Technically Incorrect

Perhaps you might be one of those who believes that there should be a very remote and unremitting island, somewhere in the Northern Baltic Sea, reserved for all those who act in an utterly inconsiderate manner.

You know these people well: those who sneeze and don't cover their mouths; those who come to your house for dinner and don't bring a bottle or a smile; and those, at least for members of the rescue services, who have bought a personal locator beacon.

According the the Associated Press, as these beacons have become cheaper, there appear to have been more cases of people setting them off to alert rescue helicopters of imminent disaster.

Imminent disaster such as post-thunderstorm stress disorder or rather salty water drinking syndrome.

You may think this cannot be true. But here is a story the AP offers from the National Park Service in Arizona.

A few dads took their sons for a hike somewhere around the Grand Canyon. They ran out of water, so they activated their beacon. Soon, rescuers found the party. Oh, what joy they experienced to discover that the dads and boys had found a stream. Help was not needed after all.

After a couple of beers, might someone alert the services for a refill?

(Credit: CC Besighyawn/Flickr)

However, they set their beacon off again a few hours later. Had a dad been devoured by a Bigfoot? Had a son become lunch for a bear? No, the hiking half-formed were worried that they might soon suffer dehydration because the water they had found tasted salty.

Which was a shame, as the rescue services were so concerned that they sent out a helicopter that was rather well equipped with night vision capabilities.

Your throat may temporarily cease to function when I tell you that this experience did not deter the fathers and sons from having faith in their beacon. The next day, they set it off again. Which caused the authorities to have them removed and cited for being utter and total morons who should never be allowed near the ACG section of Niketown ever again.

I'm sorry, that might not be quite accurate. The actual words were "creating a hazardous condition."

This might be an extreme incident. However, someone did once activate their beacon when they were frightened by a thunderstorm, the type of event that caused the top man at the California Search and Rescue operations to create a rather fine name for these personal locator beacons: Yuppie 911.

Matt Scharper, who co-ordinates rescue efforts in California, told the AP: "With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn't have been in in the first place."

The people who risk their lives by flying helicopters and allowing themselves to sometimes get far too close to people with the mind and body odor of a desperate rodent, think that inexperienced hikers are buying these beacons--they can be had for as little as $129.99--in the belief that they can negotiate terrain that is far beyond their minds and bodies.

But what can you do? How do you know that a piece of technology is in the hands of a decent citizen or an utter offal-muncher?

Surely some brilliant engineer might solve this conundrum. Otherwise, let's vote for a two-strike rule and it's off to the northern Baltic with you. Sans personal locator beacon.

We all, at one time or another, fail to think straight when under pressure. However, when we decide the time has come to rob a bank, arrow-like mental functionality is imperative for our tool belt.

I mention this only because of the tale of Garry Lee Damon. Damon is currently being subjected to the police's careful hospitality on suspicion of having robbed a Citibank in Santa Clara, Calif.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the police looked at surveillance photos of the robber and wondered who he might be.

I am told this is a telescope linked to a GPS satellite. Oh, we're all being followed now.

(Credit: CC 37Hz/Flickr)

They showed the photos to a parole officer, who seemed to feel he might recognize the man in question. For he allegedly bore a remarkable resemblance to one of his parolees.

The parole officer decided to perform a swift technological check of Damon's whereabouts at the time in question.

You see, Damon was wearing a GPS. And the information from the GPS allegedly suggested that he was, indeed, in the aforementioned Citibank at the inappropriate time. Which prompted the police to consider this more than a coincidence.

I know it cannot be easy knowing that one has a tail at every moment in one's life. Ask any squirrel just how skittish it makes them.

However, I cannot help wondering whether one should perhaps steer clear of the potential of committing crimes when one's whereabouts, thanks to modern technology, are not exactly a secret.

It appears that, strangely, some BMW drivers are actually submissive.

In what may be the first case of its kind, Robert Jones was found guilty this week of what they call in the U.K. "driving without due care and attention" for daftly following the orders of the soothing voice of his GPS when the more urgent voice attached to his brain cells might have suggested he, um, think.

You may be rendered temporarily numb, when you hear the details of this story, to discover that Jones delivers cars for a living.

You see, when Jones' GPS suggested he drive down a narrow, unpaved, cliffside lane, you might have imagined, given that he is an experienced driver, that he would have experienced a little doubt.

You might have also imagined that bears only use lavatories in large country homes.

Does the small print say, "Please disengage your brain"?

(Credit: CC Cpchannel/Flickr)

According to the Daily Mail, Jones kept on going until his car made the intimate acquaintance of a wire fence and became stuck at the edge of a drop of some 100 feet.

The prosecutor, Waseem Raja, seemed to foster a certain glee in describing Jones' actions.

"The path was not designed for motor vehicles, yet Mr. Jones slavishly continued to follow the satnav system to the point where his eyes and his brain must have been telling him otherwise to such a degree he was not exercising proper control of the vehicle," Raja told the court.

For his part, Jones offered the court a stirringly self-aware defense: "I might have been an idiot for taking the wrong road or carrying on, but I have not driven without due care or attention."

Unfortunately, the police officer who first appeared at the scene in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, chatted with the farmer upon whose land Jones had strayed. The farmer told him he wouldn't even take his horses down the path.

Jones, however, chose to take his considerable horsepower down there because his Tom Tom stood over him in tight leather garb brandishing a whip.

Oh, when will humanity ever learn to think for itself?

All right, let's get the jokes out of the way first.

How many roads must a man walk down before he totally loses his way and has no direction home?

If you've been 10,000 miles in the mouth of a graveyard, shouldn't you retrace your steps or you'll end up on Desolation Row?

Or are you a firm believer in the direction principle called "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"?

Oh, what I am talking about?

Well, it seems that Bob Dylan, he who has more gravel in his voice than many a snowy road has on its surface, is in negotiations with two car companies that would like to use his distinctive tones for an in-car navigation system to guide the drivers of the world.

Do you know he wrote a song called "Ninety Miles an hour (Down a Dead-End Street)"?

(Credit: CC Binary Ape/Flickr)

According to New Musical Express, Dylan told listeners to his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour: "I think it would be good if you are looking for directions and hear my voice saying something like, 'Left at the next street, no a right. You know what? Just go straight.'"

I don't know whether that would be so good at all.

Cars are things with very particular atmospheres. Somehow the voice that tells you which way to go should surely be one of reassurance, rather than doubt. It should have a soothing timbre, rather than that of a street person being tortured. It should be a guiding light, not a dread-filled drone.

Perhaps there are musicians whose voices might suit the innards of your Prius. Jewel, perhaps. James Taylor, no doubt. I rather like the thought of Kanye rhythmically keeping me on the straight and narrow.

But Dylan? I fear even he thinks he might be taking a wrong turn with this one.

You see, he's already started with the jokes too. For he told his listeners: "I probably shouldn't do it, because whichever way I go I always end up at one place: Lonely Avenue."

Could we really ever trust the chap who once told us: "There must be some way out of here"?

Perhaps you have some suggestions about whose voice you would prefer to Dylan's in your car?

I know there are many in the tech world who believe people just shouldn't be trusted. Or listened to. Or even believed.

So it may be heartening to these defenders of our cyberfuture that there is yet another piece of evidence suggesting people aren't quite as clever as they think they are.

The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics decided to test a very simple form of human judgment: the ability to know where you're going when you're hiking.

You see, many intrepid humans believe it is enough for them to follow the sun, the moon, or the howling of wolves to reach their destinations and find their way home.

However, as the Institute's Jan L. Souman so elegantly put it to The New York Times: "People really do walk in circles."

As in life, as on a hike, you might conclude. And so it seems.

Could crop circles have been formed by incompetent hikers?

(Credit: CC Kecko/Flickr)

Souman's fearless objectifiers followed a number of hikers as they made their way around the dense forests of Bavaria and the rather more sandy parts of Tunisia.

They discovered that without some celestial object to guide them, people fail to recognize a straight line and double back on themselves like drunken drivers being questioned by the police.

Apparently, if one just walks along and trusts either the images one sees at ground level or even the inner sense provided by the inner ear, the brain gets more than a little confused.

Perhaps it might seem obvious, but even clutching a compass doesn't provide one with the surest of answers. A small dissonance between the arrow and your brain and you could be off at tangent that soon describes a circle.

It's a little like golf caddies. While many still believe they can judge distance by trusting their eyes, there is an increasing prevalence of technological devices because they simply measure distance more accurately.

Similarly, most experienced hiking guides suggest GPS because, well, it doesn't see the sun or the moon and it doesn't hear ululations.

And it does tell you if you were in this very place just half an hour ago.

There is nothing like a mother's love. Save, some kids say, for a mother's nagging, a mother's nosiness, oh, and a mother's constant worry, of course.

Perhaps this might explain why 53-year-old Rachel Wilder reportedly put a Traakit GPS device on her son.

Harry Wilder is not a 7-year-old who is prone to chase passing dogs and cars.

Harry is 19 and will soon start a business management degree course at Oxford Brookes University in England.

Before he does, he's going on a long trip to Australia, Thailand, and South Africa. In fact, he's already in Australia. So is his Traakit, which allows his mom to locate him to within 15 feet of his actual body.

And at night she sits, awaiting Harry's next move.

(Credit: CC Steph and Adam/Flickr)

"I can tell which street he is in so I can make sure he doesn't wander into any dangerous areas," mom told the Telegraph.

But does Google Earth really show which streets are dangerous?

"I have no way of knowing if a street in Australia is dangerous but if he was in Bangkok, for example, I could see if he walks in an area which might not be safe and ring or text him," Mrs. Wilder insisted to the Telegraph.

And at this I wondered if I felt a rat of the PR family creeping very slowly up my trouser leg. For it transpires that the Traakit was developed by a man called David Clayton. That would be the David Clayton who is Harry's uncle.

Harry seems happy enough to be carrying the little credit card-shaped tracker.

From his travels in Brisbane, he said: "It's not so much of a concern here, but in somewhere like Thailand, if you were to get kidnapped or driven off into the jungle, people would be able to find you from the signal."

He is also, let's remember, about to study business management. So in case you were wondering what he might do if he suddenly felt the need to enjoy the pleasures of certain parts of Perth or, well, Bangkok, Harry would like to tell you.

"Not that it's happened yet, but if I didn't want mum to know where I was going I can always leave the thing in the car," he said.

Kids. You just can't control them these days, can you?

I haven't managed to become dependent on GPS yet.

It seems to be quite fun when you're driving in strange areas of America. But I'm not sure I want to hear a voice telling me where to go all the time. It's all a little too, well, corporate for me. Or a little too like a 20-year-old marriage.

However, I was moved to virtual paralysis when I learned that an appeals court in Wisconsin decided that police can stick a GPS-tracking device on anyone they want without getting a search warrant. Even if that person is not suspected of anything more than living, breathing and expectorating.

The Fourth District U.S. Court of Appeals doesn't seem terribly happy about its own decision. However, the court decided, after much rumination, that GPS does not involve searching and seizing.

Which means that any information gained by sticking a secret GPS-tracking device on someone's car will only yield information that could have been gleaned through normal visual surveillance.

Some might wonder, normal visual surveillance by whom? R2D2? Spiderman?

"Sir, I believe I know precisely who sculpted those sideburns for you. Do you want her husband to know?"

(Credit: CC Greenbroke/Flickr)

The decision stemmed from a case against Michael Sveum, a Madison resident who was accused of stalking. In his case, police got a warrant to slip a GPS on his car.

Sveum argued that this contravened his Fourth Amendment rights, which protect him against unreasonable search and seizure. His lawyers said that he was followed out of the public view, in intimate places such as his garage.

The court begged to differ, declaring that an officer could have used his eyes to see when Sveum entered and left his garage.

I don't know about you, but I'm a little disquieted about this. Imagine if you'd met a nice person in a bar. Having spent some considerable overnight time with this person, you discover that this person is the lover of a police officer.

This ruling seems to say that the officer can track your every movement by sticking a GPS on your chassis with a view to sticking a haymaker on your chin. Yes, this might sound a somewhat unlikely example. But surely you see the point.

Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU in Wisconsin, does. He told the Chicago Tribune: "The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else's property without any court supervision, that's wrong. Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want."

Even the appeals court itself is "more than a little troubled" by its own misdirected thinking and suggested that lawmakers in Wisconsin regulate the use of GPS by its officials.

I have a theory, however. I believe the court made this decision because it wants the police to track every single movement taken by former Green Bay quarterback and legendary mind-changing diva Brett Favre.

The Cheeseheads want to know whether he's staying retired or whether he's thinking of unretiring yet again, don't they?

Some commentators are getting their knickers in a twist because they feel they are now unable to twist their lover's knickers around their fingers.

The world is, apparently, experiencing major changes in extramarital sexual behavior. And the reason for these changes is the development of superior technological gadgetry over the last few years.

According to Nick Harding of London's Independent newspaper, the United Kingdom's divorce rate is going down, and one of the reasons, he posits, is that it is far too easy for your spouse to catch you cheating, if not in flagrante delicto, then certainly communicanto.

Or, for those of you whose Latin is restricted to Russell Crowe in Gladiator, a snoopy spouse can find out where you've been and what you've been doing not by asking you or even catching you out in person, but by taking a voyeur's voyage around your gizmos.

(Credit: CC Just-Us-3)

Mr. Harding tells the tragic story of an Iraq vet who came home and discovered his wife's heinous affair by looking at her Mii performance records on their Nintendo Wii console.

It recorded the long nights of virtual bowling by the Iraq vet's wife with someone out there, bowling that appears to have escalated to a slightly less virtual and virtuous rolling. In the hay, as it were.

But technology isn't merely wrecking the joy of extramarital sex in the ways that many readers might have already experienced--the text message that gets read by the wrong person, the e-mail that gets surreptitiously scanned and interpreted. Or even misinterpreted.

Just a cursory googling brought me to a site that will happily sell you something called a GPS Snitch, which is "small and has advanced features in real time," for a mere $399.

Essentially, the GPS Snitch enables you to follow your spouse's car wherever he or she may go. Or roam. But if you're really suspicious, you could try wandering over to Brickhouse Security's very thorough site.

Brickhouse Security is keen to sell you a semen detection kit. (Sale price: $49.95.) I would underline the fact that this masterful technology works on garments of all materials, colors, and genders.

While I don't intend to spoil all your enjoyment of this most sobering science, I really must quote just one short paragraph from the Brickhouse site: "On Sunday morning, he left the house and told you he was going to play golf. Then, when he came home and took a shower, you grabbed his underwear and did the test. If you detected semen, what is he going to say? 'I was masturbating on the golf course.'"

Mr. Harding appears keen to suggest that younger people, who are more tech-savvy, are the ones who are keeping clear of infidelities, especially long-term ones. He quotes a psychologist called Andrew Marshall: "Keeping an affair going has become almost impossible. I would regularly counsel couples where an affair had lasted more than three years. Today, he or she will first get proof and confront. The result is that the length of affairs has dropped dramatically. Looking at all the evidence, it seems that the end of the secret affair is in sight."

Word has slipped out in only the last 24 hours that the propensity to have an affair, at least for men, may be genetically determined. But being a people sort of person, I am very keen to discover whether readers have been, well, caught. If not in the act, then at least very shortly afterward.

I am also interested to hear whether the ubiquity of your technological footprint really is making it more difficult for you to cheat on your spouses. Or whether, in fact, the younger ones among you have decided that, perhaps, marriage at a young age simply isn't such a good idea.

I have heard it said that many long-term relationships are currently being held together by economic imperatives rather than the atomic thrust of love. But I am a romantic at heart, and I want to be convinced that the true exciting beauty of the illicit affair is not quite dead.