I really don't understand this urge to prosecute him. Why isn't this treated like an airplane accident, where only in extreme cases the pilots are prosecuted? Yes, the man may have made a mistake. Missed a sign, fumbled the controls, miscalculated something, whatever. For me the obvious response is then to find out why that happened. Was he blinded by the sun, were the controls illogical, was he not trained enough, etcetera?

Isn't that much more productive than immediately assuming that he should be thrown is jail, for whatever good that would do?

And if there's no bread the poor should just eat cake, right?

What was that thing about people who forget history?

Although more accuracy always helps, I think the point is not the increased accuracy, but the increased coverage. The first vendor to have reliable indoor positioning will get bags and bags of money. Just think of the navigation in large shopping malls and airports. The Iridium localisation may help in that. If not, a team that is able to mix Iridium into the positioning is also able to mix Apple beacons into the positioning.

If you spill a drop of coffee on a piece of paper, the stain will expand to form a circle. The paper is still flat or otherwise an elliptic or otherwise non-circular stain would have formed.

By that logic nothing has happened in computers in the last 60 years. After all, there were computers 60 years ago.

The incessant whining about systemd in the last few years here on /. has been deafening. So if a major distribution then switches to systemd, and the world is not coming to an end, that's news for (this particular bunch of) nerds, no?

I realise that for some people here it is not welcome news, but news it is.

I helpfully added a hypothesis to complete your theory, you reply with a wall of text, and then you ask about my butthurt. That is, uhm, errr, an interesting perspective.

Doing science? Does it matter in what pigeon hole this particular research fits in?

Or perhaps it was because you were saying something stupid? I mean, let''s make a list of all the possible explanations. It's the scientific way.

I've seen quite a number of desperate last-ditch refutations of the obvious on /., but this one takes the biscuit.

This is why there are governments.

First do a study if this is really a good idea, including a scalability test. Then if so, Explain the citizens why this is such a good idea, and why this is worth the small investment. Then make it mandatory in the building code. Use some carrots and sticks to let people add sensors to existing buildings.

All boring existing government machinery, but that's how civilised countries got things line warning sirens, vaccination programs, street lights, fire departments, etc. etc.

These neat little theories are always so so convenient to explain why everyone else is inferior. Yet Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.... Perhaps the world is more complicated than these little theories suggest?

It is worth mentioning the efforts of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team: http://hot.openstreetmap.org/u.... They don't pretend to solve the whole crisis, but they do try to make navigation in the area a little easier by providing accurate and recent mapping information. At least in earlier crises, the effort was appreciated by the people on the ground: http://www.redcross.org/news/a....

Who exactly is 'they' in this context?

There are no level crossings on Shinkansen/TGV/ICE tracks, so I must assume this system will also not have them. (And it's in tunnels most of the time anyway.)