The large block of land to your left called California is about to become the largest state to ban "unlimited cellphone use by drivers" -- namely, a law prohibiting drivers under 18 from talking on the phone, and requiring older drivers to use a hands-free headset. New York, Washington D.C., and now Washington state are all in on similar ventures as well. So USA TODAY asked insurance and driving experts to explain the new restrictions.

Things we learned:

1) The risk of having an "injury crash" increases by four times when a driver is on the phone, says Anne McCartt, a vice president with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

2) There is no proof that driving with a hands-free headset is any safer than using a cell phone, according to Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association. Studies have shown that drivers using headsets are just as distracted, he says.

3) In California, the base fine ranges from $20 to $50 -- and it can triple if certain penalties are applied. In Washington, fines start at $124.

Lots more informative talk after the jump, including a list of every state that has restrictions on texting or talking while driving, and what those restrictions are. Now pay attention here, folks -- both hands on the keyboard. [Source: USA Today]

This probably doesn't come as much of a surprise, but many teen drivers don't follow laws restricting cell phone use. According to the Associated Press, researchers from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety found that the number of teens using cell phones while driving was exactly the same before and after states instituted laws banning their use for drivers under a certain age.

It is believed the primary problem is enforcement. The difficulty of spotting a hands-free device and of correctly guessing a person's age has made many police officers unwilling to enforce the laws to their fullest. Law makers say that stepping up enforcement is crucial, but so, too, is parental involvement.

Back in 2003, the National Transportation Board recommended that states ban novice drivers from using cell phones following a study that found that car crashes were the leading cause of death among teenagers. Without proper enforcement however, their efforts are likely to make little difference. [Source: USA Today/AP]

Hybrid cars and electric cars are great for the environment, but they pose a potential danger to pedestrians. Electric engines make almost no noise when running, so that familiar sound of an on-coming combustion engine isn't there to warn absent-minded pedestrians or the blind that a vehicle is approaching.

Members of Congress are now considering a bill that would establish minimum noise levels for all hybrid and electric cars. Two students from Stanford have created a system that uses speakers mounted behind the wheels to project a vaguely motor-like sound towards pedestrians in front of and behind the vehicle. A simple computer is used to direct the sound, for example, increasing the volume in the left speakers when making a left-hand turn.

Check out the video above for some shots and sounds of the system in action. [Source: New Scientist]

Virginia has become the first state in the nation to mandate some form of Internet safety courses for public school children. Details on the program are scant at the moment, but the courses came out of concern for teens and pre-teens who may be the target of sexual predators.

As part of presentation in a Richmond, Virginia high school, the state's assistant attorney general, Gene Fishel, showed images of a social networking profile of a convicted sex offender who pretended to be a 15 year-old girl.

It's nice to see a state reach for education as a solution to the problem instead of censorship.

From Slashdot

Related links:

• Proposed Law Requires Age Verification on Public Wi-Fi Networks
• Another MySpace Predator Caught Going After Children
• MySpace Finally Takes Steps to Protect Kids

Modern conveniences and technology allow us to do many things while driving. We can navigate our way along unfamiliar highways, avoiding traffic and finding random points of interest. We can save fuel by motoring along on steam. We can even juice the stereo in our car to the point that it turns all components and passengers into something resembling tapioca pudding. But none of these technological advances can help us if we're still refusing to use our brains while sitting behind the wheel of a fast-moving car.

Case in point: An Oakland driver decided it was more important to reach for her ringing cell phone than keep control of her car. The result? She dunked her automobile into the Oakland Estuary. She somehow escaped injury and even saved her cup of coffee. Onlookers reported that she emerged from the car's watery resting place still clutching her cup of morning joe. No word on the cell phone, though.

May we suggest a hands-free device? Or perhaps a suspension of her license?

From AOL News.

Related links:

• New Jersey Bans Texting While Driving
• Tennessee To Ban Texting While Driving
• CellCoach Annoys Teenage Drivers Until They Get Off the Phone

Any of you who have ever gotten food poisoning know how amazingly unpleasant it can be (and that's putting it lightly). One of the worst culprits is sour milk. The sniff-and-taste method is dangerous, and most people don't actually bother to check before pouring themselves a cold glass of moo juice.

A group of Chinese and American scientists have developed a widget that will at least prevent already spoiled milk from making it to store shelves. A small metal ribbon is placed inside the carton and sets off an alarm if the milk has gone bad.

The cartons would be passed through a detector at the store that generates a magnetic field. The magnet would cause the ribbon to vibrate. If the milk has gone sour it gets thicker slowing the vibrations and triggering an alarm. If the dangerous Staphylococcus aureus is present, the milk will be thinner than normal and the ribbon will move faster, also triggering the alarm.

The system will cost less than a penny per carton to implement, but getting manufacturers and stores to buy into the system is still sure to be a challenge.

From Daily Mail

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• Fast Food of the Future
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We live in a dangerous world filled with murderers, terrorists, and lamp posts. That's right: lamp posts. Don't play coy with us. We know on at least one occasion you've been walking down the street texting away on your mobile phone and walked right into a lamp post or telephone pole.

British telephone directory service 118 118 is out to save Londoners from themselves and has started wrapping lampposts in thick padding. Apparently serious injuries from people paying less attention to where they were going and more to their tiny cell phone screen has inspired the company (along with charity Living Streets) to take action. The company will poll pedestrians in the area of the pilot program and if all goes well, Birmingam, Manchester, and Liverpool are next.

The best part about the 118 118 program is that there is simply nothing we can do to make it any funnier. Once in a while something comes along that is so perfectly hilarious we are forced to just let the story mock itself. If this was April we would have written this off immediately.

And for those of you who don't believe us:

From Engadget, Yahoo News, Metro, and Daily Mail

Related links:

• New Jersey Bans Texting While Driving
• Driver Causes Fatal Wreck While Texting On Cellphone
• CellCoach Annoys Teenage Drivers Until They Get Off the Phone

The seeds of driving safety are being planted in the Garden State.

Tomorrow marks Day 1 when talking on a cell phone without a hands-free headset or texting while driving becomes a primary offense in the state of New Jersey. This means police can pull over a driver for the phone-related infraction alone, instead of having to wait for another violation to occur -- such as speeding or driving without a seatbelt -- before doling out a ticket for the talking or texting offense.

This marks an increase in the seriousness with which officials in New Jersey are taking this major source of driving distraction, although plenty of other distractions are in play and allowed by law, like shaving, eating or even reading the newspaper, as a spokesman for AAA points out.

By elevating the infraction to a primary offense, New Jersey lawmakers have made it clear that the primary role of a person behind the wheel should be -- yes -- driving. Fines will range from $100 to $250, although oddly enough no motor-vehicle points will be assessed.

The New Jersey division of highway safety is launching an education campaign to coincide with the newly strengthened ordinance, and electronic signs on the state's highways will warn drivers of the new law and the consequences for drivers who run afoul.

According to a local police official from Southern New Jersey, he expects catching drivers will be an easy task, with so many of them using cell phones in a careless way. "Its going to be like shooting fish in a barrel."

Be advised.

From the Burlington County Times.

Related links:

• Tennessee To Ban Texting While Driving
• Driver Causes Fatal Wreck While Texting On Cellphone
• Do Bluetooth Earphones Make You Look Like a Jerk?

Americans are adept at adopting new technology, and texting (sending a text message via a cell phone) is one of the new tools that has been easily learned and utilized among a population that seems driven to constant communication -- and in many cases, driven to distraction.

Take the rise in incidents in which someone writing or reading a text message while driving ends up causing an automobile accident. Several states have enacted or are considering laws to ban texting while driving. Add now Tennessee to the list of places where fumbling with a digital device while driving may soon be illegal, following a trend that is picking up speed around the country.

New Jersey and Washington State already ban the activity and the proposed Tennessee law would slap offenders with a $50 fine plus a $10 court cost. The Tennessee state senate transportation committee has already had a hearing on the bill, introduced by Republican state senator Jim Tracy. The state House has not yet scheduled hearings as the Senate won't be voting for at least another two weeks.

From The Tennessean.

Related links:

• Driver Causes Fatal Wreck While Texting On Cellphone
• Teen Imprisoned for TXTing While Driving
• Text Messaging to Blame in Teen's Car Wreck?

Here's a somber reminder of why it's important to pay attention to the road while driving.

A California woman was driving along a highway at 66 miles per hour when she crashed in to a line of cars stopped by a construction zone. Why didn't she see the line of cars stopped ahead of her? Because she was too busy sending text messages from her cell phone.

Many states and provinces in North America have banned talking on cell phones without a hands-free device while driving. Some states are going a step further, banning use of a cell phone while driving altogether. But fewer states and municipalities have banned texting while driving. Some are getting wise to this major and dangerous distraction, with Washington State leading the way.

A 2006 University of Utah study found that people driving while talking on a cell phone were as impaired as if they were driving with a 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level. Another 2006 study by Liberty Mutual Insurance Group and SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) found that instant and text messaging while driving leads the list as the biggest distraction while driving for teens.

From Textually.org.

Related links:

• CellCoach Annoys Teenage Drivers Until They Get Off the Phone
• Teen Imprisoned for TXTing While Driving
• Text Messaging to Blame in Teen's Car Wreck?

Text messaging in Sri Lanka was suspended Monday by that country's government for fear that Tamil Tiger rebels would use the system to scare people away from independence day celebrations.

The country's telecommunications regulator ordered the suspension of SMS text messages for the duration of the celebration and the leading service provider, Dialog, complied.

In the Western world, we often hold Edward Bulwer-Lytton's famous line "The pen is mightier than the sword" to be a hard-fast truth but it seems in some tension-filled regions the pen -- or in this case the text -- could be used to instill fear, or worse.

While most of the country engaged in celebrations, suspected rebels blew up a passenger bus, killing 13 people. This follows other suicide attacks during the weekend.

Besides blocking text messages, the government also blocked main roads throughout Sri Lanka's capital city of Colombo.

From Textually.org.

Related links:

• Indian Families To Receive Rice Availability Alerts -- via SMS
• Text Message Sends Indian Stock Market Reeling
• BlackBerrys and Cell Phones Turning Americans Into E-Mail Addicts

On the same day MySpace and the attorneys general for 49 states announced an agreement that will allow parents to have their kids' email addresses blocked from the social networking site we get this tragic story out of Florida:

A Tampa man met two girls, aged 14 and 12, through MySpace and met up with them to have sex. After the 14-year-old confided in her parents about what happened, the police nabbed the pervert after he attempted a second meeting with the younger girl.

Turn your irony sensors on now: When arrested he was wearing a shirt that read "Real Men of Genius." See the referenced story for the picture. And that's the long and short of the humor here. Irony sensors off now. Thank you.

Nothing is funny about a predator skulking around MySpace looking for victims. It will be interesting to see how many parents take advantage of the new offering by the social networking site to let them block their children from signing up. Granted, this relies on the parents submitting their kids' email addresses in order to have them blocked, which may not be enough considering how easy it is to set up a new free email account. But at least it is a start.

What would you do to protect your kids from online predators? What do you do to protect yourself when you go online yourself?

From Tampa Bay's 10 and The New York Times.

Related links:

• Can Privacy Exist on the Internet?
• Stalker Alert -- 53 Percent of Adults Google Others
• Teens Still Prefer Landline Phones, Says Study

MySpace takes a lot of heat for not doing enough to protect the younger members of its site. The site has repeatedly worked with governments to ban sexual offenders, but those efforts have always been reactive to external pressure and bad PR. Now the site is being a little more proactive, announcing a number of measures to help ensure the safety of under-age members.

This includes a number of enhancements to the site, including the ability for parents to list the e-mail addresses of their children and prevent them from creating profiles, automatically marking under-age profiles as "private," and responding within 72-hours to any reports of inappropriate content on the site. The company hopes these measures will help to keep kids safe and, of course, keep angry parents off of their backs. But, we can't help but think these measures will be easy to subvert or abuse.

It would be a funny joke to list all your friends' e-mail addresses as your children and prevent them from using them to sign up on the site (assuming you have any friends who aren't already on there), but the bigger problem is that there's no way to prevent your kids from going to Hotmail or Gmail and getting another disposable e-mail account to sign up with. And there's still nothing preventing them from lying about their age to make a public profile.

Ultimately these changes are positive steps that should help to protect some of the untold thousands of underage MySpace users, but we believe that those who really want to will keep on finding ways around them.

From CNN

Related Links:

• MySpace Bans 29,000 Sex Offenders
• MySpace Hands Over Sex Offender Data
• MySpace Asked to Identify Sex Offenders

If there are any of you out there who are avid scuba divers, then we're sure you're well acquainted with the dangers and difficulties that go along with such a hobby. Most difficult of all when exploring what lies beneath the waves is maintaining a line of communication. So UTC (Underwater Technology Center) has developed the Underwater Digital Device or UDI.

The UDI is a wrist-wearable diving computer that not only keeps logs of your dive, but also allows you to communicate with other divers and your boat. The UDI uses 2-way text-messaging, over a distance of up to 500 meters (or about 1,640 feet). There is no keyboard, so divers send any of 14 preset messages ("Watch out for that shark!") Over the same range, the devices can also be used as homing beacons so divers can find their boat.

There is also an SOS beacon which functions at up to 1000 meters (almost 3,300 feet) letting other divers and the boat know you're in trouble. The SOS beacon can also be activated remotely, so if your buddy looks like he's in trouble, you can activate his SOS beacon for him. And with an estimated eight-hour battery life (assuming one message being sent every four minutes), this thing won't die right in your moment of need.

We caught a glipse and got some hands-on with two of these underwater wrist gizmos this morning at the Cherry Picks demo-fest this morning and thought they could be useful and fun for us if we ever actually go scuba diving.

Though the UDI was announced back in October, it seems to have been virtually ignored by most outlets, so we're writing about it now, since it looks like it's finally shipping at the price of $1,500.

Related links:

• Toyota and Nintendo Team Up for "Elderly-Friendly" Car
• CellCoach Annoys Teenage Drivers Till They Get Off the Phone
• New Jersey School Forces Students to Carry GPS-Enabled Cell Phones

The older people get, the harder it is to drive -- reflexes slow, eyesight goes, and one's level of awareness drops as the years pass. These unfortunate realities of aging can make driving a potentially lethal proposition for those getting on in years (not to mention the drivers around them).

Governments, however, are not about to start confiscating drivers licenses when people are old enough to collect social security, so the challenge becomes how to minimize the danger involved with putting those in their golden years on the road.

Toyota is teaming up with Professor Ryuta Kawashima, who worked for Nintendo to develop the DS hit 'Brain Training,' which uses simple and fun puzzles to sharpen the mind and tell you how old your brain is. Toyota and Dr. Kawashima are working on a system that will monitor the moves of aging drivers and help them avoid dangerous behaviors. The ideas currently on the drawing board are an automatic braking system that can curb unnecessary accelerating, a navigation system (duh) and climate controls that will help keep the driver alert and comfortable.

"Ultimately, we hope to develop cars that stimulate brain activity so that driving itself becomes a form of brain training," Dr. Kawashima says. Toyota and the professor hope to have a basic form of the system ready for deployment within five years. Toyota's system isn't the only game in town, though, that is looking to save some lives by keeping drivers alert, Nissan has been working on its Intelligent Transportation System for some time now.

Nintendo has cornered the market on electronics marketed to the elderly at this point. 'Brain Training' and the 'Brain Age' series on the handheld DS and 'Wii Sports' and 'Wii Fitness' have also proven to be huge hits with older consumers looking to dull the effects of aging.


From Daily Mail


Related links:

• Study Shows Video Games Make Senior Citizens' Brains Sharper
• Top 11 Free Brain Games
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