Word: traffics
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...seems almost compulsory in south Asia to use your horn constantly. On a recent visit to Dhaka, Bangladesh, I noticed that the taxi driver I hired had worn smooth a spot on his steering wheel where his right thumb rested and pressed the horn incessantly as he weaved through traffic. In India and Bangladesh, turn signals and rear mirrors are for sissies. Drivers are responsible for what's ahead of them, not what's behind. Many studiously ignore vehicles not in their direct line of vision, meaning the horn is the only way to make your presence known. So drivers...
...traffic jam the results are spectacular: an almost continuous blast of horns, deep and tinny, near and far. The bass of a bus mixes with the thin shrieks of a motor scooter. Add in the noise of rasping truck brakes, the sweet tinkle of bicycles and rickshaws, the wailing Bollywood music pumped out by kids in their new cars, the reverberating bangs and cries of touts beating on the sides of buses for business, the siren of an ambulance vainly trying to push its way through the heaving mass and the general, constant growl of traffic and you have...
...This portable gadget runs little Web applications so you can access Internet information quickly and easily without your computer. Widgets update you visually on the weather, traffic or stock market, or you can use them to showcase your Flickr photos bedside, or to check out just about any other bit of Web content that interests you, even an eBay auction. This simply designed, elegant little device stands alone and can travel with you. After winning an innovation award at CES this week, Emtrace will release it in the U.S. this spring, though the price has yet to be announced...
...world may want to keep it alive, if only as a backup when global communications networks crash-as they did spectacularly on Dec. 26 when an earthquake off Taiwan's coast damaged seven undersea fiber-optic cables that handle some 90% of phone calls and data traffic in the region. Millions of homes and businesses across Asia were left without Internet access, e-mail and international phone connections. Financial markets were interrupted. And those lucky enough to connect to overseas websites experienced exasperatingly sluggish data-transfer speeds. While most services have been at least partially restored, a flotilla of repair...
...highly resistant to catastrophic failure because it's a mesh of interconnected smaller networks, all providing alternative data pathways should any single link fail. Indeed, Asia's abundant data capacity and plentiful circuits-a legacy of rampant overbuilding of undersea cable during the tech boom-ensured that most traffic was quickly rerouted after the quake, restoring crucial services such as phone connections. Some of the overflow was also handled by satellite systems, which are normally too costly and lack the bandwidth of terrestrial networks...