"Follow Mountain Ridge Road until you reach a cliff. Drive off the cliff. Arrive at 468 Canyon Drive." Would you follow these directions if they were given to you by a friend? What if they were given to you by your car's GPS navigation system?

The GPS, the only fully functional Global Navigation Satellite System, is extremely accurate. Utilizing a constellation of over 24 Medium Earth Orbit satellites, these orbiting government-maintained outposts are capable of determining the location, speed, direction, and time of a device.

The GPS technology, originally designed by the U.S. Department of Defense, is now available for consumer use, most notably in car navigation systems. GPS stands for global positioning systems, not guaranteed perfect systems. The reliability of these navigation devices may be questionable. Due to the troubles of keeping up with the world's ever-changing road systems, navigation-related blunders have become common.

"First things first, I can never tell which way the thing [navigation system] wants me to go," said junior Frank LoCurto. "I put the address in and it shows the route, but if you don't know the area you're in it, is hard to tell if the first turn should be a left or a right because the map on the screen is sometimes flipped."

"I would also like to say that it never gives you a good route. For example, if I type 'Garden State Mall' into my navigation, it tells me to get off the parkway about four exits before the mall and take ridiculous back roads and then get back on the parkway, which doesn't make any sense because the mall is accessible from the parkway," said LoCurto.

As GPS devices are becoming increasingly popular, it appears that satellite navigation may very well eventually replace paper maps altogether. However, the technology as of now does not incorporate the common sense of a human being yet people are acting extremely reliant on these relatively new devices.

"I used to always use my navigation, even if I knew where I was going," said junior Nick Lipeika. "Whenever I drove to my one buddy's house, the GPS in my car would tell me to drive straight through the mall. I think it was bringing me to some sort of maintenance access driveway or something. If so, I would have been in a pretty bad situation if I decided to follow its directions."

The imperfect navigation system may give people illogical directions and make people late, but so what? Although it should be under the discretion of the driver to decide whether or not to obey the machine's directions, it is not always that easy. Sometimes the machine's errors may cause more than mere tardiness.

Cases of crash-causing navigation errors are occurring all over the globe at an alarming rate. Just this April, another GPS navigation crash story involving a bus happened in Washington. A charter bus transporting a high school softball team, crashed into a pedestrian bridge in the Washington Park Arboretum. The GPS navigation system, which was set on the bus function, sent the vehicle under a 9-foot clearance, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

By blindly following these tools, consumers are putting themselves and others in danger. The technology is being further motivated into the consumer mainstream with the average price of a car navigation device plummeting by about 100 percent in the last year. Only more people will run the risk of falling victim to the same mishaps that other fellow consumers are falling to.

If the trend continues, the popularity of these devices will maintain its rise in the marketplace, eventually making it customary for every motor vehicle to be equipped with one. Is this going to really help you? With this in mind, people may consider simply asking people for directions instead of machines, next time they go out.