When Getting There is NONE of the Fun.....

     Picture this:you are walking in one of the urban areas of Alabama...Birmingham, or Montgomery..maybe Huntsville or Mobile, and you are not familiar with the streets.
     So you ask your GPS enabled smart phone-pad-flash-drive-cassette to create a route for you. And you want it to include a stop at a hot dog place.
     Microsoft has patented a program that will do just that...avoiding "bad neighborhoods" and giving preference to hot-dog places that just happen to be advertisers on the program.

     There will be some unhappy business owners if the smart-machine decided their hot dog stand is located in a  "high-crime" area and sends the user away...conveniently to the competition.
     I'm actually surprised there isn't already a program identifying homes for sale where violent events, criminal or otherwise, or even just plain natural deaths, have occurred (for the poltergeist phobic among us)...and that rate various neighborhood blocks on a ten scale for the number of break-ins that have occurred to homes or vehicles.
     Programs like this tend to have a self-fufilling feature. Like the Top-Ten Stories list in newspapers, which increase the rankings for those stories by attracting more readers, insuring they will stay in the top ten longer.