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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-nope dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Could the world cope if GPS stopped working?

What would happen if GPS - the Global Positioning System - stopped working?

For a start, we would all have to engage our brains and pay attention to the world around us when getting from A to B. Perhaps this would be no bad thing: we'd be less likely to drive into rivers or over cliffs through misplaced trust in our navigation devices.

Pick your own favourite story about the kind of idiocy only GPS can enable. Mine is the Swedish couple who misspelled the Italian island of Capri and turned up hundreds of miles away in Carpi, asking where the sea was.

But these are the exceptions.


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  • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday November 11 2019, @12:12AM

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Monday November 11 2019, @12:12AM (#918750)

    Thirded. When I started driving truck, consumer GPS didn't even exist yet. Well, that's not technically true, most GPS receivers looked like this:

    http://retro-gps.info/Magellan/index.html [retro-gps.info]

    Expensive, bulky, not very practical, and you still had to be able to read a map to use one.

    I have a friend who cannot even find her home without GPS (she's also the scariest driver I ever rode with, and if you mention it she say "you didn't die did you?") Her phone died on her one day and she didn't have her car charger with her. I got a phone call from an unknown number that turned out to be her, asking if I could possibly find her and help her get home. She borrowed someones cell to call me. When she told me where she was (northside Safeway) I went and guided her to her house ten blocks away! She was literally in her own neighborhood and passes that shopping center every day going to and from work.

    Oh, she's seventeen, it's her parents house, and she has lived there all her life.

    And no, she's not a blonde and I can't find any good dumb redhead jokes.

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