Two of the superficial things that I REALLY look out for... Handicap license plates and the old people that generally accompany them... and cell phones, whether texting or at the ear. I can't explain why... but my passenger notices it too... If someone is weaving back and forth in their lane, tail-gating, changing lanes without a turn signal, stopping rapidly, turning suddenly, driving too slowly, generally driving inappropriately for the conditions, or generally not giving other drivers notice of their upcoming actions... a cell phone being used is a REALLY good bet. On a bike, all of your inputs have to be dedicated to not getting squished, so you notice these things a lot more when your life really depends on it. In my truck, I personally turn into a moron when I pick up the phone to say "Can't talk, driving." Even holding the phone while it's on speaker is a distraction. I can't say why. Using bluetooth in the truck CAN be distracting depending on the discussion, but I don't notice it so much. Having a conversation on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth is definitely not something I do around town / on the twisties. This is enough evidence to tell me that I personally am not able to drive/ride as well when I'm on a phone, or even talking on Bluetooth. And I've seen enough to convince myself that people physically holding phones turn into total morons when driving. Or perhaps that most moron drivers just like to talk on the phone. Sure, some people think their cell phones don't impact their driving, but 95% of drivers think they're above-average drivers too. Hang up and drive. Or get a blue-tooth headset. Or a blue-tooth stereo. Whatever. That might still leave you 25% distracted, but it's way better than the simplified version of driving that cell phone users end up when holding it up to their face. "Follow car in front... follow car in front... follow car in front..."

Even more awesome.

And this is the best thing I've ever seen on it. I wish I could put this in the Slashdot survey as an example of the kind of stuff I come to Slashdot for. No, it's not breaking new ground, but this guy and his friends did a nerd thing just for the hell of it. And that's what we do. He planned it well, it executed well, and the way it was shared with us was awesome. That said... Why did the Go-Pro shield melt on the way up? Was it the heat conducted through the tube from the burning engines or something?

It's probably nothing... probably... but... well, no... we're well within normal bounds again. Continuing sequence.

I'm a fan of the Tea Party (I won't go so far as to call myself a member, since it's kind of like Anonymous in that regard... It is what you want it to be) and I've done more free work at my current job than I care to think about. I've also volunteered quite a bit of my time to causes slightly more important than my job. I have a feeling that if I thought my job was keeping planes from falling out of the sky, I'd probably keep doing it through a "blip" in my paycheck. Also, if I thought I would be potentially fired on the resumption of my pay. Would you really be comfortable walking away from your job just because the pay stopped temporarily? Don't pretend that wouldn't be held against you...

If he's examining the grey matter of easily distracted people, I assume he's doing this post-mortem... and it would make sense that these easily distracted people were then motorcycle riders who should have perhaps taken the bus.

Which will be recovered in the class action suit.

How did they manage to turn on their iPhone and get a decent enough signal for this testing? I'm sure it helps that it was probably sitting on a table and not being held^d^d^d^dattenuated by a human hand, but still.

This is incredibly well thought out. I forgot that since this was a free service, you're not permitted to have any concerns about the integrity of information stored on it. Man I'm an ass. Would love to hear how your tune changes when someone starts sending penis enlargement emails to your grandmother directly from your GMail account.

One of my associates manages the Facebook page of a local baseball team. A while back, they started getting iPhone spam posted to their team's Facebook page. No one could tell why. He was changing passwords, taking away peoples' access, running offline virus scans on their hard drives... Losing his mind with it. Each time one of these messages got posted, they'd lose 1,000 fans due to the spam. That's a big deal for companies that use Facebook. Turns out, the issue was due to the "mobile updates" feature. According to him, there's a random email address that you send updates to, and that gets posted to your page. This is not something you can disable, you can only request that the address be changed. The result is that you can basically spam a whole ton of random email addresses in this format and get your message posted to a load of random Facebook pages. Facebook has not been helpful in stopping this or disabling this feature for their account. Since then, I have seen this happen to my girlfriend's Facebook page as well as her friends', etc. This vulnerability is a wide spread problem. It may not be what happened in TFA (I did not read it), but it's out there. And it's insane.

Between Sony's adopted mantra of "Do all evil possible" and Google's of "Do no evil", when they get together that must become "Do nothing".