Who’s In Charge Here, Anyway
I’m not absolutely sure this one is for real but there have been too many recent similar reports for them all to be a hoax:
GPS steers driver into path of train
Silicon Valley geek led astray
Iain Thomson, vnunet.com 04 Jan 2008
A computer technician from Sunnyvale is facing a bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars after his GPS system caused him to collide with a train.
Bo Bai claimed that he was driving a rental car in Bedford Hills, New York when his GPS system directed him to drive down a railway track.
The car became stuck almost immediately and Bai abandoned the vehicle shortly before it was hit by a commuter train travelling at 60mph.
"As the car is driving over the tracks, the GPS system tells him to turn right, and he turns right onto the railroad tracks," Dan Brucker, spokesman for train company Metro-North told the Lower Hudson Online. …
It’s the start of a new year here at GPS ROI Tracking, so let’s take a moment to review the bidding. I was brought up in a day when you didn’t have to put warning labels on hot stoves, and long before Bill Engvall made a career of handing put signs to stupid people.
Most of the time I’m happy with my age and the aging process, sometimes I feel bad that I wasn’t younger just so I could be around to see some of today’s great inventions mature, but there are times, when I see how frickin’ stupid some people are getting, and how society props these dingbats up and makes excuses for them, that I just want to throw up my hands and say, "Lord, I’m ready now".
Folks, GPS navigation units are built to calculate your position and either report that position back to headquarters or show you that position on a map. The map-style GPS units typically have address finder and driving directions built in … and that’s, of course, a handy feature. But as a driver, you and nobody else is responsible for your vehicle. I am so sick of people coming up with every excuse in the book to cover up their mistakes and their failure to accept responsibility for their own actions that I could just SPIT.
But I hate spitting and also hate losing my temper, so I’ll just leave you with this thought for a better 2008 … as Sgt Jablonski was famous for saying for many years, "be careful out there".