This is part of the reason that "strong" passwords are actually as weak or weaker than "weak" ones. If you have to aggregate them into a "manager", something similar, or write it down on a post-it/piece of other paper it's NOT "strong" in the slightest.

We'd be better off having passphrases that would be difficult to brute-force, but easy to remember for humans.

They'll have less resources to assign to the 90% of the time they have given to domestic disputes and even less to the chuckleheads who are cutting you off, talking on their phones, while drunk and snorting coke, while driving.

Every new law should be bound to carry funding to enforce it.

Here is tip, comrade, everyone is a terrorist, but me!

Hate to tell you, but mankind has been doing that for at least as long as horticulture and trading has been around, probably 15,000 years at the very least.

Did you even check, or did you assume? What sort of Americans are you dealing with when they're 'shocked' by 100 km to the next gas station? That's only 60 miles. I've seen signs that say 125 miles to the next, or 200 km. Must be East-coasters who think the mid-west is 'flyover country'.

Let's check your work: You guys average 15530 km per year
Americans average 12k-15k miles per year, this site says 13,476 miles. Which works out to 21,696 km/year. Or 40% more than Aussies, which I'd qualify as 'heck of a lot more'.

Let's verify a bit: Population of Australia: 22.7M. KM driven: 232,453M km. KM per man, woman, and child: 10,240 km.
Population of the USA: 313M. Distance driven: 3M million miles., or 3,000 Billion miles. 9,413 miles per year, or 15,154 km per person. 48% more than Australians.

Personality test? Oh, institutional corruption, got it.

You mean the totaled car that was wrapped around a tree? Or do you kick people out of their homes in Australia?
Oh, and we do it in the USA as well. Problem being that, especially for multiple DUI offenders they generally drive such crappy cars that it costs more to have the sheriff confiscate it then they get at auction. Oops...

You really think this? The problem is twofold:
1. The poor people can't pay the fines. It costs somewhere around $22k/year to keep them in jail/prison.
2. The rich people can pay the fines, then carry on more or less like nothing happened.
3. Both parties will often obtain a $500-1000 car to drive that they register under somebody else's name so no breathalyzer equipment is installed.

A first time DUI in the USA can run you over $15k. It's not cheap.

You're going to have to face it: There isn't some 'magic bullet' policy difference between the USA and Australia. It's a lot of little ones, and the difference between .05 and .08 for DUI isn't really one of them.

With the really sleazy lawyers they'll still go to court, especially the rich types, because all they have to do is convince the jury something is in doubt, that he doesn't deserve the conviction, get some piece of evidence like the blood test tossed out on some technicality, etc... Heck, get some sympathetic drink-drivers on the jury. Lots of options.

Agreed.

Indeed. For that matter, the official designation of 'alcohol related' per the NHTSA is 'either a driver or a non-motorist had a measurable or estimated BAC of .01 g/dl or above".

A MUCH better figure would be the one that found that, in 2001, 12.8% of all drivers involved in a fatal accident were legally intoxicated per the laws of their state, though I'll note that the Wikipedia article is unsourced, and my google search is mostly finding other non-reliable sites.

However, this still means that most fatal accidents don't involve alcohol at all, and I've NEVER seen a figure that estimates the number of miles driven by drunk drivers, or whether the times they often drive(late at night) make a difference. Roughly speaking, we need to figure out, on a basis of per mile risk, what the lethal/non-lethal accident rates would be if everybody was sober in order to figure out how dangerous, real-world, drunk driving is.

Personally, I'd almost rather just put the effort towards developing self-driving cars.

Except that isn't the expectation. It's called a speed limit for a reason. You're expected to not exceed it. You can drive as far under it as you want unless a minimum speed limit is posted(such as 40mph on a lot of freeways).

Here in the states we have so many artificially low speed limits that people pay little attention to them, and as a result the cops generally don't bother people unless they're going faster than 5 to 10 over*, or otherwise driving stupidly.

I think I've heard about Victoria. They say the best way to get a bad law changed is to enforce it strictly - then the average people will rise up and force it's change. But in any case I've heard that Victoria has the highest rate of speed compliance, but they've paid in having the highest rate of gridlock and such. Turns out that you need a certain percentage of speeders in order to maintain good traffic flow.

Part of the problem here in the USA is that traffic departments don't follow DOT rules. For example, there's the speed limit rule - the speed limit should be: Take the 90th percentile speed(IE 90% of drivers drive at this speed or less) with NO speed limits, and round up to the nearest 5 mph. IE if the 90th percentile works out to be 53.7 mph, it would be a 55 mph zone. Many areas disregard this, some completely, with the most common being that they round down instead. They shorten the yellow to get more camera fees, etc...

*I'm in an area where they'll start stopping you at 6+ over

Actually, the USA is at 10.4 as of 2011, and 1.1 per 100 million vmt, which works out to 6.8 per billion km.
Your death toll of 5.71 per 100k (2011 data), and 5.8 per billion km.

Results: You're still safer than we are even by distance driven, but we drive a HECK of a lot more per person. In addition, given that the proposal is, high end, expected to save ~8% of alcohol related deaths, which is in turn only 1/3rd of total deaths - that's about a 3% cut in death rate. That would drop us from 10.4 to 10.1 per 100k, and from 6.8 to 6.6 per billion km. Better, but still far short of your own.

For that matter, let's assume we ELIMINATE all alcohol related fatalities. That's 1/3rd of our deaths gone. That would get us down to about 6.9 per 100k people, still above your figure, and 4.5 per billion km, finally below your own. You're 15% safer per km driven, btw.

Conclusion: We have problems, and it's not all attributable to alcohol. Reducing the BAC allowed would help a little, perhaps. But it's edging into territory where treating driving as a privilege, and not a right, and getting marginal people out of the driver's seat would be beneficial. For that matter, getting tougher with driver's ed would help.

1. Offering a blood test doesn't alter the odds they will attempt to contest it in court.
2. Increasing 'fines and suspensions' doesn't cut it. Already you have the problem where we end up tossing convicts in jail because they can't pay their fines, and suspensions often don't do a thing here because the main result is they simply drive on a suspended/revoked license. Or get a waiver for 'work purposes'. Or they lose their job, making it even more unlikely that they'll be able to pay your increased fines.
3. Same problem as #2. They often simply don't have the money, and we already have your 'loser pays' system, more so than MOST countries. You think the lawyer to contest your DUI is free? Paid for by the defendant. Remember plea bargains? The USA is king of those. 90% of people end up pleading out for reduced sentences. But, raise the fines - oops, they're MORE likely to fight, because, well, they're bankrupt anyway if they plead! If you arrange such a generous plea bargain, then the legal hawks sit there and say you're suppressing justice because you're making it cheaper to simply plead guilty.

That's fine. In my state you get one for the first DUI, no matter the range. Were you aware that many US States have required them for decades, even for the first? From what I'm seeing, in all the states I've checked you're getting it period for the 2nd, no 'high range' required.

I'm not saying that we don't have problems. What I'm saying is that reducing the BAC level isn't going to help much, which I backed up with some math and 3 citations. We need to do more to stop the HIGH BAC drivers - when they're driving at .24 and up, triple the current legal limit, making it so they're 5X the legal limit isn't going to change much.

Heck, given that the human psyche is often more affected by the certainty of punishment over the severity of it, a hand slap and $50 fine would probably be sufficient to stop 99% of drunk drivers if they were caught EVERY TIME. As is we probably catch them well under 1% of the time, all too often only because they got into a serious accident.

Do you have some reference showing Australia's rates before and after passing the .05 standard? Were they at .08 before that? Where they ever comparable to the USA? Did they do something in parallel, such as the AC's proposed designated driver programs? Which exist in the USA as well. Heck, the USA might be king of various 'ride home' programs.
I've gotten free non-alcoholic drinks all night as a DD
I've ridden buses and taxis home... BTW: I think a very good bit of advice to avoid getting a DUI is to simply NOT DRIVE to where you are going to be drinking. In order to get a DUI in that case you'd have to get a ride home THEN get in your vehicle.
I've heard of a bar that owns a few mini-motorcycles that fit into the trunks of cars. For a small fee an employee will drive you home in your own vehicle, then take the mini-bike back to work.

One crazy proposal I thought of was to forbid bars from having customer parking. ;)

1. Go with a neighbor/relative - fewer vehicles on the road during an evacuation is beneficial anyways
2. If you have 2 vehicles, which many families will have for the foreseeable future, you will probably have 1 gas and 1 EV. You take the gas one.
3. Toss a generator into the trunk or attach a trailer that has a generator and the appropriate hookups, basically converting your hybrid into an EV
4. Catch a bus.

As for access to the super-charger points, logically as more Tesla vehicles get on the road they'll install more charge points. You should be fine unless you're trying to travel to some event where the road has vastly more traffic on it than normal. Ideally I see lots of charge points at restaurants. They always have enough parking, at least unless the restaurant is full itself. Charge points might be expensive now, but they have the potential to be a lot cheaper and at least they don't present a serious chemical/fire hazard.

And yeah, to each his own.

Because of Tesla's stated business plan? Start in the ultra-high end sports car market, move down to the luxury car market, using the larger profit margins that allows to eventually move down into the economy car market?

They see Tesla being competition eventually, and they want to protect their business model - which would be to force Tesla to hire them, at least some of them, to act as dealers, allowing them to continue their business as usual.

There's a number of different ways to 'toughen' drunk driving laws, and lowering the BAC level is only one of them.

1. Lower the BAC level - problem: Even .08 is low enough that a cop driving behind you can't tell whether you're inebriated or just tired, on allergy medication, old, new to driving or just a bad driver.
2. Impose confinement: Something like 30 days in jail for the first offense. Problem: High impact; you're normally putting an employed person in jail, which means they might lose their job, at which point you have to provide for the care of them and their family(or they're not paying taxes).
3. Impose fines: Already done; to the point that poor people can't afford them yet the really rich often don't care
4. Force them to have an interlock device: The difficulty in fooling the thing is limited to the expense of simply evading it by getting a different vehicle.
5. Expand the definition of 'DUI' - I've heard of people busted for DUI while sleeping in the backseat of their car in the bar parking lot. Their own driveway I can sort of understand, and parked on the side of the road nowhere near where alcohol is served is downright suspicious, but if the engine isn't hot... I've also heard of people getting DUIs on riding lawnmowers, though most of those are justified in my opinion. Once you get on a motorway with your John Deere you're subject to the rules of the road... The funniest, I think, are the ones where somebody got a DUI while riding a horse or bicycle.

Especially for #5, you start to have to question whether the law in question is actually 'for the common good'. If the law is intended to protect the drunk against his own actions, what sense does it make to force him to suffer more serious losses than he realistically would even in an accident?

Eliminating drunk driving is a complex affair, and I think we need to do more to reduce the heavy drinkers from driving drunk - not expand the definition again.

I'm not a professional researcher, but I question their results. I read a different article which said that .05 BAC levels would save 200-300 lives a year.
Some figures:
Annual traffic deaths: ~33k
Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total
Number of lives estimated to be saved: 500-800 per year, 5-8% of current alcohol deaths.
Extra risk: .05 is 38% over sober .08 169%

Already there's all sorts of activities that will raise the risk of you having an accident more than 38%. The vast majority of the fatal DUI accidents I've read about are for people with BACs north of .24, or triple the current limit.

Meanwhile, I predict that prosecuting people for .05 DUIs is going to be expensive. Most will try to fight it; you're getting into the range where a breath test might not be accurate enough. I question whether the the cost to society for enforcing the rule might not exceed the cost of implementing it.

Realistically you'd be better off somehow stopping the 'should be dead with a BAC that high' people from driving. A bit tough given how creative some of them get - permanently 'borrowing' a friend or relative's vehicle, secretly buying a used car without the mandated interlock, etc...