New GPS Satellite Launched 9
zonker writes "A U.S. Air Force Delta 2 rocket launched a new GPS satellite today to add to the collection of 27 up there. This new GPS satellite is one of seven now in orbit as a replacement for an earlier generation of GPS. May be of interest to the GPS folks out there."
Big News Item! (Score:1)
GPS errors (Score:2)
This sentiment is mirrored here:
http://www.sbcmag.net/texis/scripts/vnews/newspap
seems sort of shifty if you ask me.
Re:GPS errors (Score:5)
It wasn't a secret the military tried to keep; they told you straight out that the civilian channel had deliberate inaccuracies in it to degrade its military value for potential hostile powers.
Hardened military targets (bunkers) and mobile armored targets (tanks) are very hard to destroy with accuracies of 100 meters; they are very easy to destroy with accuracies in the single meter range. And hundred-meter accuracies were good enough for most civilian navigation, whether by hikers, boaters, or pilots.
And Clinton didn't lift the restrictions out of the goodness of his heart, either. It's just that techniques that compared the GPS-reported and known actual coordinates of landmarks allowed for correction of civilian data to military-level accuracy*. So separate levels of access were no longer benefiting national security.
*Ironically, the Coast Guard pioneered these techinques, since they weren't given access to the military data.
Re:GPS errors (Score:1)
Re:GPS errors (Score:1)
Is it me or are we coming too reliant on this? (Score:4)
I was sysadminning for a major UK law firm about 18 months ago when I learned of a case we were working on for an insurance company
It seems the insurance company were unwilling to pay for the loss of a 60000 tonne bulk cargo carrier which had run aground in the Carribean (in broad daylight, on a flat calm sea with unlimited visibility) because the captain was watching the GPS and not what was directly in front of the bows.
Needless to say no-one involved was very happy
Ian
Re:Is it me or are we coming too reliant on this? (Score:1)
Could we just make sensors that detect mental function in the Captains of ships? That would have prevented the exxon valdez and many other disasters.
If people can connect to one another even the smallest of voices will grow loud.
Re:Is it me or are we coming too reliant on this? (Score:1)
No e-break slides with a tanker (Score:1)