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Software Holds Cell Phone Calls While Driving
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian company Aegis Mobility has developed software that detects if a cell phone is moving at 'car' speeds. If so, the software, DriveAssistT, will alert the cellular network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until the drive is over. Calls are not blocked entirely; callers will be notified that the person appears to be driving, but they can still leave an emergency voice mail, which will be sent through immediately."
Seems like exactly the same as turning the phone off. I smell a patent!
Per subject..
... and let the machine get it.
Nobody rides a train at car speeds, am I right?
So when I'm on the train, subway, in the back of a taxi or in the passenger seat in a car I can't talk on the phone either? I believe I'd be going the same "car" speeds in all those situations. I don't think they thought this through at all. It would just piss me off more than anything.
No, wrong, voice mail is more of a distraction than receiving text messages. Just don't enable the ability to respond to the text message until the car comes to a stop.
But what about passengers?
What about the train commuters out there?
Yes, the vast majority think they are above average drivers. They think _they_ are special. They can handle it, it won't distract them. It's pretty much the same arguments drunk drivers use.
Of course many laws trying to fix the cell phone and drive problem are delusional too. They allow hands free phones, as if multiple studies haven't found that it's about as bad as a hand held phone while driving.
Of course they have. You can TURN IT OFF if you're a passenger.
RTFA FFS.
I hear that a freeway describes exactly what you are talking about,
The troll with karma.
Nearly every time I see someone driving outlandishly stupid on the road, they're using a cell phone. However, there are more stupid things that you can do while driving that are more distracting than a cell phone: changing the radio, eating, drinking, looking for something, reading directions. None of these things are illegal, merely discouraged.
Outlawing cell phone use while driving is futile; there are always ways to get around it, e.g., hands-free links. If there is no way to enforce a law, it shouldn't be a law in the first place.
I think if we stopped trying to ban it and merely strongly recommended not using cell phones while driving, we would see an effective drop in the number of people using cell phones while driving. Seat belts, for instance, weren't enforced until this past decade (at least in my state). However, advertising, education, and signs asking you to buckle up made it so the vast majority did buckle up. Was it illegal to drive without a seat belt on? No. Was it safe? Yes, so most people did it. Why can't we approach the cellphone problem like we approached the seat belt problem? Why are we so gungho about laws and declaring everything unsatisfactory illegal nowadays?
Isn't the plan to make this technology mandatory? Then it has to work even if you don't desire it.
That's a bit of an uninformed conclusion. Just because you can imagine a bunch of cases where such a feature is not a good idea, doesn't mean that there aren't cases where it would solve a lot of problems. If your job involved lots of short drives between destinations then it could be really useful. As soon as you start moving your phone won't interrupt you, as soon as you stop it lets you know about the calls you missed, and in the meantime it let the people trying to contact you know what's going on.
If you took your blinkers off you might realize that this is a feature that will be useful for some people, who will purchase it, and not so much for others, who won't purchase it. It's not a hard thing to get your hear around if you try. Nobodies going to purchase it and then try and figure out a way of defeating it.
If Slashdot was a crowded room, and someone were to come into the room and ask "Who owns the red car parked out the front", the answer "oh yeah, that's mine" would be lost amongst the noise of everyone else replying "It's not mine. I can't imagine why you'd think it was mine. How dare you suggest that I left a red car parked out the front".
Perhaps because it is not a feature to control the user (yet) but to HELP the user. That's also why it costs money, rather than being mandated by law.
This seems like a feature that they're planning on selling to parents. Otherwise, if you can't remember to turn off your phone before getting in a car, what are the chances that you'll remember to turn off the cell lock when getting on a train, bus, or plane? This sounds exactly like the kind of Won't-Somebody-Please-Think-of-the-children that will lead to some expensive new gadget that simply annoys teenagers. It also, of course, gives them an all-new reason why they're not answering you when you call.
If you're an adult and you actually need this... LEARN TO IGNORE YOUR CALLS. Trust me, it's possible. People in Los Angeles have been masters of this for 40 years.
I really wish they'd create something that would turn Cellphones back on at the end of movies. I can't tell you how often I've gone for a day or two without being reachable simply because I was trying to scrub the memory of The Santa Clause 3 out of my brain.
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