Remember the early 90s and cell phones? Aside from the fact that they weighed ten pounds and you couldn’t even watch TV on them (gosh!), they had a lot more connectivity problems than today. While on an important call, getting disconnected would just, well, happen. You’d roll your eyes to the heavens and yell “damned solar flares!” Well, you might not yell that, unless you were a little imbalanced that is.
Turns out that last December, some mega-humongous solar flare disrupted GPS systems. Now I personally have a Garmin Nuvi 350 (amazon link), and it’s about the best thing on Earth (although my new Xbox 360 is a strong contender, plus it’s 10 higher than the Nuvi), but it’s been wrong before. I once followed it’s step-by-step directions to a Dairy Queen once (love me a Blizzard) and was delivered at someone’s doorstop in a residential neighborhood. He didn’t even give me ice cream!
Another interesting note on GPS is the number of people who seem to use it and ignore all things going on in the real world. Techdirt has a few stories of people driving incredibly long distances when they weren’t actually far away. But that’s more about stupid than it is about technology.
I think I like this solar flare disruption news issue, it opens a whole new set of opportunities…
“Hey Jim, sorry I’m late to the meeting. Darn solar flares screwed up my GPS again, I was halfway to Boise before I noticed!”