Everybody keeps saying that travel on the NSE is a burden financially. However, the urban highway issue is more pressing. The government should look into BESRAYA, GRAND SAGA, SPRINT, NKVE, NPE and the SMART tunnel where urbanites have to pay toll everyday, sometimes three or four times a day.

The amount of toll paid at these highways adds up to a bigger amount compared to what is paid on the NSE.

In addition, the NSE is not a highway that the average consumer uses regularly. The biggest beneficiary of lower toll or abolition of toll on the NSE would  be businesses rather than the man in the street who does not frequently go on long-distance trips. Therefore, priority should be given to tolled links which ring the Klang Valley.

By only privatising PLUS, what message is the government sending if it does not have a follow-up plan for other toll roads?

The anti-smoking campaign has been running for years, but it appears that more people are picking up the habit. The Health Ministry and other agencies must have spent millions, if not billions of ringgit on advertisements and other efforts to educate the public, especially the young on the dangers of smoking.

Pictures showing how a damaged lung looks as a result of nicotine blockages and other horrible pictures simply no longer have any effect. Similarly, banning smoking in certain confined areas have not achieved the desired result. What is more disturbing to non-smokers is that even those who are supposed to enforce the law on smoking are themselves happily puffing away in restricted areas.

The same with enforcement of the use of rear seat belts. There have been many complaints about this new law. Forget about its advantages and the safety aspects. Most of the complaints I have read are of how much it is going to cost to install rear seat belts, and show no appreciation that the government is doing something positive for motorists. It seems the lives of loved ones must be calculated in ringgit and sen.

Perhaps the only way to shock the peo-ple would be to let smoking-related deaths soar. Only then will the public wake up.

The same applies to rear seat belts. Stop the campaign, fatalities of rear passengers will rise and maybe then car owners will come to their senses and install the belts.

So if people do not wish to heed warn-ings on the dangers of smoking and not using rear seat belts, so be it. Let’s channel the money to some other worthwhile cause like helping the poor.

This could help Google in its efforts to lure more people off desktop applications sold by Microsoft and onto the mostly free Web-based apps Google offers.

Google Apps Team Edition is a free service that lets people within the same e-mail domain collaborate easily with Google Apps, a package that includes Docs, Calendar, Talk, and Start Page.

Unlike IM applications, which open communication to anyone on the Web using a compatible IM app, Google Apps Team Edition lets you share with people only in your same organization.

Google’s stand-alone hosted apps for consumers haven’t really made a splash in the corporate world, largely because of the security threats posed by how easy they make it to share sensitive work data with people outside the company.

So Google created Google Apps, a free Standard Edition and a Premier Edition that has a fee. These editions give an administrator control over how the apps are used, allowing for services to be disabled, new services like Gmail to be added, and integration with apps for things like single sign-on. Google offers security and government regulation compliance services for those editions 9789901 through its Postini acquisition.

“People are already using the consumer (hosted Google) apps in the workplace, like they did IM a decade ago,” said Jeremy Milo, senior marketing manager for Google Apps. “We’re trying to bring more security by introducing the notion of domain awareness.”

The Team Edition offers a compromise for workers who want to use the apps in a company that isn’t already using Google Apps or if the company lacks an IT administrator. An administrator can always step in and switch from Team Edition to Standard or Premier if they want. And a new domain can be acquired through the Standard Edition for $10 for those who need a uniform e-mail domain.

(Credit: Google)

With Team Edition anyone can open an account and start using the apps with anyone within the organization. For instance, a group working on a team project could use Google Apps Team Edition and be able to access the shared documents from any computer over the Internet.

“Google Apps Team Edition is another on ramp” to Web-hosted apps, Milo said. “They are one more way for businesses to get comfortable with computing in the cloud and anywhere, any time access to critical information.”

But, some day, can it turned to be something like this …

or something like this too…

My journey to my hometown couldn’t escaped this terrifying drive too. The actual plan to start at 01:30 am Thursday morning went smoothly, as I leaved my apartment nearly at 1:45 am, together with my brother-in-law’s family. When these 2 cars approaching Karak Toll near UIA, I started to realize that the traffic jam is in front of me soon. The massive numbers of cars at the toll booth and along the 60 km KL – Karak’s Highway stretch tell everything. When it comes to cross the town like Bentong, Raub, Kuala Lipis, Gua Musang, Kuala Krai, and Ketereh, all the traffics will stuck, and people start to loose their patient. They start to take extra driving class such as using emergency lane, cut-off the ques, overspeed, and some are totally lost their mind to drive on the opposite lane, eventhough there are incoming cars, lorries and buses.

After all, I had just break my own record traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Bharu by using Lipis-Gua Musang roads when it cost me 12 hours to complete the 446 km stretch. I arrive at my home nearly at 2:00 pm Thursday evening. The pictures shows the traffic jams before I reached Kuala Krai’s, nearly 15 km before town.

The main reason why this extreme traffic jams happened is because everybody have to cross the town. There’s no bypass road for Bentong, Raub, Gua Musang, Kuala Krai and Ketereh where those cities are in critical condition during festive holiday. We can’t stop the increasing numbers of vehicles on the road, we also can’t stop the huge number of people migrating from their hometown to Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, we can’t educate people to drive properly and have a safe journey. Their manner will stand by themselves forever. But what government can do is build necessary bypass road for this selected towns as they have built for Machang’s (Kelantan) town. I believe, the new Machang bypass road had saved at least one hour of driving time.

At 512m (1,680ft) and 141 floors the Burj Dubai, which is still under construction, is now taller than Taiwan’s 508m (1,667ft) Taipei 101. The final height of the Burj is a closely guarded secret with speculation that it will top off at the 800 meter mark (2,625 ft). Most likely it will beak the 628m (2,072ft) mark by a good margin in order to break the record for highest man-made structure, held by the wire-assisted KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota.

When completed, the skyscraper will feature more than 160 floors, 56 elevators, luxury apartments, boutiques, swimming pools, spas, exclusive corporate suites, Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s first hotel, and a 124th floor observation platform. The $1 billion skyscraper is in the heart of downtown Dubai, a 500-acre development area worth $20 billion. Construction, which began just 1,276 days ago, has been frenzied — at times, one storey rises every three days.