Feature interactions in telecommunications systems

Imagine commuting home from work one day, driving past the downtown stores toward the grocery store when you receive a call on your mobile phone. It's your daughter, asking you to pick up milk on the way home. Now imagine that the call is from your refrigerator. This vision is not so far-fetched with today's computing and communications technologies. The communications network already provides messaging services, and these can easily be extended to support such automated messaging. Global positioning systems can determine where you are. Such devices are already installed in cars to provide directions to the drivers. Determining that you are about to pass the grocery store is just a small step from this. Finally, many appliances already use chips for various functions. It's not much of a stretch for appliance manufacturers to add distributed objects to enable their appliances to communicate. Perhaps the most far-fetched idea is trusting electronic appliances to manage our lives to this extent!