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Posted by Bill S on July 23, 2007 at 6:59:36 pm EDT
In reply to GPS receivers are wonderful, but ... posted by Bill S on July 23, 2007 at 12:21:49 pm EDT

MTB416 -

Serious about what? You should know by now that I am rarely ever serious about anything. But I am serious that people do incredibly dumb things with their GPSRs, like blindly following them (staring at the screen while hiking into obstacles or into ponds and streams - which I have seen too many times in my land navigation workshops), or getting tired of hiking, then using the cellphone to call for a ride home. And I am serious that in my workshops, I tell people right up front that the GPS receiver can tell you where you are and which direction to a previously marked location, but it cannot tell you how to get there, and its batteries can die. So don't rely on the electronic widget as your sole navigation device. It won't keep you from falling off a cliff (I do know of a case where someone rode their mountain bike off a steep embankment trying to follow the straight line path shown on the GPSR he had tide to the handlebars). Use your head. etc etc etc. Doesn't always do a lot of good, though.

Ed -
If you follow the various links and do a little probing, the incident as described in the article did happen, but the photo was from something completely different, a publicity stunt. The incident itself happened in Switzerland, but the truck in the photo is an old Chevy pickup, and the tree isn't even a cherry tree. In the real incident, when the guy finally realized he was on a pedestrian walkway, he tried backing up, managing to hit a couple lamp posts and the tree (not clear from the original source what kind of tree it was), which had low-hanging branches (it was a park of some sort). The park workers had to do a bit of pruning of the tree's branches to get him out of there. The detail links I went to weren't clear whether the truck was towed out ultimately or whether it got driven out, but it was on the ground, not up in the air.

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• Re: GPS receivers are wonderful, but ... - Ed G 20:24:12 07/24/2007

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