Big brother is really watching now

Not so sure about this one: While Jacobs has designed the application for tracking runs, another viable use for this is tracking trips in vehicles. Businesses looking to keep an eye on their employees' short-haul trips could use such a system to make sure they're going where they said they did.

Yes, it's a fun way to keep track of how far you have run, or even cycled. But do we need our bosses watching our every step? On the one hand it stops (or maybe just slows down) some slackers who need to be chastened, but for the ordinary delivery or sales guy or gal, can't they have some respite from being tracked? I guess they could just switch it off, but that invites questions. Or pay someone else to go to the locations specified, although that's only if you are desperate enough to do something really dodgy!

There are many good reasons to use employee 'tracking' - to look for patterns, good, bad or nefarious, and to optimise routes, reduce waste, ensure workers take adequate breaks and minimise fuel use. As long as the workers are given breaks, of course. If you look at factory and office jobs it's hard to hide from the boss anyway, and what a GPS tracking system really does is simply bring these 'outdoor' jobs into line with what we accept in other workplaces. It does reduce or remove the 'freedom' I once had as a sales rep, something that balanced the pressure and grind of making sales. And I imagine it will make some jobs less enticing for that exact reason. However with the advent of multiple GPS-enabled devices it seems inevitable that this sort of 'feature' will become the norm.

Hope you are OK in the quake zone

We know where the fault lines, the volcanoes and the most-storm prevalent locations are, but do we avoid them? No way. We build on 'em. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said the region had been lucky to avoid a major disaster. "Thank Gd that there have not been any reports of serious injuries or damage to properties," Mr Schwarzenegger said. "This reminds us once again that in California we have to be prepared for anything and everything."

Hope LA citizens survived this warning - never forget the risk you take just living near the San Andreas fault. It may be a once in 100-year thing, or maybe once in 500 years - but when it comes it will be big. I guess plenty of people are thinking 'it can't happen to me'.

Which is a little bit like ignoring pollution and global warming, de-forestation and loss of biological diversity - we think about ourselves and our short lives and rarely look at the consequences in the longer term. If we can do OK in our 70 years that's great. If it all falls apart when we are gone, well that's not our problem.

And a note to Mr Schwarzenegger, or maybe to the proofreaders at News.com: just who is the "Gd" thanked here?