Galileo Navigation System Gets Go-Ahead From EU Parliament 178
An anonymous reader writes "Plans to start up the EU's first global satellite navigation system (GNSS) built under civilian control, entirely independent of other navigation systems and yet interoperable with them, were approved by MEPs on Wednesday. Both parts of this global system — Galileo and EGNOS — will offer citizens a European alternative to America's GPS or Russia's Glonass signals. The Galileo system could be used in areas such as road safety, fee collection, traffic and parking management, fleet management, emergency call, goods tracking and tracing, online booking, safety of shipping, digital tachographs, animal transport, agricultural planning and environmental protection to drive growth and make citizens' lives easier."
What it will be used for... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, a decade after that it will be used to collect speeding fines on all roads. Which makes sense from a government point of view, but would be a practical nightmare.
Re:What it will be used for... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, there's no possible way to fiddle that system.
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Considering it's been illegal as hell for decades to mess with the odometer, yeah. You're moving from regular fraud to tax fraud on a system built to be fraud-resistant. You can't even use a power drill to roll the numbers back now--and I've tried that on systems that let you, it takes eternity. To complicate the matter, even shit as old as 1980s has the numbers locked to the whole mechanical system controlling it; the stuff holding this together isn't bolted in, but rather cut and bent from a plate, so
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Considering it's been illegal as hell for decades to mess with the odometer, yeah.
If miles were taxed there'd be a lot more incentive for ordinary people to fiddle, not just dodgy used-car salesmen.
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You wouldn't need to. It's a simple matter of disconnecting it entirely - drive, but don't rank up the miles. Might mean driving without a speedometer too, depending how it's built.
I imagine on a modern car the engine control computer also keeps track though, so there'd be a discrepancy if anyone were suspicious enough to check.
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In mechanical odo cars, the cluster is fitted over an interface with a solid square drive that connects to the speedo, and drives the odo. You'd have to disconnect the entire cluster to do that. Some such cars don't have a tach on the automatic transmission version, because it's too complex to set up mechanically and not relevant and so just added expense and potential breakage. You can swap the cluster, but then you have a different cluster with some random amount of mileage on it.
In electronic control
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No you can legally fudge the odometer, you just have to mention that on the title when you sell it. It varies by state, but in Arizona they call these "box c" cars (Box C is a portion of the title that indicates that the actual mileage of the car doesn't match what is listed on the odometer, and so writing down the mileage is optional.)
Used car dealers do this all the time, though they tend to sell the cars as box A when they do so (box A is where you list the actual mileage.) Box B is where you put so many
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You're also dramatically increasing the incentives for fraud, while still being terribly unlikely you would get caught.
This is silly. The odometer and speedometer is controlled by two small wires coming from the transmission. It's TRIVIAL to disconnect them, and reconnect them for inspection. Then
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Uh. In mechanical systems, the odometer is controlled by a mechanical linkage, not computer telling it to tick up slowly. Same for the speedometer. That's why people used to use power drills to roll it back, but it takes too long.
In electronic systems, miles are recorded in the ECU. The odo is reading that, and will have to be connected for inspection. For technical reasons, you cannot disconnect the ECU during engine operation.
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Uncommon since the early 90s.
You're an idiot. It would take you 30 seconds online to find out how to disconnect your speedometer/odometer. It will not otherwise impact operation in the slightest, and is trivially easy to do, as I said. Your transmission simply has a "speed sensor" that you can disconnect. I've done it on my own vehicles, so I can say, wi
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A friend's late 90s Seat Alhambra was as easy as disconnecting a single cable. You lost the speedo as well and the mileage never increased. It was a company car with limited yearly mileage allowance and he liked to take it on long holiday drives.
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The Dutch proposal called for a tax based on congestion. Busy road->more expensive, i.e. it was both time and place sensitive. The idea was to offer drivers a monetary incentive to not use the roads when they are busiest, alleviating traffic jams for those who do need to be on that road at that time. Odometers don't cut it for this use case.
This would have replaced the current ownership tax in favor of a system where the heaviest users pay the most.
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If that tax isn't intended to be confiscatory or punitive (i.e. "we hate cars a lot", as with many urban planner types), but economic ("let's use price signals to balance supply and demand of a finite resource"), then it's a great idea -- so long as the data don't get used for something nefarious, which is a long shot. Some places in the US do this, with billboards saying things like "it's 50 cents to go this way", and transponders (EZPass) in the cars.
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The pricing was calculated to even out for users who drive an average amount of km per year.
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The idea with location-based taxation would be to set different rates for different roads and times - it would be more expensive to drive a clogged road at rush hour than it would be to drive the same road at an earlier or later hour.
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because a state does not have the power to tax a car driven in another state,
this won't work.
Recent changes in state laws across the US allow for multi-state toll-collection reciprocity agreements to enable all-electronic tolling.
The effect of these changes is that the entity that has the authority to tax you has effectively subcontracted with other authories in other state and the terms of that reciprocity agreement is that it makes you liable for certain things that didn't happen in your state of residence. Today that is traversal on toll roads, it's not a stretch to say that also includes miles
Re:What it will be used for... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a stupidly expensive way to do road tax.
If you want to do that, electronic booths are much simpler - Italy has them already. Any motorway, you take a ticket when you get on, pay when you get off. You don't need multi-billion pound satellite systems to do it.
And Galileo doesn't "send" signals from the car to the satellites. The car "receives" the current position from the satellites. So there's absolutely NOTHING in this that couldn't be done without Galileo (hell, we have GPS for a start!). And, to be honest, the easiest tax is just to tax petrol and diesel more.
Tracking devices in the car make NO difference here. If you want to tax, you do not need them, and they are actually easily tampered with / jammed and more costly than just deploying an ANPR or toll system anyway.
Speeding fines on all roads? Fuck, to me that's reason enough to let them do it. STOP FUCKING BREAKING THE LAW. If you want to speed, campaign for higher speed limits (a proposal TOTALLY IGNORED by the electorate last time it was brought up in the UK political system), not disregarding the laws we have.
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If you want to tax, you do not need them, and they are actually easily tampered with / jammed and more costly than just deploying an ANPR or toll system anyway.
ANPR has several problems - you need cameras on every street corner, it lets the government know everywhere you go, people can put false plates on their cars, etc.
(No, the government probably won't see any of those as a problem, but their opposition will...)
A GPS system could just measure distance traveled, not locations or any other data. The car could refuse to work if it doesn't receive a GPS signal that makes sense. If it's in a tamper-proof box then hacking it could be difficult enough that most people
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Like when you go into a tunnel.
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Gee, if only the car engineers could think of problems like that.
Maybe you could call them and get involved in the design process. Without your input they might make a car whose engines switch off two microseconds after losing the GPS signal.
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Without your input they might make a car whose engines switch off two microseconds after losing the GPS signal.
So, brain box, exactly how long is a car to be allowed to run with no GPS signal?
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The car could refuse to work if it doesn't receive a GPS signal that makes sense.
Like when you go into a tunnel.
That ^^ got modded "insightful"?
In that case I expect this will get modded "Makes Cowboy Neil look like a luser":
if (last_good_GPS_signal() == near_a_known_tunnel_entrance()) {
use_the_speedo_to_calculate_distance();
}
else {
use_the_GPS();
}
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It would take some engineering skill up front, but it's the sort of thing that could be commoditized.
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ANPR has several problems - you need cameras on every street corner, it lets the government know everywhere you go, people can put false plates on their cars, etc.
(No, the government probably won't see any of those as a problem, but their opposition will...)
A GPS system could just measure distance traveled, not locations or any other data. The car could refuse to work if it doesn't receive a GPS signal that makes sense. If it's in a tamper-proof box then hacking it could be difficult enough that most people wouldn't bother.
So you don't trust plate readers, as the government can track you, but you believe that a GPS system will be used to ONLY measure "distance traveled, not locations or other data."
Do you have any basic understanding on how GPS type systems work?
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I really can't see how GPS (or galileo) (or odometer checking) could be more usefull than taxing the gas/diesel, since both systems could be cheated, but you cannot drive without gas.
And there is another point of taxing gas (versus km driven): it estimulates people to buy more economic mileage cars.
So, why change a system that (a) works and (b) it's fair to a system that can be cheated and it's not so fair?
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Electric Cars are to blame for Tax-By-Distance. Electric Cars don't pay petrol taxes. As more electric cars hit the road, taxes collected from petrol will keep going down, as the number of cars total continues to rise. Electric car drivers think they are getting a free pass, but they are about to get a rude awakening once the governments figure out a tax them equally. Roads are not free. They cost a lot of money to build and maintain, and those fat pigs called Electric Cars weighing as much as an SUV
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As vehicles become more fuel efficient, the amount of tax you collect goes down. We are facing that problem in several states in the US, and said states are supposedly giving more thought to pay-as-you-drive taxes instead of more gas taxes (which, even if you do raise the taxes, as cars become more fuel efficient, you're tax revenue still declines).
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Oops... That should be "your tax revenue", not "your're"... Can't believe I did that... :(
Re:What it will be used for... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I don't agree that camera surveillance or a ticket booth system on motorways in a solution for all parts of Europe, I think the military and economic applications of EU's own GPS system are probably more important than the surveillance applications. While a direct military confrontation with the USA and EU is exceedingly unlikely now, or at any point in the future (thanks to NATO), there could be future proxy wars where EU and US opinions differ, and where the US might conceivably use jamming of the GPS signals to e.g. to render EU wardrones inoperable. Such situation might arise in the Middle East for example, where Europeans seem more open to the Arab/Palestinian causes than the Americans, who are very staunchly allied with Israel. Or any other military situation involving proxies – bottom line is, it's not a bad idea to develop new military technology that's not dependent on tech by others, especially as wardrones are looking more and more like the future of warfare, and sooner or later EU must start producing its own wardrones.
Further down the road, trade disputes between the US and EU are much more common and likely than any forms of military engagement. Should a trade dispute escalate, it's conceivable though unlikely, that there might develop a situation where the Americans would leverage their control over GPS as a weapon in trade negotiations, especially if the tech under dispute is dependent on positioning tech – like is true for more and more of new high tech. Look at what happened to Samsung in Apple v. Samsung – essentially a modern form of protectionism through a flawed trial by court. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.
For EU, it's not a bad to have its own positioning system just in case for situations like those. While it seems currently very unlikely that the US would abuse its control over GPS in any situation, no one knows what future could hold. As deploying a GPS system is a process that takes years or decades to complete, if a need arises at some point, it's probably too late by then. Especially the wardrone tech seems like something that the EU might want its own GPS system for already now (think exporting this tech to countries not allied with US). And on the good side, I can imagine many worse uses for EU tax dollars than developing space technology!
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This is a stupidly expensive way to do road tax.
It would be ... if it was being built by a government just for road taxing, but it's not, and it isn't.
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Electronic booths are simpler, but not cheaper when you have to blanket the entire country with them.
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You'll notice that on many roads, nearly all drivers go substantially faster than the speed limit. These are isolated roads (in the US: Eisenhower interstate highway system), not residential streets where bot
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You don't even need GPS to do that. Just use the odometer. It's how the US insurance trackers work - they don't have a GPS unit - they plug into the OBDII port and get the actual mileage from the car.
E
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Road tax per kilometer driven. By having a tracking device in every car. This has already been discussed in Dutch parliament, and so far has been rejected, but it probably won't be forever; I know people who are actually in favor of such draconian surveillance.
It would only be discussed in Dutch parliament, as the Netherlands is very flat and has no mountains or tunnels.
But why wouldn't they just use the car odometer?
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Lots of these ideas get discussed but never go anywhere though. They've had the same discussion in the UK a few times but it's one of those issues that has so little public support they have zero hope of ever going ahead with it.
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Raise the taxes on fuel. Simple and effective. For lorries and buses, european legislation requires from the eighties that they're equipped with a tachigraph that will record the mileage and the peak speed.
The real reason for Galileo (Score:2)
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You missed the key point, which is:
under civilian control
US civilians might be able to use it as well when the revolution comes ... just sayin'.
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Simply put, they don't trust us enough to use our system...
Yep.
and are willing to spend billions of Euros to prove it.
Huh, now it's just about proving it? Think much?
Perhaps, maybe the GPS constellation should become a UN protectorate and no nation should be able to weaponize it... Just sayin'
Yeah, but then, to say it with your own words:
Simply put, they don't trust us
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The Galileo is a old project started at the time when the GPS was really not trustable at all if your are not part of the USA military. Back to his time, USA military reserved any right to control the signal to lower his availability or his precision. Galileo was first a political move against this very real fact. This move somewhat changed the USA official claim by stating that the GPS signal will always be available without manual distortion. But this is only a claim. The pragmatic reality is that the USA
GNSS (Score:3)
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Well, obviously, you need both. You'd like a GNSS (a system of navigation satellites) to help you navigate. But how will the satellites navigate themselves? They need an additional GSNS (system for navigation of satellites).
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GNSS - Grammar Nazi Surveillance System
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Out of curiosity, since we aren't using latin/greek inflection these days, why does it matter if you "split" an infinitive in English?
Actually, it never mattered. The whole issue was cooked up by some class-concious grammar nazis in 19th century who didn't really know Latin, but wanted to attempt to assert their superiority by creating an artificial link between the then modern form of English back to Renaisance times rather than the actual Germanic roots of the language that introduced the infinitive form with "to/zu"...
We are perhaps fortunate to not be permanently stuck in that brief period of insanity. ;^)
Unfortunately, that split in
GNSS? (Score:2)
Plans to start up the EU's first global satellite navigation system (GNSS) built under civilian control,
Well, it's either a GSNS or it should be global navigation satellite system. Pick one please. To be fair, at least the editors were able to cut and paste accurately.
Useful for more than just navigation (Score:2)
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Interesting)
You assume that European's view America as a friend who will always let them use GPS?
Of course friends don't spy on friends or apply pressure to force diplomatic aircraft out of the sky, etc, etc.
There's other reasons.
Like spending European money on European technology projects & creating European jobs - even if they seem unnecessary.
That's a winner for me (speaking as a European).
Depend too much on the technology of another power and you end up belonging to that power entirely.
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"Like spending European money on European technology projects & creating European jobs - even if they seem unnecessary. That's a winner for me (speaking as a European)."
Beware of the Broken Window Fallacy though. Just because it's europeans doing it, you wouldn't want to pay for teams to dig & refill holes, would you?
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We had this problem repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan. European allies would frequently be a liability because they weren't communicating or coordinating properly.
Look... do as you please and my point is not to be mean here. I'm just saying... we are you allies and this move isn't actually helpful either to you or to us. It just creates complication to no purpose. But whatever. In the end it doesn't really matter.
This isn't anything new. It's been going on since WW2.
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I didn't say the US doesn't have a superior bargaining position that it frequently uses to get a favorable bargain. All things being equal... its only fair.
What I said was that if the US offered a reciprocal deal many european powers would turn it down. Especially if the treaty included nasty penalties for breaking the rules.
What the Europeans want is to improve their bargaining position. As to spying... they do each other and to the US all the time.
What would the US lose by not spying on the Europeans? Pos
Re:To what end? (Score:5, Informative)
Because we don't trust the Americans, basically. They have a tendency to temporarily switch off GPS in areas of conflict and only share the encrypted military signal with allies that are fighting with them (not neutrals, etc.).
This tends to fuck up shipping in the areas around it, and lots of other problems.
Additionally, the accuracy of Galileo is better. That's a plus point in itself. More satellites in the sky - on whatever system - means more correlation, means better signal in cities and valleys. It doesn't matter what standard, so long as the receiver can decode them and correlate their information. I lose signal every time I go into London, because the high-rises block it. And driving around London's one-way systems when you're not familiar with them? That's the one time you WANT a GPS device to work properly. It's worth it for that alone.
Additionally, the Russians AND the Chinese are doing the same. So Asia and Europe have their own systems. Big deal. Maybe it's because we just don't want to rely on the Americans to hold to their promises. And maybe it's because - for our own military needs - we do not want to be dependent on even an ally. Imagine telling the American people that GPS only works for as long as they stay friends with France. See how much uproar there is, even if they are allies at the moment.
It's leverage over Europe, that we don't need, and that the Americans have exercised in the Middle East. GPS, the commercial / public signal, was switched off and jammed because it might help set up attacks. So entire nations had fucked up GPS because the US thought someone was going to bomb somewhere. That's not a commercially-viable technology to navigate a ship or a plane by. And reason enough to build a replacement that has a bit more "local" control over it, but harms nobody.
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jamming GPS is actually quite difficult at least at a distance. The signals are low-power but very directional and if someone ignores satellites at low sky angles especially in the direction of hostile forces then singals from the other satellites in the constellation should be uncorrupted.
Local jamming of GPS is easier to carry out. If there is only a few km or so between the receivers and the jammers then they can be swamped or subverted, fed corrupt data to make them inaccurate. General jamming isn't going to work unless aircraft fly over the area to be jammed and that puts them at risk of being shot down in a conflict. They also need to stay on station for extended periods and as yet drones can't carry the amount of equipment and generating capacity to do a good job in such circumstances.
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Just so the Americans can jam Galileo whenever they want with no impact on their own system.
And the converse is true. Seems fair to me.
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We don't trust our own governments either, that's why this is being built by civilians .
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Russia and china aren't allied with the US. They can't use the GPS system for military purposes. Where as you are offered that by the Americans.
As to shipping routes etc, the reason for that is that you don't want the enemy using your own navigation system against you. So we do encrypt the system in areas of conflict. But why wouldn't the europeans do the same thing?
If NATO is involved in something then why wouldn't the EU do the exact same thing? The alternative is that you make your system avaliable to en
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So you build receivers that work on the US, EU, Russian *and* Chinese systems. If one or two decide to cut the signal, you can still navigate. Plus you can use them for verification: If three of the four put you in a 50m radius of a location, and the other says you are 2KM to the south, you can disregard the outlyer as malfunction/jamming/subversion.
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We are your friends. Actually. We've been your allies for a long time and we've been faithful throughout. I'm not sure what we'd have to do to improve your impression.
Stop being a bully. Listen to your friends, rather than deriding them as "Old Europe", when they tell you that the Iraq war is a shitty idea.
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"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
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No eternal allies huh? That's not what your politicians tell us.
Your leaders always swear to us that we're friends forever.
So your leaders lie to us? Or you don't know what you're talking about?
Its one of the two... if not both.
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Additionally, the accuracy of Galileo is better. That's a plus point in itself.
In it's base state the *proposed* Galileo system is more accurate than the *current* GPS system. By the time Galileo launches, enough of the new generation GPS satellites will be in orbit that GPS will be as or more accurate. Now, when all devices are upgraded to support blending of Glonass, GPS and Galileo solutions then ev
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Because we don't trust the Americans, basically. They have a tendency to temporarily switch off GPS in areas of conflict and only share the encrypted military signal with allies that are fighting with them (not neutrals, etc.).
This tends to fuck up shipping in the areas around it, and lots of other problems.
So you want to ship product through an area that is known to have an ongoing armed conflict? How is that even sane?
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The entire official claimed reason for galileo is better accuracy in europe.
Wrong.
The system will never have reliable or even usable coverage outside the EU unless they massively increased the planned size.
Wrong.
You need about 50 birds for global coverage
Wrong.
and the galileo system is planned for 6 birds.
Wrong.
Other than that, yeah.
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I wish someone would tell us that, since France seems to be a mostly peaceful country these days (more than the US), and that would be one more stick with which to whack my government with when it gets bellicose.
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Not shutting GPS signal off, ok but it was not designed to be altered this way.
Please read this instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_Positioning_System#Selective_availability [wikipedia.org]
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Why would the Europeans need anything else? They get everything the americans get out of it. Including military targeting.
When the system was originally being discussed, the US government were fairly strongly pushing the EU not to implement it, and gave the reasoning that the US would never shut NavStar down so the EU didn't need to implement their own system. When it became clear that the EU were going ahead with the experimental phase of galileo, the US government changed their tack, complaining that they wouldn't be able to shut it down in the event of a conflict and that therefore the EU shouldn't build it. (In the end t
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As to the conflicting arguments... that is a misunderstanding.
We said we wouldn't unilaterally disable the system in such a way that it would cause problems for European military or business interests. We certainly did not say we would never encrypt the system to lock anyone else out.
As to our complaint, our issue was that the system as designed didn't seem to have the ability for YOU to lock your own system in the even that you needed to do that.
We're your allies. We're not aholes. We told you that we woul
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As to our complaint, our issue was that the system as designed didn't seem to have the ability for YOU to lock your own system in the even that you needed to do that.
That is a *good thing* - you can't expect people to rely on systems that are designed to be shut down on a whim. Designing systems to be robust and reliable promotes adoption (a good example of this is the Internet - it has proved to be extremely robust and has benefitted society massively because people know they can rely on it. I'm extremely unconvinced that the same would be true if it was designed to be shut down on a whim, especially with the corporate interests that are frequently involved in politi
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US GPS system had this feature and was adopted thus rendering your argument obviously invalid.
As to the US ahole status, that's mostly because the US stands as scapegoat for whatever political discontent is present throughout the world. The US is beyond tired of it. From the saddest mud hut living countries to the parliaments of europe... when the rabble get upset... blame the Americans. We're apparently to blame for everything. Never mind the problems were there before we ever arrived and will be there lon
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Re:To what end? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe we do not want to be dependent on something so important that is not under our control?
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The only time NATO has fought under the treaty's Article 5, the "attack on one is an attack on all" umbrella was when the mighty US was laid low by a bunch of Saudis armed with boxcutters. If the US wants to get out from under the NATO umbrella, on you go but watch out for those scary Muslims with their oh-so-nasty knives! Papercut!
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Don't admit to the Saudi connection. They are well-connected, are rich and control oil. We're supposed to pretend they were all from Afganistan.
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So the decades of US support during the cold war against the Soviet Union was apparently not a real thing?
You apparently are totally unaware of the cold war.
NATO was created to provide and formalize US military support for your nations. That was the whole POINT of NATO.
Think WE needed NATO? Think the soviets were actually a threat to the US? Not really. We could stand them off indefinitely and we knew it. They were a threat to YOU. They wanted to run tanks through YOUR streets and take over YOUR governments
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This, exactly.
Nobody wants to invade Europe because Europe is most valuable, to pretty much everyone else, as a peaceful trading partner.
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Don't invert the reality:
US military try to police the world by involving others EU countries.
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The primary downside the US GPS system is that it limits high precision navigation to military purposes. For anything not needing to be super precise, GPS works just fine.
Anyone can get extremely high precision GPS (sub-inch) with off the shelf hardware.
You just not going to be using low cost consumer grade hardware and you need a fixed base station.
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Europeans wants the control of there signal, that's so simple.
There remember that the USA very easily break there promise that the dollar will always be convertible in gold.
There are since under the economic control of the USA and don't wants to make this kind of mistake again.
Last massive international spying scandal don't help any USA dependency, it's understandable.
Complex dependencies have been part of situations that have degenerated. The history is full of facts like this.
We are allies, each with our
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When did the US use GPS against the europeans?
*rolls eyes*
As to the spying scandal... that's more due to the inept diplomacy of our fearless leader. The man is a twit. He let the europeans use the spying issue to make us look foolish. That is all. Your leaders weren't surprised by it. We had signed agreements with you on this stuff ages ago. We shared intelligence. You knew and you accepted our activities because we shared our intelligence with you.
What is more, you spy on us all the time and we in turn get
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Remember: U.S. citizens are also at the mercy of the U.S. decision making machine.
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Simple, the U.S. at any point in time can lock out ALL use of GPS satellites for any reason they deem necessary.
Anyone who suggests that has no idea how much critical infrastructure is heavily reliant on GPS for timing.
Then again, Obama probably isn't either.
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Well, we're trying to boot strap a private sector space program. You've likely seen what is happening with the new orbital launch start up companies.
That is our next move. We'd like to make NASA more of a science and coordination department that does lots of hard science and possibly sets goals. But the actual space rockets etc have always been built by private contractors and the most reliable source of funding is the private sector. If we can bootstrap a private sector space program it should be more effi
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NASA has never built rockets, it's bought them from Boeing and a whole host of other US companies over the years. The new "private" launch startup companies are Seven Dwarfs [toolbox.com] who will rely to a large part on US government money via NASA and other organisations like US DoD to offset their costs and pad the bottom line.
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For now. And we'll pay that. The idea is that over time we want to get more for less by giving up control of it to a more organic market driven system that might be more innovative and consistent in its objectives.
Recently we had the director of NASA say his biggest mission was Muslim outreach. That's just politics obviously and stupid politics at that... but its typical of the way political organizations work. They don't have a consistent bottom line. They can be very mercurial... shifting randomly one way
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Europe isn't focussed on space. It sees a space industry and a space presence as a valuable asset to civil life in Europe and elsewhere. The US sees it mostly as another place to put military hardware.
As for "maintaining focus" we've seen other powers lose, for example, intrinsic manned space capability and having to go cap-in-hand to the Old Enemy to get their people into orbit. No names no pack-drill, but as you point out retrenchment could happen to ESA too.
The US space launch business has never been hea
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As to military hardware, that isn't true. We see space as a long term economic, scientific, political, and military resource.
All the above.
As to the US using Russian launch capacity for a few months. What of it? Its for the international space station which we mostly put in place to give Europe a role in space.
Why else do we have an international space station? It doesn't do enough scientific work to be worth the expense. Its mostly a political gimmick.
And it is those sorts of boondoggles that drain our spa
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Re:To what end? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the error (enough to turn meters into mm) in GPS is identical for a few km, so a base station is placed statically, spends some serious time with a high quality antenna getting its true location and then transmits the error to a compatible receiver. Base stations and GPS receivers with radios are not cheap. ($2000- $20000).
It's not quite the easy solution AC makes it out to be above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Kinematic [wikipedia.org]
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... until the next time when Congress gets collectively drunk and decides to shut down the government, and someone puts up Faraday-cage Barrycades* around the GPS satellites. Yes, it sounds crazy -- but so did the Barrycades around the memorials at the National Mall, until the Feds did it.
Point is, governments occasionally get crazy and do crazy things. So do the European ones, of course, but it's nice to be able to use satellite navigation even if one particular government goes crazy and throws a tantrum.
*
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But not secure to use from a political point of view.
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Or you could just put tax on fuel, and have a pretty good equivalent without all the complex surveillance.
Oh, hey, Europe already has high fuel taxes. They've solved it already.
Hmm, I wonder whether there could be another reason why they want to track all vehicles all the time?
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Galileo ... will inform users within seconds of any satellite failure, making it suitable for safety-critical applications such as guiding cars, running trains and landing aircraft. "
This is something GPS, GLONASS does not offer... the ability to inform users that there is a satellite failure. This is a huge advantage. Because of this GALILEO can be used in the future in airplanes as a primary navigation system.
Please note that this feature is already implemented since a decade by the EGNOS network. EGNOS monitor the GPS signal (and maybe the Glonass signal, this was planned but I am not certain if it was implemented), verify his resolution, and generate back to space two kind of informations that will be reflected by geostationary satellites: 1) a error correction factor to be applied to the GPS (or Glonass) signal to be more precise, 2) a safety signal that assert the signals validity. The EGNOS network analyze