In yet another zany use for
wireless networking, an inventor named Zack Butler has come up with a new way to herd cattle which consists of a collar
with a WiFi card, a PDA, a GPS receiver and a loudspeaker (these damn cows'll have better gadgets than we do). The idea
is that the boundaries of the grazing land are downloaded to the PDA and when a cow nears the edge (as determined by
the GPS) the speaker produces a cow-scaring sound, such as a lion roaring or snake hissing. Why they picked a lion is
beyond us, since cows don't frequently encounter lions on farms, maybe it's some some instinctual thing. Amusingly
enough, in tests these sounds slowed the cattle down but didn't always stop them, so adding electric shocks are a
likely next step for the WiFi collars.