lazy and didn't go to the comScore parents to find all of this out.

Their theories are, in order:

#1: "Everyone has too much email!"
#2: "Rules are too complicated to use!"
#3: "Priority inbox is better because they're just really rules, but you have no control over them!"

I appreciate their effort, but this honestly just seems like another way for Google to engage in self appreciation and try to write users rules for them better than the users can. Can they do it? With enough data and time, probably. But in the long run, its not very useful for any user with a hint of intelligence, and like other people are already stating - the inner workings will be dissected enough to where people will filter messages to get a higher rank.

You don't need to see my controller. We can go about our business.

So we've gone from a two in 90,000 chance of being whacked upside the head 27 years from now to a one in two hundred-fifty thousand chance.

Great

What is the real use in this? When, within reasonable (I'm not a scientist, but lets use an 85% confidence interval) levels of knowing, would we be able to determine that in fact, yes, this thing is or is not going to hit us? It's certainly not now, 27 years prior. Is it a year prior? six months? A month? A day? And, once we reach that date, do we have the resources/funding to have a defense system or contingency plan set up in time? Knowing chances and all is great, but we're not going to build a bruce willis-mobile 27 years in the future.

The article states that they aren't being given the funding to further fund research centers for adequate testing. Politics aside - is there any funding (and more importantly, scientific viability) for preventative action for any of this, or are we just providing confidence intervals of our ultimate doom?

I'm no law expert, maybe someone here is. How exactly does this work when dealing with things like:

• Non-US citizen blogging on a US owned server
• Non-US citizen blogging within the USA's physical geographical borders
• US citizen blogging outside of borders (IE: Canada)
• US Citizen blogging outside of borders on a machine that resides on a server outside the US

Basically, what are the virtual and physical borders (if any) of this law? Is this going to end up being something else that just gets taken offshore, like all the internet gambling sites today seem to be doing?