In the future, it''s conceivable that static geo-location router devices will be incorporated in the design of all new buildings and retrofitted into existing structures. It would be particularly useful in skyscrapers to have routers positioned at the corners of every floor, perhaps attached to every exit sign, yielding the ability to automatically track the location of all firefighters during a fire.The Orange County tests also identified some issues with GPS accuracy on standard commercial GPS devices, Godfrey says. Civilian GPS can experience drift, limiting accuracy to plus or minus 50 - 60 feet. The accuracy of civilian GPS is limited by the Department of Defense, which controls the satellites and reserves the most accurate readings for military operations.

In some respects, backhoe loaders are going through an evolution of sorts. A decade ago, we had just standard backhoes like the Case Model 580 and Deere 310. Today, backhoes come in all sizes from small compact machines that have digging depths from 8 to 10 ft. up to the bigger standard models that dig as deep as 16 ft. The smallest machines are powered by both gasoline and diesel engines in the 20 hp range and reach about 60 lip. Their larger cousins start at about 70 lip and go up to about 115 lip. Several companies are moving into the smaller machines because of their growing popularity particularly with the rental industry and with landscape contractors.

In 1936 Henry F. Phillips, also once a traveling salesman, patented the cruciform head known to us all. It was first used by General Motors in the 1936 Cadillac, and within three years most screw makers produced Phillips head screws under license from the inventor.The first screwdriver the author found was in the late fifteenth-century castle manual cited above. It appears in the careful drawing of a screw-cutting lathe and was used to adjust the cutter. "Eureka!I''ve found it. The first screwdriver. No improvised gadget but a remarkably refined tool, complete with a pear-shaped wooden handle to give a good grip, and what appears to be a metal ferrule where the metal blade meets the handle....there is no doubt that a full-fledged screwdriver existed three hundred years before the tool portrayed in the Encyclopedie." Since the lathe was shown in a chapter devoted to machines of war "it is likely that screwdrivers appeared first in military workshops, though perhaps not in France, as I had assumed, but in Germany"

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