One could possibly drain the lake, cut down the gypsum to the bedrock, then fill it back up. Pay for it with seized ISIS funds.

How ironic it is that one of the largest supplies of fossil fuels ever is going to experience the worst of global warming caused by the same...

The cargo holds are pressurized...but the wheel wells are not. And the wheel wells are open continuously from touchdown to nose-up. Someone could have easily slipped something in there right before takeoff.

Are the pumps not carrying out POS functions? If so, they're networked-

I think it points back to the providers not scaling up as to make the consumer pay more for the "next tier up". There's no reason the networks can't be scaled up to meet demand in urban areas with high population density. In the opposite sense, the providers complain that the low density of rural areas are cost prohibitive to run that last mile of cable/fiber. So which is it?

So, Mr. Trooper is going to sit on the side of the road and see how fast your car is going...or better yet, just put up some sensors along the roadway and start billing (fining) people based on their car's reported speed. Takes all the ambiguity out of the cop actually using a piece of equipment to determine your velocity. Why not start taxing people based on it too. Or, maybe you won't be allowed to get on the road unless yours works. I'm sure there will be a black box thrown in there too, one that you can't disable. Do they make tin-foil car wax yet???

I only have an undergrad degree in Geology, so I'm not an expert by any means.... But I could see that pumping in CO2 into a carbonate-rich environment such as the Permian Basin could possibly mix with groundwater or other interstitial water and form some carbonic acid which would eat away any of the limestone, especially at the cracks where the liquid could reach. For some reason, people get surprised when the land below them shakes and fractures because of pumping some type of liquid at high pressures. This basin has been around for 250 million years, settling over time. How can you not expect something to happen?

Awesome! I don't work for the NSA, but I do use ARCMAP....although Esri would prefer it spelled "ArcMap". It's common GIS software, not a NSA program.

I'd suggest using GIS as a facilities maintenance type of application. Points can be your equipment/connections/appliances and lines can be your fiber. You can attach as many fields as you need to a feature, and you can do calcuations and reports on them. You can overlay these on any basemap you like. I use ESRI's ArcGIS products personally, but you can find other ones, especially open source (free) ones that will do the job just the same.

As with some of the other posters that have dealt with GIS in one form or another, so do I. I am a GIS analyst for a county government, and I can tell you that when any new roads are cut, we are the ones that start the ball rolling. So, you can see that over time, lots of governmental organizations are the ones that initally put these roads out there (aka make available for distribution). If you take my particular organization, multiply that by every county and local government in the country, you can see the conflation that occurs when your major road navigation companies try to stitch these together. I dont know the exact number, but some states have different projections for their data, and there's at least one for every state. States that have some kind of non-equal extents (california and north carolina come to mind)usually have multiple ones. Assembling this data takes time and effort, even if it's just updating what they already have.

Another problem is that you dont want every tom, dick, and harry editing GIS data for the masses. Control is key, and there is an implication that the data has been quality checked and will lead you to wherever you go. If you have grandpa out there, logging some points and uploading them to the public, how do you know that he put the data through differential correction and the lines are topologically correct?

One final thing...my county doesn't try to profit off of it, but there's many, many governments that charge some pretty high fees for somebody to go in and buy their data. You think that they would give that up easily, when they're basically making total profit off of the data and we have to maintain it as part of our job? No way.

So my advice is this: there are ways to convert and upload basic GIS shapefiles into your GPS units if you so wish. Check with the local authority to get your best data. Our E-911 system uses it, shouldn't you?