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From 1st December, it will be illegal to drive in the UK whilst holding your phone (or using a PDA etc. to access the 'net). Handsfree kits are allowed (AFAIK including headsets) as long as the phone is held in a cradle, not your hands. See here for the FAQs.

...any company with cycle-parking has to provide showers, it's UK law...
Do you have any references for this, I work in the uk and would like to cycle to work occasionally but we have no shower facilites. It would be nice to have something concrete to take to personnel.
cheers.

I'll ask about it next week; it's not something I was involved in directly. A google search doesn't reveal anything like that, but talks a lot about the benefits of companies voluntarily providing such facilities.

Examples:

"The first and basic requirement is secure parking, showers and changing facilities. Interest free loans for bicycle purchase and the establishment of Bicycle User Groups (BUGS) can assist in establishing a pro-bike culture within a company, as part of wider efforts to establish a change in attitudes and culture and to promote cycling positively. Showers and changing facilities can be used by employees for other health and fitness activities, and to meet health and safety requirements."link

(b) For employees who may need to change clothes and to shower after arriving at the office because, for example, they cycle or run to work, tax is not chargeable on the free use by employees of changing room and shower facilities at an employer's premises, provided these facilities are generally available to all employees. link, also mentions a 12p per mile standard if you go anywhere other than to and from work.

• Detroit: 50 (1998-2000)
• Los Angeles: 25 (1998-2000)
• USA: 19
• Great Britain: 17
• Germany: 14
• Seattle: 10 (1998-2000)
• Netherlands: 7

So it seems the best idea is to get rid of cars and put lots of bicycles on the road :-) See also here

The phone must be *fully* hands free to be legal. The proposed law (63Kb PDF) is ruling out handheld phones even with hands-free equipment:

The proposed prohibition would apply to the use of all mobile phones or similar devices that are not hands-free. We do not consider that the phone needs to be physically held in a driver's hand in order to commit an offence. This would prohibit the use of hand-held phones used with an earphone and microphone whether using a wire, or wireless, connection. Even though they can be used 'hands-free' to some extent, these still require the user to hold the phone in order to press buttons or to read a message on the phone's screen.

This means at the very least you must have it in a "permanently fixed cradle" and possibly have to switch the "auto answer" feature on - how many people know how to do that, let alone bother to do it every time they get in the car?

That is not to say you will be a safe driver even then - a few years ago a driver reached into their jacket in the passenger seat for a mint and swerved into a lorry which smashed through the central reservation and killed several people. He escaped a prison sentence - but only just.

Gareth

Please check your facts re: the UK. The last I checked (5 minutes ago at UK Highway Code), the UK still uses Miles per Hour to measure highway speed. The odometers in cars are still miles too. I agree that the UK is ahead of Canada (where I live) and way ahead of the US, but non-metric units still unnecessarily abound.

No-one's pointed this out, but the e-envoy site runs Apache on Solaris 8 (it's an E450).

We host a few of the government websites (including e-envoy) and some are Solaris, some Lose2K and some are Linux (e.g. Office of the Deputy Prime Minisiter and Department for Transport).

We use Win2K for 3rd party authoured sites that require it, Linux for low/medium traffic sites and Solaris (sparc) for pretty much everything else, because (apart from recompiling Apache, PHP and OpenSSH, BIND with every security hole, and Sun's god-awful patch management) TCO is pretty low and we get good hardware support.

However, half of the technical staff run Linux on the desktop, and it's going to be a rough ride for Sun over the next 2 years.

These are my views and not those of my employer's etc. Blah-blah.

European safety is in many ways far tougher than in the US - the Smart Car you mention is probably the safest small car in the world - if crushed it would probably stand up better than many larger vehicles.

If you import a car from the US to the UK it will have to pass an SVA test. I have been told that there are some vehicles sold new in the US that have no hope of passing the SVA without costly modifications (and we're not talking amber tail-lights here - major brake modifications!) Apparently even the emblems on the hood of some Limos are too *tall* to pass, though you could remove it for the test and re-fit it afterwards!

Gareth