Driving with cellphones

I'm writing this in the closing few minutes of October 2009 and by the time I finish it will be November. On November 1st it becomes illegal to use a hand-held mobile phone while driving. The penalty will be a modest $80 fine and 20 demerit points.

We've been getting the usual propaganda for the last few months on how it is unsafe to phone and drive. The message has been paid adverts and an endless succession of reportage from tame journalists echoing the official line. The figures that keep being repeated are 4 times more likely to have an accident while talking on the phone and that it is as dangerous to use a mobile phone while driving as it is to drink and drive.

If this is true, why on earth is the penalty so low? Or to put that another way why are our politicians so gutless about this?

There's only a very few options here:

• It isn't as dangerous as is claimed (Please note I'm not disputing that it's dangerous)
• Driving under the influence of alcohol isn't as dangerous as claimed. (Again, I don't believe this)
• As alcohol is a drug, our politicians are wanting to punish it more for moral reasons
• Our politicians are too gutless to take road safety seriously.

My money's on a combination of the last two; but I've been wrong before.

Whatever the truth of the matter, we have an appalling road toll in New Zealand and it's about time that the authorities started taking enforcing the road laws seriously.

Gmail Goggles - Stops drunken emailing

Well, not quite. It's a timer based service and Google being Americans they primly describe your state on a Friday night as being "Tired", if Google understands irony it might be a reference to Private Eye's "Tired and emotional" euphemism.

Mail you send over the weekend late at night may be useful but you may regret it the next morning.

How it works is you install it through the "Labs" tab on your Gmail settings page, then before you can send an email at certain designated times you have to solve some basic arithmetic problems. Presumably you pre-set the times it's active to match your likely times for being tired and emotional.

The feature is also available for the email component of the Google Applications for Domains hosted office service.

I can see this as a great service for those who go out partying then put a hand over one eye so they can do a quick email check while they are waiting for the room to stop spinning, now I just wish the car manufacturers would install something like this to reduce the carnage on our roads by stopping people driving cars drunk.