Ah yes, of course.

Speaking of SUVs... my business partner has a nice new land rover with built in gps-nav. It creates insanity to no end that I, as a passenger, cannot operate the gps while the car is in motion. The insanity!

Very often when driving I'll get a tech support call and I'll stop, have my brother take over the driving (we do lots of stuff together) and I'll work on my tethered laptop to work. I have a feeling that very many people across the country, from techies to kids of soccor moms would go batshit insane and probably become violent if all cell use while in a car-in-motion was automatically fined. Either that or it would become basically a tax and cost-of-doing-business. I wonder if it would be tax-deductible.

And what about passengers on the phone?

Here's the issue... shoddy morality grounds or not, people en mass (all around the world too, not just the US) are not respecting copyright law.

Alcohol was illegal in the 20s... Did that stop everyone? It's legal now, isn't it? Legal issue became a moral issue.

Like it or not, as time goes on I think file sharing is going to follow the same path as prohibition. More and more kids are being brought up with getting payware for free. This is especially happening because many of the napster generation now have their own kids who think downloading music/movies/games/etc is perfectly okay (or they "know it's wrong", but do it anyway because morally they are okay with it, like say.... jaywalking).

In general, when millions upon millions of people are breaking the law every day, it seems to me that there's something wrong with the law.

Here's the crazy thing... I run a software company which survives by customers paying for the software of course. Would I be pissed if someone was running a copy they got for free? Yeah... I would be if it was a company using it for-profit. If it was some kid in a basement... eh, that's okay with me.

For me, morally it's a really tricky issue. Reading about grandmas, teenagers, and college students getting sued for hundreds of thousands over downloading an album or two makes me cringe. Reading about companies getting shut down for selling knockoff software or hardware makes me happy. There's a line somewhere where it all makes sense but it's not well defined.

Really? I always thought it was stacks of money that kept planes in the air.
:O

My point was....

You wrote "Drivers exhibiting signs of impaired driving... excessively long cushions to the next car"

You mean cushion as in the gap between vehicles... correct?

If so, I disagree entirely that long gaps between vehicles are a sign of impaired driving, or are a problem at all.

When you wrote "excessively long cusions"

I don't see a problem with 100 yard cusions or 1000 yard cusions. When driving out in utah and the limit is 75 but everyone is doing 80 or 85 there's routinely huge distances between cars because it's ludicrous to be close together.

Well... more like "as much distance as needed to have a save stopping distance at the given speed"

But... are you trolling or do you really think that narrowing the air gap between vehicles traveling at 70+mph is safer?

I don't know about you, but I prefer to keep as much distance as possible between my vehicle and the one in front of it. It's the idiots on cell phones who are *also* riding your bumper that cause nasty accidents.

Tailgating should be heavily enforced.

How do you manage to rack up a million in student loans? How many degrees is this person trying to get? And how many times have they flunked a class?

They will issue a warning or cancel your ezpass if you speed through a booth area.