Chinese GPS System To Be Offered Free 131
MattSparkes writes, "The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government's National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, 'Frankly, China's behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago.'"
China (Score:2, Funny)
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They never left the plants of the company they're working for.
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Re:China (Incompetent, Offtopic, Flamebait, Troll) (Score:2, Informative)
CC.
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There's an attachment where the crackberry user can stare at the screen, while their helmet with mounted camera directs them through the crowd. It would work on a GPS device too - if you can figure out how to read Cantonese.
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While that is possibly the wet dream of the government, it is highly unlikely. If the Chinese system is set up in the same manner as GPS, it will be a passive system, where the receivers do just that, receive. Broadcasting positions would also require transmission capability, so they would need a cell phone-like transmitter or a satellite phone-type transmitter. Certainly not impossible to do but it would be massively costly, especially with the potential number of users.
OTOH, it doesn't seem so far fetch
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We are, we do, sometimes happens, and we do.....nothing really racist about your statement.
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That's the second reply I've seen that assumes the joke was racist. I didn't read it that way at all. I read it as a joke about their population count and density, and the unnecessary addition of complication/technology.
The same joke would work if the article headline was "NYC giving free GPS unit to all residents", except s/"
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And the America thing wasn't as funny because the number wasn't as large.
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Seriously, get over yourself.
Free (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Free (Score:5, Funny)
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That's a very good idea actually. (Score:2)
You have to admit, it would be very good for security.
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Then the devices took over everyone's brains and turned them into Cybermen...
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Actually, the US is way ahead of them on this one. How can you beat citizens banging on your door and asking for an implant?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(hu man) [wikipedia.org]
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=487 60 [wnd.com]
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,50187,00. html [wired.com]
I agree it can't be long until governments and employers everywhere encourage people to "voluntarily" get chipped.
But... (Score:5, Funny)
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This? (Score:2)
Of course there are a few successful localized industries... but as with many other poor countries, there are a few developed areas, while the rest of the country is still in the stone age.
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What? (Score:3, Funny)
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We talking about the same China? (Score:2)
What if (Score:1)
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Cliffs? What cliffs. China doesn't have any cliffs, nor do they engage in censorship!
Right, comrade?
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For some reason, I keep getting lost in Tiananmen Square.
Chinese opposite to the West (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chinese opposite to the West (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Chinese opposite to the West (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're NOT communists... (Score:3)
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The US leadership are taking away power from the people and giving it to the Communist-detracting leadership, and thus making their people nearly prisoners/slaves. That is almost the expected to happen in the West.
captcha: propound
Chinese giving away nothing (Score:1)
They take power from corporations and give it to the Peoples Liberation Army. By the way, GPS is free.
It took decades for the Air Force to learn how to manage a constellation of 24 satellites. It should be fun to watch China and Europe struggle with it.
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The Europeans have the advantage of learning from the mistakes made by the Air Force, as well as newer technology. GALILEO is a win-win for users, because it is causing the acceleration of the GPS program, GPS-III should be operational years ahead of schedule (and many augmentations originally slated for block III are now in IIF - launch starts 2007). When combined GALILEO/GPS recievers are released to market, the accuracy commonly available to civilians will increase because of the added frequencies and po
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Really? When did the US establish fees to use GPS? And more to the point, how do they bill and collect them?
-ccm
Majority Rule (Score:2)
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Ah, you're referring to that old saying: "In the land of the blind, the man with the Geiger counter is king"
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In the US, with WAAS (in areas that it works well, not northern states), you can get down to 7 or 8 feet (on Interstates or areas with little to no tree cover). With a decent GPS unit (and WAAS) even under heavy tree cover you can get an average of 18 to 25 feet.
For most people that's fine. What are you looking to do that you need something more accurate than that and thus requirin
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As for "speedy CPU and large antenna", that's why I'm talking about smart antennas, SW radios, all preferably on reconfigurable HW (like FPGA). Multiple GPS, multiple data networks, etc. Only when these mobile devices have
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When we say something like "in the land of the blind..." we are generally assuming people would develop everything the same, which is just silly.
$0.02
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The king doesn't have to deal with most stuff in society, just the best stuff that he alone can see to pick.
In the realm beyond our senses, into which we extend with necessari
Sounds sensible. (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, it'd simply be absurd to make your businesses pay all the costs to field a system they aren't allowed to use, and have them pay fees to get similar service from a foreign country. Such a policy would serve neither security nor economic interests. I'm all for private development of technologies, but I can't feel too badly for Galileo investors if they were counting on China to act in such an irrational way.
The resolution of the Chinese system isn't so great, so clearly there's a business opportunity for the private sector there to create subscription services, either to a competing system or to some kind of terrestially based correction service.
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How many do we need? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, the U.S. has GPS. And the Europeans don't trust Americans, so they want Galileo. And the Russians don't want to admit that the Europeans could be better than them at anything, so they're keeping GLONASS around. The Chinese don't trust anybody, and nobody trusts the Chinese, so they have Beidou. The only thing we're missing is one by India (to compete with the Chinese), or maybe one just by France that's purposely incompatible with the rest of Europe's (is "SENAV" taken?).
How soon until the satellites start running into each other? (Yes, I know they won't really; it'll probably be radio spectrum that we run out of first.)
At least as it looks right now, the only system that's even going to be an improvement over GPS is Galileo, and even then it won't be by much. Seems like it would be a whole lot more productive to build systems that augment the signal already available from GPS, and then can call back to providing position itself if GPS goes out; then you'd be able to get higher precision. With higher precision signals, a whole lot of interesting things become possible: you can have automatic self-driving farm equipment (like John Deere's ground-based StarFire augmentation system), lower-cost aircraft navigation, all sorts of cool remote-sensing applications. If you thought that GPS in itself was cool, there are far more opportunities to use it, when you start talking about inch-accurate systems.
The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.
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People said the same thing when RedHat launched its Enterprise server edition. In fact - selling such a service makes perfect business sense. If you were to develop solutions using GPS - you would prefer to use the service that comes with a guarantee - not one that comes with a "if you use it -
Re:How many do we need? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, even though quite a lot of the aerospace industry is solely about countries comparing their orbital penises, this isn't one of those occasions - those are valid concerns. It's not about precision, it's reliability. We're seeing more and more critical systems switch over to satellite navigation (planes, boats, trucks, goods delivery systems in general, personal cars, even, as you say, tractors). You do not want your country's entire infrastructure in the hands of a single, potentially hostile, foreign power. Thus, every nation or block of nations with the resources to do so launches their own network.
A world-wide cooperative effort, that won't be jammed/shut down in case of war/diplomatic catfights, would of course be optimal - but that's Just Not Going to Happen (TM). It ranks up there with the "if we just sit down and talk, we can all get along!" theory of conflict solution.
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The U.S. is not going to start a nuclear war with anyone; it has more to lose than anybody else. It's just not going to happen. And before people bring up Iraq as some sort of evidence of U.S. instability, realize that on the scale of things, attacking Iraq was like kickin
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They're working on it, and that document is nine years old.
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You don't hear a lot about the celestial navigation systems, but they're a pretty obvious and elegant solution for what they do -- provide a way of driving a warhead to its target in a way that is nearly impossible to jam or recall. (Granted, what they do in the larger sense is arguably neither elegant nor obviously necessary, but that's a separate discussion.)
It's going to be pretty necessary if we ever get proper spaceflight and want to colonize the solar system.
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The long of the short, it is t
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It is happening for a perfectly rational reason. War.
Do you think that in the event of a war between the USA and China, it would be sensible of China to rely on a US system? Obviously not. With regards to Europe, if you'd have asked me ten years ago I would have said that replicating the US system was stupid as we are allies. Unfortunately events since then have changed, and I think it is wise for Europe to have it's own system as well. You
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The key difference isn't technical, but a question of control.
The big thing with Galileo is that it won't be controlled by a military but by a civilian administration. Given the development of world affairs in recent years it's perfectly reasonable for the Europeans to want an independent system. Europe is very dependent on the current GPS system and the US has cl
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Such as? Are you referring to the US refusal to uphold UN Resolution 1441? Oh, wait, that was continental Europe. Do you mean agricultrual tarriffs under the WTO? Wait, that was Europe again. Which international agreements were you referring to, then?
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U.S. already has the new GPS IIF nearly ready for launch. And GPS III is in its early stages of life. The technology does not stand still.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's essentially what I meant. (Score:2)
Actually, systems like the Japanese one are really the sort of alternatives I was proposing to the wheel-reinvention of simply making "another GPS."
From an an article on Japan's system [gpsworld.com], "although the QZSS is seen primarily as an augmentation to GPS, without requirements or plans for it to work in standalone mode, QZSS can provide limited accuracy positioning on its own." That seems like a good approach, which the Europeans might want to consider. Rather than simply pretending GPS d
Re:How many do we need? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you really simply don't get it. That's like saying "geez, why do we all print separate currencies, when we all could just be more efficient if we printed one and all used that..."
1) the ability to determine one's position on earth is vitally important, commercially, navigationally, and of course, tactically.
2) Whoever builds such a system, controls it. They can make it available as selectively or narrowly as they want. This availability can change over time.
3) Sometimes states don't like each other. When the disagreement becomes strong enough, sometimes they will try to mess with each other, and even occasionally fight. When this fighting happens (aka "war") one typically tries to hinder one's opponent as much as possible. As 'soft' methods of conflict go, locking them out of a positioning system as a not-so-subtle diplomatic move is benign enough that it's an attractive early option, so it's pretty likely to be used.
As much as the Europeans are building Galileo because the evil US 'controls' GPS and they want an "open" system, if we ever see another general world war you can bet that Galileo would NOT remain universally available, either. To fail to build in the capacity to limit availability would be strategically stupid. (What would of course be curious is another European war - could the French turn off Galileo to the Germans?)
4) Security trumps economy. Tanks and guns provide no food directly, they simply COST an economy some wealth that could be used more beneficially, but is 'wasted' in essence as insurance against the actions of a future enemy. This is PRECISELY the same thing. Each country/group that can afford it, will build their own system as the value of having it 'unblockable' trumps the vulnerability of sharing resources.
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But in general I think competition is good, the system with less downtime, more coverage, higher precision will win (this doesn't apply to the high precision military-only applications). And if the Chinese manage to have a great system then I bet there will be devices that would use more than one system and that would perhaps will help increase accuracy....
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My handheld aviation GPS [lowrance.com] supports such a concept. It is called Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) [wikipedia.org]. Where I fly I get good WAAS coverage so I'm happy.
Sucks... (Score:3, Interesting)
10 Meter accuracy? That sucks to honest. I just about get 3 meter accuracy all the time with my $150 unit, today. Why would I want to use this and pay a license fee to do so?
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10 meters (Score:1)
Kind of like MicroSuse eh? (Score:1, Troll)
This applies to this situation and the M$/Novell deal..
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. And enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a
A dark day for GPS (Score:2, Funny)
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The receivers figure out where they're at on t heir own. And then use software locally to display maps...
There is no way you can block an area in GPS short of just jamming the signal locally at that area.
More precise? (Score:5, Interesting)
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And precize till about 4 metres (not 10 as in the article).
however the more precize positions are encrypted.
to make it more intresting the europian encryption method had been cracked a few weeks after launch of the first satelite, probaply fixed now.
Altough personaly i think a good programmer can fix this error, just by some math (i'm thinking of calculating true satelite positions, based on angle at horizon, height and speed and weight of satelite) nah
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See my posts above, but essentially... yes, it is possible to get a better position. The methods are different from what you have described however. If the same receiver can receive signals from all of the systems, there are more satellites available giving you the potential for better geometry. Another big factor is the addition of a third frequency, which carries another civilian-accessible code, this signal will allow the effect of the ionosphere to be removed from the range measurements, meaning that yo
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but their compass points south! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Out of curiosity... (Score:1)
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- Uhhh... A CITIZEN let's ask him to sign the contract to make the state...
Grow up... It's just a theory.
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Summer suntan (Score:1)
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And then think for another second... GPS by itself is no use for tracking things remotely - it is a passive system that allows the receiver to know exactly where it is. The satellites have no idea where the receivers are, or even if they exist.
To monitor a device remotely, you then have to add a transmitter which sends the device's location - easy enough to do for a limited number of receivers, but doing it on a whole population scale (as some are suggesting) would be nigh impossible.