Is anyone else as astounded as I am with the outright idiocy of crooks, thugs and thieves? Some Babylon, NY, scofflaws found out the hard way that stealing cell phones often leads the police right to your front door.Here's the scene: Some deserted town truck yard on Long Island. Here's the loot: GPS-enabled cell phones used to track the location of town property. Here's the crime: Break into the trucks, snatch the phones (which are probably chunky Nextel iDEN phones, and who really wants to steal those?), and run!

Dad-gum, that's a good time right thar!

Those numbskulls must have thought they were pretty slick. After all, it's not anyone who can pull off a smash-and-grab job with such finesse. Or so they thought. Apparently, they've never watched Law & Order, CSI, or any other show or movie that might depict modern technology in a realistic way.

Thanks to this pesky technology that seems to be making in-roads to every device under the sun called Global Positioning System, people or companies can put such devices in their asset's or employees' hands and know where those assets and people are at all time. Nifty, huh?

Cunning enterprises might even use this technology to make sure their employees are taking the shortest route between two job sites, or not using the truck for personal business during lunch time, or not stopping off at strip joints on the way home with their company logo blazing from said establishment's parking lot.

GPS is also used to, like, recover stolen goods, yo. And so it was that once the phones were reported stolen, the town fired up the GPS system and pinpointed the phones--and the idiots, er, thieves--on the map.

Suffolk County Police wasted no time following the turn-by-turn directions right to the homes of the perpetrators, where they arrested three people in connection with the crime.

GPS - 1: Dummies - 0!