The Huffington Post reported that the law, which would go into effect Nov. 1, would require Oklahoma women who have abortions to disclose the following details:

• Date of abortion
• County where the abortion is performed
• Age of mother
• Marital status
• Race of mother
• Years of education
• State or foreign country of residence of mother
• Total number of previous pregnancies

Doctors will be required to report this information to the State Department of Health so that it can be posted on a public Web site. Supporters say that patients’ privacy rights are protected because their names and other personal information will not be reported.

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According to a new survey from Vlingo, a company that develops speech-recognition technology for mobile phones, 26 percent of its nationwide sample of 4,816 mobile phone users said they sent texts while driving. This despite laws against Driving While Texting in some seven states and some nasty DWT-related accidents. The states with the highest percentage of DWT drivers: Tennessee (42 percent), New Jersey (35 percent), Alabama (34), Idaho (33) and Oklahoma (31.7).

Ironically, 83 percent of the people surveyed said they feel texting while driving should be illegal.

“In just one year, the public conversation about the issue of DWT has escalated, particularly in the wake of some high-profile accidents,” Dave Grannan, chief executive of Vlingo, said in a statement. “Texting is such an integral component of our daily lives, and the cautionary tales about DWT danger have not stemmed the tide. We predicted last year that this problem would get worse, and it has since more people are texting. The good news is that many state legislatures are starting to take up this issue, and today more advanced technologies exist that can increase safety on the roads.”

My God, if one in four drivers admit to driving while texting, how many more were too ashamed to?

BoomTown is not proud of the problem.

Not at all.

But, after hearing the same situation described over and over again from many other parents like me, I am also not alone.

As it turns out, our almost-seven-year-old son, Louie, has morphed into an iJacker.

That would be of my iPhone, which I switched solely to recently after a longtime attachment to my BlackBerry.

That RIM (RIMM) mobile phone never turned into a CrackBerry for him, as Louie did not care much for its lovely keys for emailing that so captivated me.

But now he wants to grab my iPhone from my holster all the time, having become entranced by apps–lots and lots and lots of apps–that now litter the digital pages of my Apple (AAPL) device.

DizzyBeeFree and Super Monkey Ball. Touch Hockey and Paper Football. Finger Sprint and MoodPhone. Bounce On and Crazy Penguin Catapult. Lie Detector and Crazy Snowboard. Tic Tac Toe and Hangman. And iChess, iCheckers, iBowl.

Of course, there are also the bubble poppers and light sabers and more cowbells.

And, good lord, how did a “Race to Witch Mountain” app get on there?

So, I don’t need any stats to tell me that the iPhone, and the iPod touch too, have turned into gaming devices of great impact.

But there are stats, like yesterday’s from comScore (SCOR), showing that 12 out of the top 25 all-time iPhone apps are games. (See the chart below; click to make it larger.)

It’s easy to understand why. The ease of use, the small form factor, the great graphics in this mobile phone that is actually a powerful computer.

In fact, Louie hardly has any interest in the desktop computer anymore, or even a laptop. Although we limited his access to it, it’s moot, since he hardly ever uses it now that the iPhone is around.

Why? It is clear, most of all, that Louie loves the movement and the touch features, which turn the experience into a visceral one.

And, uh-oh–according to a post last week on the blog Blorge.com, “The industry patent watch reveals that Apple has filed patent applications that seek to patent certain user interface ideas for the iPhone, including the use of movement, vibration, and pleasure.”

Oh, this is not going to go well when Louie is a teenager.

Thus, aside from switching to a Microsoft (MSFT) Zune, what are our parenting tactics to stave off that day from coming sooner?

Well, obviously, as much as he might beg–and he does beg and wheedle and plead–Louie gets to use the iPhone sparingly, on short car trips mostly.

And he has to play not only the sillier games, but use ones like iChess or word games that require some brain power.

Lastly, Louie must be analog more than digital and playing inside and outside more than any of it.

There should be more rules, I know, but for now he seems just as riveted to baseball and kickball too, so I am not quite in the panic stage.

More the do-not-leave-the-iPhone-on-the-counter-if-I-ever-hope-to-see-it-again phase.

Louie’s almost-four-year-old brother, Alex, is less interested in games on the iPhone, as it turns out.

Instead, for him, the iPhone is a magical music video device on which I bring him old musical numbers.

Last night, it was “I Like to Be in America” from “West Side Story” and the night before, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from “Oklahoma!”

He was as delighted and mesmerized, as I was when I first saw those classics on the television when I was a kid.

And, even seeing them on an iPhone, of that, I am proud.

But, to give you the full picture of the situation, here is a video interview I did of Louie in action with my hijacked iPhone (it is not pretty):

Google said on Thursday it aimed to build a data centre at an old paper mill in southeastern Finland that it bought from Stora Enso for 40 million euros ($51.7 million).

‘We are currently considering to build a data centre at this site,’ said Google spokesman Kay Oberbeck…

In early 2008 Stora Enso closed down the loss-making Summa mill, which consumed 1,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, after nearly 53 years in operation.”

Go ahead and make your own knowing creative destruction joke here. And when you’re done, think about the more prosaic symbolism of the purchase. Last fall, Google (GOOG) was putting the brakes on growth–it delayed and scaled back data centers in Oklahoma and North Carolina, and even laid off some of its recruiters.

You don’t want to read too much into this purchase–buying property isn’t the same as actually building a data center–but it’s certainly a more hopeful sign than a company that’s selling off assets.

[Image Credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

At Sony’s keynote presentation yesterday, CEO Howard Stringer devoted a good chunk of his presentation to the wonders of the technology and showed off a 3-D short from Disney’s (DIS) Pixar. And last night a few hundred of us got another demo–a broadcast of the Florida/Oklahoma BCS championship game, on a giant screen, live, in 3-D.

This sounded great in theory. A brace of companies, including Cinedigm, 3ality, Carmike Cinemas (CKEC), News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Sony (SNE), partnered up to create a special 3-D broadcast that went out to a handful of movie theaters across the U.S. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.) And they’d like to replicate this a dozen times a year for other special occasions: Other big sports events, concerts and the like.

This stuff is still a bit rough around the edges. The 3-D cameras seem to have a hard time keeping up with high-speed action like a pass, some images didn’t seem to focus that well, and the broadcast, which was created separately from the show everyone else in the country saw, seemed to be several cameras short–not enough overhead shots of the action, etc. But that’s OK: CES is usually stuffed with vaporware that never makes it to market, so we’re willing to cut an actual product some slack.

The bigger question is whether the 3-D experience will be amazing enough to convince people to pay money to watch a big game at a theater instead of their living rooms or at a sports bar. I’m not convinced, but I’m willing to give it another shot.

Here’s some video footage from the event; I can’t show you what the broadcast looked like because my not-so trusty Flip Mino doesn’t have any kind of flash. And there’s not much point in watching a clip of a 3-D broadcast in 2-D anyway, right? Instead, I chatted with Cinedigm CEO Bud Mayo, recent Carmike investor Mark Cuban (more from him later), and Nate Westheimer, a New York-based tech guy around town who filled in as my volunteer cameraman and one-man focus group.

[Image Credit: Life/Google]