Cellphones gum up traffic

Motorists who talk on cellphones drive slower on the freeway, pass sluggish vehicles less often and take longer to complete their trips, according to a study that showed cellphones not only make driving dangerous but cause delays, says Chicago Tribune.

The new study, scheduled to be presented on 16 January during the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting, shows if just two or three people gum up the system by making fewer lane changes or driving more slowly, the cascading effects slow everybody's commute.

Compared with undistracted motorists, drivers on cellphones drive an average of two miles per hour slower, and take 15 to 19 seconds longer to complete 9.2 miles. This might seem insignificant, but it's likely to be compounded if 10% of all drivers are talking on wireless phones at the same time, says researcher Joel Cooper, a doctoral student in psychology.

Netflix, the DVD-by-mail company with more than seven million customers, has a new strategy that may one day make those red envelopes obsolete, reports New York Times.

The company wants to strike deals with electronics companies that will let it send movies straight to TV screens over the Internet. Its first partnership, announced yesterday, is with South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics to stream movies and other programming to LG's high-definition televisions.

The partnership will extend a novel feature from Netflix, announced a year ago, that allows paying subscribers to watch any of 6 000 movies and television shows on its Web site free. But that service can be accessed only with a personal computer.

SanDisk yesterday introduced a USB flash drive with automatic online backup, so files can be recovered from any Internet-connected computer if the drive is lost, forgotten, or stolen, says Information Week.

The Cruzer Titanium Plus is SanDisk's first USB drive with backup capabilities. The 4GB device is to be featured at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month.

The Cruzer Plus comes with a six-month subscription to the BeInSync backup service at no additional charge. After opening a personal, password-protected account, any files copied to the drive from a computer are automatically backed up online. If the computer is offline, then the files will be backed up the next time the drive is plugged into an Internet-connected machine.

Wikia Search, a community-driven search engine, will get its first public preview on Monday, according to co-founder Jimmy Wales, reports News.com.

In an e-mail sent to the Wikia Search mailing list on 24 December, Wales wrote that he aims to make the initial version of the search tool available in alpha form. "We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken," he wrote.

Wikia Search, which aims to allow people to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, will have open source search algorithms and application program interfaces. The search platform includes the Grub search project, acquired by Wikia in July, which employs user-donated distributed processing power to crawl the Web.