What not to do while driving

When driving, what are some of the key things that people are advised ? You should be sober, capable of driving, and not getting diverted. So this means no driving while under the influence of alcohol, no talking on the phone, and certainly no involvement in sexual activities. People found involved in any of these activities are liable to face action, and maybe even jailed (and these also have an impact on their driving record). So what do you about a person who does more than one of these at the same time (link to article):

A Seattle man was arrested for drinking under the influence of alcohol and having sex while driving last weekend, the Washington State Patrol reported. The incident happened when a state trooper noticed a sport utility vehicle drifting between lanes and driving at unusual speeds, sometimes speeding up then slowing down to well below the speed limit on Interstate 90, near Bellevue’s Bellevue Way, about 1:20 a.m. Friday.
State trooper Jeff Merrill, who wrote the news release, said in an interview Wednesday that „embracing while driving“ is a misdemeanor. In this case, the woman said she was performing oral sex on the driver while he was driving.

This guy was under the influence of alcohol, and was having oral sex performed on him, and was driving at the same time. Not only is he a risk to himself and other occupants of the car, but a serious risk to other people on the road; no way should such a person be allowed to continue driving.

Saudi professor to be lashed for meeting woman alone

Read this article, and was revolted by what I read. You do read from time to time that people have different cultures and social norms, but there must be some amount of humanity to all norms. Saudi Arabia has strict interpretations of what a female can do and cannot do (more controls on what she cannot do), but the bottom line is that freedoms that others take for granted are not available to her. In this case, a professor in Saudi Arabia is going to be in prison for 8 months and be lashed 150 times for the big crime of meeting a woman alone:

A Saudi Arabian man is to get 150 lashes and spend eight months in prison after he was caught meeting a woman without a chaperone in a coffee shop.
Muhammad Ali Abu Raziza, a psychology professor in Mecca, was arrested by the Kingdom’s feared religious police, the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. He was accused of breaking the Islamic injunctions under the Khilwa code, which restricts the independence of women. It stipulates that women must not meet men alone, other than relatives.

Now, there are many people who would say that this is the way that the society over there is governed and this is the choice that people have made, but that is nonsense. Just because some societies had the policy of apartheid does not mean that the world let that continue; and further, Saudi Arabia is not a democratic country where people have made this choice - this is a decision by the rulers to have such laws so that they get the support of the religious clergy.

Hitting a record number of porn sites

There are a lot of people who are attracted to porn, and use whatever opportunity they have available to browse for porn. There are a lot of offices that do not actually prohibit porn, and there are others who prohibit browsing for porn, but do not either have filters in place or do not effectively monitor people's net usage to check for porn browsing. However, even a place that hardly check for porn will take action if they find an employee logging almost a million hits for porn:

A Japanese civil servant was demoted for logging more than 780,000 hits on pornographic Web sites on his office computer over nine months, an official said Friday. The man, a Kinokawa city government employee in western Japan, visited porn sites from June 2007 to February 2008, city official Tomiko Waki said. City officials said the number of hits discovered on his computer's internal log was so high in part because one click on certain types of pornographic sites registers multiple hits.
The man's supervisors discovered his extensive porn site visits after his computer became infected with a virus, prompting officials to examine his Web browser's history. Along with the demotion, he received a 20,000 yen ($190) monthly pay cut, Waki said.

This officer was lucky to have been left off with a demotion, given that in many countries and in most corporations, he would have been fired. The interesting part is that either it was not being checked whether his normal work was also happening, or maybe he could get by without doing work.