A Moment of Wisdom

From Slashdot:

A company called Lok8u (“Locate You”) has come up with a clever watch that serves as a GPS tracking device for your kids. Now, we can quickly ask the question of “how paranoid are we as a society?” but at the same time we can say, “Man, I wish I had something like this in my watch whenever I misplace the darn thing!” I have little ones and ponder over whether investing in something like this makes sense or not. I probably won’t wind up getting any of these but it’s neat to see ideas like these come along … I’m sure they will do well in the market.

Funny excerpt from the Slashdot forum on this topic:

Personally I wouldn’t use this for teenagers because at that age, they have matured enough that they deserve a little privacy

Exactly – if you put the wristwatch on a teenage boy, all they’ll find is that he’s spending most of his time in the bathroom rapidly jumping back and forth about 4″ at a time.

Ahh, nothing like a little potty humor on a Monday morning.

According to Slashgeo,  a company named OnTerra is offering a free service to Bing Maps as WMS.  So far none of the big commercial map providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. ) have offered their services out as an open standard like OGC WMS.  I my development efforts I have used OpenLayers a bit and they make additional efforts to support these proprietary services … it would be nice for them to embrace the OGC standards too.

via Bing Maps WMS Service.