The security is there to protect the office, not the man.
That said, I find it telling that this particular office always seems to need so much protection. I live in Cambridge, UK. We were visited last week by Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq: he was guest speaker at the university debating society. Obviously this is someone high profile, and in personal danger because of his office. Now, I was driven right past the building in question around the time he was there, in a taxi, and you could get a pretty good feel for the level of security: unusually high numbers of police in the surrounding area, a few probably-not-quite-standard-issue black cars parked up nearby, etc.
This is significantly more than we usually get when, say, Prince Charles or the Queen visits. However, next to the motorcade and such that you see every time Bush goes anywhere, it was almost nothing. And like I said, we drove right through the area. They did close a couple of short stretches of road, but I'm guessing that was just to ensure that his cars could leave immediately when he was done; they didn't close off the whole area with some blanket ban. I wasn't on my mobile at the time, but there were no stories of disruption to service. If the President of a nation torn apart by war and probably subject to several assassination attempts every month only needs this much protection, you have to wonder what it is about the US President that needs so much more.
So yeah, ten points for a great idea, but try and think like a terrorist, and then how would you defend against that.
<obligatory>
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., 5 August 2004
At any given time, there are waaaaaay more mobile phone users than people with children so young they might be a major distraction in the car. There are fewer people consuming a lot of alcohol, though. Perhaps you think we should repeal the drink-driving laws?
Moreover, there is a need to transport young children. There is no need to text on a mobile while driving.
In addition, the whole "envy" argument is a cliché now. Please give it up. Some laws, taxes, etc. really are just envy taxes, but attaching that label to everything you happen not to like because you might personally be disadvantaged by it, regardless of the facts and the bigger picture, just weakens the argument against genuine envy laws.
Oh, and driving while tired is a killer, too. In fact, it's been a major road safety focus here in the UK for a while now. And if your tiredness is affecting your ability to control your car, you can and will be pulled over and cited for it.
Also, large-scale software projects can take years to develop, particularly if there's genuine R&D involved. Patents that expired before or very soon after you got to market would be far less of an incentive, if they would allow competitors to develop smaller and more specialist applications quickly using the patented inventions.
It's debatable whether any of the MS software patents would stand up in the EU anyway. Although the Europe-wide patent body has awarded a few patents that might be described in those terms over the years, as a general principle we don't currently have them, and the enforceability of the odd few in European countries is doubtful.
The Office 2007 UI is relatively innovative: they are the first developer of mainstream office software to break with more than a decade's tradition in UI design and go for something completely different. Sure, not all the underlying ideas are homegrown at Microsoft — how many truly original UI ideas are there anywhere in software today, really? — but let's give credit where it's due.
Microsoft has produced plenty of other innovations as well. Excel contains some of their better ones, offering several powerful features not previously found in spreadsheets. Just because it wasn't the first spreadsheet doesn't meant it doesn't have anything in it that other spreadsheets don't.
We could go on. They've put serious effort into developing the.Net platform and the C# programming language, for example, and as such tools go, they're doing a pretty decent job from what I've seen so far.
Of course Microsoft aren't the only innovators in software, and of course many of their ideas are bought-in or borrowed from others. This is why I think a lot of their empire-building IP claims are bunk. But pretending they never do anything new is on the same level as describing them as Micro$oft: a cute in-joke the first time, but nothing more.
Sorry, but you're mistaken about the burgers. "Quarter Pounder" may be a brand name belonging to some fast food chain, but if I go into any of my local burger bars (not part of large chains), they all have 1/4lb burgers on the menu.
I'm afraid I don't understand your point about pints in a pub. How is my pint in a pub example not relevant, if my pint of milk example is? I honestly can't see the difference here; maybe it's a culture thing, and one would seem artificial in Sweden because you usually use a metric measure?
Just take a look at the amusing comments on the Office blogs about licensing their Office 2007 user interface IP. It's abundantly clear that some of the bigwigs in management there are not lawyers, and haven't even read about their own company's history in this area with Apple and others in the past. Some of them really do believe that just because they spent a significant amount of time and money researching something, they automatically get perfect monopoly protection of that research under IP laws.
More generally, just because some electronic document format is a published standard does not mean there are multiple (or indeed any) good choices of software to read documents stored using it.
I'm actually pretty worried by the whole politicisation of ODF. Frankly, it's taking the format from a substandard, little-used office suite and imposing it on a world that mostly uses a more powerful alternative software. The fact that it's written down openly may be an important principle, but the trend here is to put that principle ahead of pragmatism.
Bottom line: if other things were equal, going for the open standard over proprietary would have merit, but other things are far from equal. I have yet to see a convincing argument from anyone, including OSS fans, that there will be practical benefits to society in the long run through mandating the use of ODF.
Every country in the world except for Burma, the US, and Liberia currently use the metric system as their primary method of measurement.
Yep. That's why this evening I bought 2 pints of milk from the supermarket 2.6 miles from my home, travelling along roads with 20mph and 30mph speed limits to get there, probably with hideous fuel economy of about 20mpg, before returning home and walking to the pub so I could safely drink my pint of bitter without having to drive back, conveniently allowing me to pick up a quarter-pound burger for a late-night snack on my way home.
But yep, here in the UK we're metric through and through.:-)
I'll grant at any time that usability is the number one priority.
I won't.
For a business, making money is probably the number one priority. For a personal home page, maybe staying in touch with friends is the number one priority. For a non-profit, maybe raising awareness and informing people about the organisation is the number one priority.
But usability? Usability is merely a means to an end. It is nothing without the end itself.
The sad thing about Nielsen is that he does have a good point, which used to be the central theme of his web site and which his articles used to support.
Today, according to his own guidelines, his web site is worse than it used to be: his recent content is increasingly self-promotion, while relatively few of his latest articles contain hard data about the results of real usability research. He does still publish useful articles — a recent one advocating writing numbers using figures more often on the web than is traditional in print springs to mind — but today, such articles are the minority.
His site has not been on my "visit weekly" list for a long time now, and the biggest irony is that this is because he was correct about what people do — and don't — want to read on a web site.
I acknowledged the issue about smart people thinking about it before getting in touch with Y Combinator before. However, I think perhaps you miss my point: what they're offering, in real financial terms, isn't enough to make or break a business. As investments go, it's a low risk. But if a business does take off, the Y Combinator folks have a big profit on their hands for negligible investment. Is their advice really worth it? I'm not convinced, but hey, I'd turn down Y Combinator funding, so obviously I'm stupid.
I'm not sure it's fair to say they got fscked by the government.
For one thing, if you recall, they were right. The problem was that at the time, they couldn't prove it sufficiently to defend themselves. But history has shown that they made the right call, and it's entirely possible that they knew they were making the right call at the time but didn't back it up to avoid compromising their sources.
For another thing, although the two top guys stepped down — effectively "doing the decent thing" and taking the hit to protect everyone below them — they left with crowds of hundreds of BBC staff cheering them outside the building, and hundreds more sending them personal messages encouraging them not to go. Name me any other organisation in the world, on the same scale, where the staff publicly show that much loyalty to the guys at the top. Can't? That's why the culture at the Beeb is special in a world full of cookie-cutter journalism and commercial advertising.
Oh, and did we mention that almost all of the other staff who were directly responsible for the original reporting in that case are still working at the BBC in the same or similar roles? Just because they cut the head off, doesn't mean the rest of the beast is dead.
It's a shame they are tending toward "celebrity journalists" like Nick Robinson and Evan Davies these days. There's certainly been a lot of Blair worship in recent days, with some very rose-tinted views of the results of his ten years in power. Bring back Andrew Marr, I say!
But that's about the limit of their political compromise, even now. If it ever comes down to Hubbard vs. Paxman, I know which side I'll be betting on.
Just wanted to let you know that the primary reason behind current sunday-trading laws is actually "protecting the family" and not religiously motivated.
Bollocks it was. That was just a transparent excuse to justify appeasing a tiny minority who practise a certain religion at the expense of a great majority who do not.
This is abundantly clear when you consider who actually works in the affected stores at weekends (or during the evening shift, or doing logistics overnight). Just take a look around your local supermarket or garden centre next time you're in on a Sunday. Many of the staff are either kids trying to earn a bit of spending money by doing some decent work, or older folks who have perhaps retired from their main career but still want to earn a little money. Neither of these groups loses any more family life whether they work 10am–4pm on a Sunday, or 10am–4pm on a Saturday, or 5pm–11pm on a weeknight. In fact, for the kids who are still at school, the weeknight option is almost certainly worse for their education and family life.
By all means have some generic laws to protect work-life balance so the big supermarkets don't wind up forcing people to work all weekend or give up the job. But please don't pretend that Sunday trading laws are anything other than an anachronism that remains to appease a small but highly vocal minority of the population who want to impose their own moral values on everyone else.
It's still not a deal I'd take. But it probably makes sense for some.
I'm not sure I can think of anyone for whom this would be a good deal, unless they knew pretty much for certain that their business would fail anyway. The kind of money involved is nothing in business, so it's all about the support and "mentor effect", and I rather doubt this is the right mentor for anyone who wants to become a tech billionaire. (Remind me again how many of today's top 100 tech start-ups Graham has helped to set up, and how many billions are in his personal fortune right now?)
If he has to justify his hard sell with an accusation that anyone who doesn't take it in five minutes has failed an intelligence test, then I'd suggest he's just a salesman with snake oil trying to intimidate young, enthusiastic, but naive people into giving him a better deal than he deserves.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who does make such a crucial decision about the future of their business within five minutes must have failed the intelligence test. But then again, anyone smart would have read the background on Y Combinator, known what they were likely to be offered at best, and then walked away without ever taking part...
Does anyone else think that Paul Graham has a lot in common with people like Joel Spolsky: a pretty good writer, worth reading for some interesting ideas, but with rather too much ego given the real significance of their achievements?
Parents are never going to be required to muzzle their children, so this argument is unconvincing.
So because we can't do anything about one very rare but mostly unavoidable cause of accidents, we shouldn't do anything about another much more common and easily preventable one either?
Why is it that anything involving a cel phone demands a special law prohibiting it? It's all feeling rather moralistic.
You should be asking a very pertinent question there, and as you imply, it should be unnecessary to have specific laws like this. There is a very simple reason that in practice governments adapt them, and you can see what it is just by looking up and down this Slashdot discussion: a lot of people are selfish and ill-informed, and rather than looking objectively at the evidence, they insist that there is nothing dangerous about their behaviour. Since prosecuting for dangerous driving only works after-the-fact, and obviously isn't a deterrent if these people don't believe they're doing something dangerous, the only remaining option is to slam them explicitly until they grow up.
Nearly everyone I know has a cell phone. Half the people I pass in traffic when I am in large cities either have a bluetooth headset on or are holding a phone to their ears. It has been this way for 5 years. Yet there are not smashed vehicles littering the sides of the roads I drive.
Lucky you. I live near one of the most accident-prone roads in the UK. It is a major freight route also used by many local commuters. There are major accidents that cause extensive delays several times a week, and KSI accidents with many vehicles involved that gridlock the entire area probably once a week on average. The annual KSI toll on this road is several hundred people, and the hours lost to drivers and passengers in delays alone add up to several lifetimes every year.
The scary thing is that the only unusual thing about this road is that it's busier than most. There is nothing particularly difficult about driving along it, if you drive sensibly. But idiots drive too close, and weave between lanes, and brake sharply. That in itself has a pretty devastating effect, and in that context, I'm afraid the effect of morons using mobile phones is all too obvious: it's measured in tens of lives and hundreds of serious injuries per year.
Now, I'll grant that not having both your hands available is an impediment, but having a conversation on a hands free cell phone is no more dangerous than having a conversation with a passenger.
That sort of naive, self-assured statement is exactly why making things like this explicitly illegal is done. If people like you actually bothered to check the facts, a simple dangerous driving law would suffice.
Tell that to the driver who's deaf spouse has just had to deal with their injured baby at home and can't use a telephone.
And getting themselves killed on the way home is going to help how, exactly?
Seriously, even in the case of your rare and contrived-sounding example, what is so difficult about pulling over somewhere safe and considerate before texting back?
They fine people $101 for not wearing a seatbelt, which is only risking the lives of those in the car, but when it comes to endangering others, they use the same amount for a fine. If they're going to fine texting while driving, they should at least make it $500.
For the record, seatbelts are not just to protect the belted occupant. People weigh a lot and, sadly, unbelted people really do sometimes fly through windscreens after collisions and then hit things (or people) outside the car.
In any case, a $500 fine would be cheap at twice the price. How does your state punish premeditated attempted murder? I suggest that this would be a better guideline, given that there is never a good reason to be texting while driving, it's not exactly something you could do by accident and get caught unluckily, and it doesn't take a genius to spot that it will make driving very much more dangerous.
It's a shame they didn't have the guts to ban all mobile phone use here in the UK, though. Statistically, using a hands-free kit is pretty much as dangerous as using a handheld phone, because it's the distraction and consequent loss in concentration that does most of the damage. (That claim is based on the same research used by the government to justify the handheld ban.)
Unfortunately, the British government, having decided to introduce a crime specifically prohibiting the use of mobiles while driving to make the point (it already had generic dangerous driving legislation available that was not being used) also decided that a complete ban would be unenforceable and went for the easy option.
This, naturally, has led to everyone from mobile phone suppliers advertising on the radio to my local Tesco store (the biggest supermarket chain in the UK) marketing their hands-free kit with specific implications that using it will make you a safer driver, which simply isn't true.
As of today, less than 1% of drivers who use mobile phones on the road are actually being caught, but sales of hands-free kits have soared. What a wonderful piece of legislation that was!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... After the whole dyin' for a livin' part, I'm not sure you're gonna need that next job anyway...
The security is there to protect the office, not the man.
That said, I find it telling that this particular office always seems to need so much protection. I live in Cambridge, UK. We were visited last week by Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq: he was guest speaker at the university debating society. Obviously this is someone high profile, and in personal danger because of his office. Now, I was driven right past the building in question around the time he was there, in a taxi, and you could get a pretty good feel for the level of security: unusually high numbers of police in the surrounding area, a few probably-not-quite-standard-issue black cars parked up nearby, etc.
This is significantly more than we usually get when, say, Prince Charles or the Queen visits. However, next to the motorcade and such that you see every time Bush goes anywhere, it was almost nothing. And like I said, we drove right through the area. They did close a couple of short stretches of road, but I'm guessing that was just to ensure that his cars could leave immediately when he was done; they didn't close off the whole area with some blanket ban. I wasn't on my mobile at the time, but there were no stories of disruption to service. If the President of a nation torn apart by war and probably subject to several assassination attempts every month only needs this much protection, you have to wonder what it is about the US President that needs so much more.
<obligatory>
</obligatory>At any given time, there are waaaaaay more mobile phone users than people with children so young they might be a major distraction in the car. There are fewer people consuming a lot of alcohol, though. Perhaps you think we should repeal the drink-driving laws?
Moreover, there is a need to transport young children. There is no need to text on a mobile while driving.
In addition, the whole "envy" argument is a cliché now. Please give it up. Some laws, taxes, etc. really are just envy taxes, but attaching that label to everything you happen not to like because you might personally be disadvantaged by it, regardless of the facts and the bigger picture, just weakens the argument against genuine envy laws.
Oh, and driving while tired is a killer, too. In fact, it's been a major road safety focus here in the UK for a while now. And if your tiredness is affecting your ability to control your car, you can and will be pulled over and cited for it.
Also, large-scale software projects can take years to develop, particularly if there's genuine R&D involved. Patents that expired before or very soon after you got to market would be far less of an incentive, if they would allow competitors to develop smaller and more specialist applications quickly using the patented inventions.
It's debatable whether any of the MS software patents would stand up in the EU anyway. Although the Europe-wide patent body has awarded a few patents that might be described in those terms over the years, as a general principle we don't currently have them, and the enforceability of the odd few in European countries is doubtful.
I think you're being rather unfair to Microsoft.
The Office 2007 UI is relatively innovative: they are the first developer of mainstream office software to break with more than a decade's tradition in UI design and go for something completely different. Sure, not all the underlying ideas are homegrown at Microsoft — how many truly original UI ideas are there anywhere in software today, really? — but let's give credit where it's due.
Microsoft has produced plenty of other innovations as well. Excel contains some of their better ones, offering several powerful features not previously found in spreadsheets. Just because it wasn't the first spreadsheet doesn't meant it doesn't have anything in it that other spreadsheets don't.
We could go on. They've put serious effort into developing the .Net platform and the C# programming language, for example, and as such tools go, they're doing a pretty decent job from what I've seen so far.
Of course Microsoft aren't the only innovators in software, and of course many of their ideas are bought-in or borrowed from others. This is why I think a lot of their empire-building IP claims are bunk. But pretending they never do anything new is on the same level as describing them as Micro$oft: a cute in-joke the first time, but nothing more.
Sorry, but you're mistaken about the burgers. "Quarter Pounder" may be a brand name belonging to some fast food chain, but if I go into any of my local burger bars (not part of large chains), they all have 1/4lb burgers on the menu.
I'm afraid I don't understand your point about pints in a pub. How is my pint in a pub example not relevant, if my pint of milk example is? I honestly can't see the difference here; maybe it's a culture thing, and one would seem artificial in Sweden because you usually use a metric measure?
Just take a look at the amusing comments on the Office blogs about licensing their Office 2007 user interface IP. It's abundantly clear that some of the bigwigs in management there are not lawyers, and haven't even read about their own company's history in this area with Apple and others in the past. Some of them really do believe that just because they spent a significant amount of time and money researching something, they automatically get perfect monopoly protection of that research under IP laws.
One does not follow from the other.
More generally, just because some electronic document format is a published standard does not mean there are multiple (or indeed any) good choices of software to read documents stored using it.
I'm actually pretty worried by the whole politicisation of ODF. Frankly, it's taking the format from a substandard, little-used office suite and imposing it on a world that mostly uses a more powerful alternative software. The fact that it's written down openly may be an important principle, but the trend here is to put that principle ahead of pragmatism.
Bottom line: if other things were equal, going for the open standard over proprietary would have merit, but other things are far from equal. I have yet to see a convincing argument from anyone, including OSS fans, that there will be practical benefits to society in the long run through mandating the use of ODF.
Yep. That's why this evening I bought 2 pints of milk from the supermarket 2.6 miles from my home, travelling along roads with 20mph and 30mph speed limits to get there, probably with hideous fuel economy of about 20mpg, before returning home and walking to the pub so I could safely drink my pint of bitter without having to drive back, conveniently allowing me to pick up a quarter-pound burger for a late-night snack on my way home.
But yep, here in the UK we're metric through and through. :-)
I won't.
For a business, making money is probably the number one priority. For a personal home page, maybe staying in touch with friends is the number one priority. For a non-profit, maybe raising awareness and informing people about the organisation is the number one priority.
But usability? Usability is merely a means to an end. It is nothing without the end itself.
The sad thing about Nielsen is that he does have a good point, which used to be the central theme of his web site and which his articles used to support.
Today, according to his own guidelines, his web site is worse than it used to be: his recent content is increasingly self-promotion, while relatively few of his latest articles contain hard data about the results of real usability research. He does still publish useful articles — a recent one advocating writing numbers using figures more often on the web than is traditional in print springs to mind — but today, such articles are the minority.
His site has not been on my "visit weekly" list for a long time now, and the biggest irony is that this is because he was correct about what people do — and don't — want to read on a web site.
I acknowledged the issue about smart people thinking about it before getting in touch with Y Combinator before. However, I think perhaps you miss my point: what they're offering, in real financial terms, isn't enough to make or break a business. As investments go, it's a low risk. But if a business does take off, the Y Combinator folks have a big profit on their hands for negligible investment. Is their advice really worth it? I'm not convinced, but hey, I'd turn down Y Combinator funding, so obviously I'm stupid.
I'm not sure it's fair to say they got fscked by the government.
For one thing, if you recall, they were right. The problem was that at the time, they couldn't prove it sufficiently to defend themselves. But history has shown that they made the right call, and it's entirely possible that they knew they were making the right call at the time but didn't back it up to avoid compromising their sources.
For another thing, although the two top guys stepped down — effectively "doing the decent thing" and taking the hit to protect everyone below them — they left with crowds of hundreds of BBC staff cheering them outside the building, and hundreds more sending them personal messages encouraging them not to go. Name me any other organisation in the world, on the same scale, where the staff publicly show that much loyalty to the guys at the top. Can't? That's why the culture at the Beeb is special in a world full of cookie-cutter journalism and commercial advertising.
Oh, and did we mention that almost all of the other staff who were directly responsible for the original reporting in that case are still working at the BBC in the same or similar roles? Just because they cut the head off, doesn't mean the rest of the beast is dead.
It's a shame they are tending toward "celebrity journalists" like Nick Robinson and Evan Davies these days. There's certainly been a lot of Blair worship in recent days, with some very rose-tinted views of the results of his ten years in power. Bring back Andrew Marr, I say!
But that's about the limit of their political compromise, even now. If it ever comes down to Hubbard vs. Paxman, I know which side I'll be betting on.
Bollocks it was. That was just a transparent excuse to justify appeasing a tiny minority who practise a certain religion at the expense of a great majority who do not.
This is abundantly clear when you consider who actually works in the affected stores at weekends (or during the evening shift, or doing logistics overnight). Just take a look around your local supermarket or garden centre next time you're in on a Sunday. Many of the staff are either kids trying to earn a bit of spending money by doing some decent work, or older folks who have perhaps retired from their main career but still want to earn a little money. Neither of these groups loses any more family life whether they work 10am–4pm on a Sunday, or 10am–4pm on a Saturday, or 5pm–11pm on a weeknight. In fact, for the kids who are still at school, the weeknight option is almost certainly worse for their education and family life.
By all means have some generic laws to protect work-life balance so the big supermarkets don't wind up forcing people to work all weekend or give up the job. But please don't pretend that Sunday trading laws are anything other than an anachronism that remains to appease a small but highly vocal minority of the population who want to impose their own moral values on everyone else.
I'm not sure I can think of anyone for whom this would be a good deal, unless they knew pretty much for certain that their business would fail anyway. The kind of money involved is nothing in business, so it's all about the support and "mentor effect", and I rather doubt this is the right mentor for anyone who wants to become a tech billionaire. (Remind me again how many of today's top 100 tech start-ups Graham has helped to set up, and how many billions are in his personal fortune right now?)
If he has to justify his hard sell with an accusation that anyone who doesn't take it in five minutes has failed an intelligence test, then I'd suggest he's just a salesman with snake oil trying to intimidate young, enthusiastic, but naive people into giving him a better deal than he deserves.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who does make such a crucial decision about the future of their business within five minutes must have failed the intelligence test. But then again, anyone smart would have read the background on Y Combinator, known what they were likely to be offered at best, and then walked away without ever taking part...
Does anyone else think that Paul Graham has a lot in common with people like Joel Spolsky: a pretty good writer, worth reading for some interesting ideas, but with rather too much ego given the real significance of their achievements?
So because we can't do anything about one very rare but mostly unavoidable cause of accidents, we shouldn't do anything about another much more common and easily preventable one either?
You should be asking a very pertinent question there, and as you imply, it should be unnecessary to have specific laws like this. There is a very simple reason that in practice governments adapt them, and you can see what it is just by looking up and down this Slashdot discussion: a lot of people are selfish and ill-informed, and rather than looking objectively at the evidence, they insist that there is nothing dangerous about their behaviour. Since prosecuting for dangerous driving only works after-the-fact, and obviously isn't a deterrent if these people don't believe they're doing something dangerous, the only remaining option is to slam them explicitly until they grow up.
Lucky you. I live near one of the most accident-prone roads in the UK. It is a major freight route also used by many local commuters. There are major accidents that cause extensive delays several times a week, and KSI accidents with many vehicles involved that gridlock the entire area probably once a week on average. The annual KSI toll on this road is several hundred people, and the hours lost to drivers and passengers in delays alone add up to several lifetimes every year.
The scary thing is that the only unusual thing about this road is that it's busier than most. There is nothing particularly difficult about driving along it, if you drive sensibly. But idiots drive too close, and weave between lanes, and brake sharply. That in itself has a pretty devastating effect, and in that context, I'm afraid the effect of morons using mobile phones is all too obvious: it's measured in tens of lives and hundreds of serious injuries per year.
That sort of naive, self-assured statement is exactly why making things like this explicitly illegal is done. If people like you actually bothered to check the facts, a simple dangerous driving law would suffice.
And getting themselves killed on the way home is going to help how, exactly?
Seriously, even in the case of your rare and contrived-sounding example, what is so difficult about pulling over somewhere safe and considerate before texting back?
For the record, seatbelts are not just to protect the belted occupant. People weigh a lot and, sadly, unbelted people really do sometimes fly through windscreens after collisions and then hit things (or people) outside the car.
In any case, a $500 fine would be cheap at twice the price. How does your state punish premeditated attempted murder? I suggest that this would be a better guideline, given that there is never a good reason to be texting while driving, it's not exactly something you could do by accident and get caught unluckily, and it doesn't take a genius to spot that it will make driving very much more dangerous.
It's a shame they didn't have the guts to ban all mobile phone use here in the UK, though. Statistically, using a hands-free kit is pretty much as dangerous as using a handheld phone, because it's the distraction and consequent loss in concentration that does most of the damage. (That claim is based on the same research used by the government to justify the handheld ban.)
Unfortunately, the British government, having decided to introduce a crime specifically prohibiting the use of mobiles while driving to make the point (it already had generic dangerous driving legislation available that was not being used) also decided that a complete ban would be unenforceable and went for the easy option.
This, naturally, has led to everyone from mobile phone suppliers advertising on the radio to my local Tesco store (the biggest supermarket chain in the UK) marketing their hands-free kit with specific implications that using it will make you a safer driver, which simply isn't true.
As of today, less than 1% of drivers who use mobile phones on the road are actually being caught, but sales of hands-free kits have soared. What a wonderful piece of legislation that was!
So, the hottest girl thing... Was that what made him cry in D&D, or was the crying in a different game?