wf3h wrote:
Calif Bill wrote:

I worked on a project like that at one time in the past. Cell phones were
going to require a GPS internally for the 911 feature to tell the dispatcher
where you really were. A company we were supplying was adding a compass
also, and you could use the phone as a web browser, and point the phone in
the direction you were interested in and ask for restaurants, history of the
building, etc. Probably would have had public pee facilities programmed in
to the host computer.

my nextel phone will give me my lat and long....

There's an upside and a downside to that.

Upside is that if you make a 911 call the police can verify your
location.

Downside is that if you aren't making a 911 call, the police can still
verify your location. :-)
"Hey, sarge! Looks like that group of folks who oppose the mayor's
politics must be having a meeting over at 9th and Jackson. We're
getting signals from three of their phones simultaneously from that
location. Shall we break things up with a drug search, or something?"

GPS has migrated from the military, to professional navigators, to
recreational air and marine use, into products as inexpensive as a mass
pro cell phone.

Yesterday I heard some congressman suggest that we implant some sort of
"chip" into peolpe who enter the country under the proposed "guest
worker" program or on student visas. It would make it easier to find
and remove these people when their right to be in the country expired.
Can implanting locator chips in every newborn baby ("to prove
citizenship", of course) be more than a generation or two away?

Not that there aren't some interesting uses for GPS transponders. I
would have loved to have such a device available back when I was
financing used cars. Lots of folks from the edgy side of the tracks
know full well they only risk having their car repo'd if the lender can
find it. :-)

It's amazing that this navigation device has found its way (for good
and for possible ill) into the mainstream of our daily lives, and so
quickly. Where's George Orwell when we need him? Big Brother may not be
actually watching everybody, but he will soon know just exactly where
we're all at.