China Begins Using New Global Positioning Satellites 168
cswilly writes with the news that China's satellite navigation system, called Beidou, has been successfully activated. "With ten satellites now, 16 in 2012, and 35 in 2020, China is making damn sure they are independent of the U.S. military's lock on GPS. According to the article, 'Beidou, or 'Big Dipper,' would cover most parts of the Asia Pacific by next year and then the world by 2020.'" The BBC also has slightly more detailed coverage.
Re:Not surprising (Score:0, Insightful)
yup. and in the 80's Japan because of their superior thinking and forward looking abilities and all around betterness than anything and everything done by the US was going to take over the US, and the evil Americans and their god the dollar would be goffed down and forgotten. But that didnt happen either :)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm... you are aware of the differences between China and Japan, right?
Such as, say, a massive difference in population? A massive difference in natural resources? The fact that China is now locking up energy and mineral resources around the world which will deny their use to the USA in 50 years?
China and Japan are in no way comparable in this sense. You WILL be second fiddle to China. You can like this or not, but that's the simple reality. You almost are already. You will be passed within a few years, and continue your downward slide as the world aligns more and more to the number one world power of the future: China.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Not this shit again. It looks like the shills from China are getting to the point where they even infect Slashdot.
Want to know one thing China lacks? The ability to grow food for its people. As of now, they are an exporter. Give it 10 years, and that isn't going to be the case. If the US gives a middle finger to the world, the country can keep its population fed. May not have the variety, but people would survive. Other countries would have mass starvations if it wasn't for their imports.
We have heard the second fiddle to China thing before. We were going to forever be second fiddle to Japan. We were going to be swallowed up by Communist countries because the USSR had so much land, puppet governments, and did not hesitate to use brutal force when called on. We were going to be swallowed up by every nation in the world going under Sharia law.
Not to say China isn't doing their part. The one thing China is good at is sabotage. They are going ape-shit dumping solar panels for way below the cost of materials + labor in the US market in effort to kill that industry and take it over for themselves. Instead of innovation, this is how they go about doing things. Hopefully in the fall of next year, we get a Congress elected that actually abide their oath of office and actively stop this crap.
The US has its faults. In fact, sometimes you wonder what the country does right, but like a NoSQL database where you wonder where the hell the consistency comes from but keeps its integrity over a period of time, the US keeps going.
Re:Active vs passive systems (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the "test" system. And their description is completely ass-backwards. I'm not sure how useful that would be for mobile units or wide spread use.
The terminal sends a signal to the satellites (say, 3 seconds latency due to distance). The satellites send the timestamps to a ground station (again, 3 seconds). They do some maths, then send the answers back to the satellites (again, 3 second), which send it back down to the terminals (finally, another 3 seconds). That is like 12 seconds, plus calculations, etc. Good luck using that info reasonably at 100+ KPH
That still leaves the issue of if terminals become popular, potentially MILLIONS of signals being broadcast skyward for the satellites to receive, sort, stamp and relay.
The Wikipedia article reads like an instruction manual on how NOT to do GPS. What am I missing?
Re:Active vs passive systems (Score:4, Insightful)
We're both wrong. Me more so than you, however.
The Beidou-1 satellites are Geo Stationary not LEO. That being said, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] latency is about 1/4 of a second for each leg.
Still, the idea of transmitting potentially millions of signals blindly in the sky to a constellation of GEO satellites, and letting them do the work of sorting, stamping, and relaying seems a bit ass-backwards.
Square Peg, meet Mssrs Round Hole and BFH.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say it's already started, but the decline is a slow process. Empires don't so much fall as decay. It took longer for the Roman Empire to completely fall than the United States has even existed. If you want to put a timeline on it, I'd say the decline started post-WW2. We had a good run shortly after as the sole manufacturing powerhouse of the world, but that wasn't going to last forever.
Bear in mind we are *still* one of the biggest centers of industry in the entire world though. We're just having to adjust to not being #1 by giant margins in every sector imaginable.