Apparently, there are units available that will track 120 simultaneous channels across all the available systems (this comes from Dave Wells). Not having a unit in my possession (and never having messed with Rinex before), I'll have to take his word for it.

If you are talking astronomy, you've left out http://yt-project.org/

It's nice to see some of my work come to light. I created prototypes for this back a few years ago with Google Earth and GDAL for the Bathymetric Attributed Grids (BAG) file from Hydrographic Surveys... http://youtu.be/7fOTlqqQ5O4 Or build a visualization yourself using the code: https://github.com/schwehr/bag-py

Yes... most likely the patent office won't discover your invention in their research as most of their searching is in prior patents. So you will find yourself paying big $ trying to get the patent invalidated.

I've got all but one of the presentations (ppt or pdf) from the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Jan 2010. Two of the talks had to be approved by the White House. There need to be many many more of these types of events, but at least it is a start. http://tinyurl.com/BpLessons

Do whatever you can. Documentation, packaging, training, whatever

Consider even just small steps... e.g. posting small examples of using FOSS can help a lot. I use my blog to help NOAA accomplish its mission indirectly. One instance is how to use QGIS to read data directly from a PostGIS database:

Using QGIS to view PostGIS data

Now, how do I convince the NOAA IT folks that QGIS should be on more peoples machines?

AIS on the IIS is amusing, but not all that helpful. SpaceQuest, ORBCOMM, and COM DEV all have space based AIS systems up...

• eNavigation09
• TEXAS III (2009)
• TEXAS II (2008)

Installing cygwin w/ cron, rsync and ssh is the only way to fly if you have to go by windows....

$ cygrunsrv -I cron -p /usr/sbin/cron -a -D
$ net start cron

Or... install some linux distro and get the real thing

This often comes purely from what the teaching faculty knows... which causes a lot of teaching of excel (+ maybe visual basic) too. If you don't know it, you can't teach it.

I've had a similar question for Hydrographic Offices in various countries that have to produce Coast Pilot/Sailing Directions documents. Except in their case, this is a document that has 100+ years of revisions and is looking to 100 more years. How do we get them into a process where they can track all the changes and reference where material was submitted from?

I tried to think through some of the options for this kind of stuff here:

Managing distributed XML document editing for nautical publications