The GPS Wars Have Begun (techcrunch.com) 210
Where are you? That's not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position. From a report: Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities. That's a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check out this article, or for the comprehensive history, here's the book-length treatment).
Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry. Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia's GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.
Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry. Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia's GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.
All for one, and one for one. (Score:4, Interesting)
Kind of funny that the Chinese don't trust the Russians either otherwise they'd be using theirs.
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The multiplication of satellite positioning constellation is about securing access to the military-grade signals and chips.
Europe has spent 10B€ to avoid depending on ITAR control of military GPS and how access to these devices, and fair price competition, is critical for many arm sales.
Re:All for one, and one for one. (Score:5, Informative)
The US GPS, Chinese Beidou and Russian GLONASS are all positioning systems intended primarily for military use but which offer a degraded lower-accuracy signal for commercial and private users. The EU's Galileo navigation system offers precision to within a few cms, effectively military-grade accuracy, to paying commercial users as well as open but less-accurate position data similar to the "free" GPS, GLONASS and Beidou systems.
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If I recall correctly, Clinton disabled the lower-accuracy for non-military. Possibly because civilian devices were being used by troops.
Also the US is currently deploying satellites for it's own next generation GPS system with higher accuracy than anything out there.
Re:All for one, and one for one. (Score:5, Informative)
Selective Availability was a deliberate degradation of the non-military positioning accuracy, "fuzzing" the reported position data. This has been switched off but the most accurate GPS signals are still encrypted and intended only for military and government use, even in the new more accurate GPS satellites being launched.
The Galileo system provides that level of military-grade accuracy (to within a cm or so) to commercial customers, not just the military forces of participating countries and allied forces. It is still encrypted and requires payment and vetting of customers. Galileo's Open Service is accurate to 1 metre, a lot better than GPS' equivalent free service.
It's entirely possible commercial pressures will mean higher-accuracy GPS signals might be made available to civilian users in the future but at the moment only Galileo can provide that sort of service over-the-counter.
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Not to mention that more overdetermination is good-- lets you average out more non-systemic error.
There's also the whole issue of commercial providers offering high quality differential corrections that get centimeter or better accuracy out of theoretically less-capable signals.
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"Clinton" didn't disable or even decide anything about this. Learn it's from its.
This is so easy [gps.gov] to check, you have to be an idiot to post a comment like that.
you'd be an idiot to think it Clinton's idea, yes (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah I agree, you WOULD [archives.gov] have to be an idiot to say it was Clinton's idea - instead of reading it, where it directly says it was the direct recommendation from the Department of Defense which wrote up the entire thing and proposed it to him.
"Statement by the Press Secretary
RSS Feed White House News
Today, the President __ __ __accepted the _recommendation_ of the Department of Defense__ __ __ to end procurement of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites that have the capability to intentionally degrade th
Re: you'd be an idiot to think it Clinton's idea, (Score:2, Insightful)
Dude, what is wrong with you?!? Go take a chill pill or seek some help.
Most people understand that a President or any leader isn't qualified in anything he is actually leading. That they don't make decisions in a vacuum.
So in that real world context, the poster's post on Clinton making the decision is far more accurate than your drivel. As a leader, he made a decision. This isn't a situation of Bush Sr raised taxes when it was actually Congress.
Re:All for one, and one for one. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not really true any longer that the military signals provide better accuracy. DGPS approaches, including SBAS (FAA's WAAS being the first), can provide approximately the same accuracy as the military PPS, while also providing integrity assurances (in that domain's jargon, integrity means you have a bound on how wrong your calculated position is). The main advantage of the military signals now is improved availability, both in terms of anti-jamming and anti-spoofing measures.
There is some advantage for military receivers in that they can use L2 to estimate dispersion due to the ionosphere, which is easily the largest source of errors for SPS receivers, but an increasing number of satellites transmit civil signals on a second frequency or use "codeless" approaches to make the same estimations using the military encrypted signals on L1 and L2.
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The funny part is that civilian users need more accurate systems then the military. When you're dropping a 2000lb GPS guided bomb, 6 for accuracy is more than enough. When you want to know what Lane your car is in, it ain't.
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In military terms, GPS is in reality pretty useless because the single band is well known and can be jammed across a broad scale. In defensive only terms to secure a country, satellites are a waste of money, radio towers make more sense, defensively you only care if it works in your country and along your coast. So cellular network systems can be tweaked to provide very accurate data, with the persons phone handling the processing. This lets you run local positioning for local needs and when a citizen leave
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How about when you use them all at the same time? The accuracy of the position must improve considerably, right? (I don’t know the details on how they work, so I’m only guessing.)
Re:All for one, and one for one. (Score:4, Informative)
All else being equal, if you use N times as many satellites to compute a position/velocity/time solution, your expected accuracy improves by a factor of sqrt(N). But it's not quite that good when you have a multi-solution due to uncertainties in the system clocks between the constellations.
Even in the ideal case, you can usually get more improvement from other techniques than just averaging more inputs. The first thing to attack is ionospheric delays, then a suite of several other errors that are similar in magnitude: GNSS ephemeris (position and velocity) errors, errors in the satellite clocks, other atmospheric delays, etc.
Simple differential approaches use a receiver at a known location to compute (the sums of) several of those errors at each time of interest. Because a single receiver can't distinguish certain errors from each other, those corrections become less accurate over distance. More sophisticated approaches use a widely separated set of receivers to break the errors down into the individual components, so that the corrections can be applied over a wider area.
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> All else being equal, if you use N times as many satellites to compute a position/velocity/time solution, your expected accuracy improves by a factor of sqrt(N)
To the extent all the errors are uncorrelated. If there's something that's equally wrong with all observations, e.g. the ionosphere delay model is bad for a direction, adding more observations doesn't eliminate that error.
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
We just pay for our own satellites with our taxes and use all the other ones for free, just like everybody else.
More satellites, more precision.
I miss the 'war' part of the article.
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The "war" part comes due to national mandates, such as China demanding that any device sold in China use the Chinese sat network. Or the US actively prohibiting the inclusion of Chinese chips due to national security concerns. This may mean fragmentation in certain markets, which creates problems for vendors wishing to sell a single device to both markets.
From a technological standpoint, there's no real problem, of course. The issue is political. Then again, if the issue *weren't* political, we wouldn't
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PLUS, there are at least two systems in development, scheduled to be fully deployed by 2020: China's Baidou and UK's Galileo.
Current (newer) chips are already able to make use of GPS, Glonass and Galileo.
The West really doesn't need Baidou. At all. GPS by itself was pretty good but now we have 3 systems we can use, even without it.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for crediting us here in the UK with Galileo, but it's an EU project, not a UK one, and we appear to be shut out of it because of Brexit.
Payment (Score:2)
Well the UK put $1.4 billion pounds into the project which, apparently, isn't good enough to have any say or special access. If it were me I'd ask for the money back but apparently May isn't interested.
Re: Payment (Score:2, Interesting)
The whole Brexit debacle is being handled by people that are bungling it purely out of spite. The UK is to the EU as the US is to NATO - pay for everything all the time but get bullied by your only reason and biggest dependent - Germany
Re: Payment (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, what? Yes, the UK does net pay into the EU, as one would expect from one of its richer countries. Germany however, has a net contribution over twice that of the UK (larger as a share of its economy, too). France, too, gives more. This is largely due to the fact that the UK gets two-thirds of its net contribution back as a special rebate. In fact, if you look at net contribution as a share of the national economy, the UK comes in ninth.
My four year old supports herself (Score:2)
Taking care of my four-year-old daughter costs about $25,000/year.
I spend about 25% of my salary on stuff for her ($25,000).
She spends 100% of her $12 income on herself.
By your reasoning, I'm not supporting her, she's supporting herself.
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The UK has not done that poorly with their deal with the EU. It is the countries in the Eurozone that are in the shitter. The UK is not in the Eurozone.
In fact the UK, since it joined the EU, has finally become independent in food production, thanks in no small part to EU farming subsidies. Which is quite a feat consider that was not the case like over a century.
Interesting. Rather be engineer than farmer (Score:2)
That's interesting. On the other hand, I'd rather be a senior software engineer than a subsistence farmer. Growing your own food is good if and only if it's better than what they had been spending their time and resources on.
You mentioned it's largely because of subsidies - the taxpayer paying them more than the value of the goods produced. That sounds like an inefficiency, a bad thing.
Re:My four year old supports herself (Score:4, Informative)
This is utterly incorrect. We import 3/4 of our food (the official figure is 66%) - which corresponds to 100% in the winder and 50% in the summer. Britain has not been self sufficient in food since the industrial revolution, and prior to then depended on large scale starvation to keep the population down. Our climate and geography make it impossible to grow food for much of the year.
Most of the imported food (by volume) comes from the EU (on account of the Americas and Australia being a long way away).
The main consequence of a no-deal Brexit will be no food in England. However, Boris and Rees-Mogg will be away in their holiday homes abroad, so they don't care. The impact on the rest of the EU will be fairly minimal except in a few industries. (Eg Farming in Spain will suffer a bit).
Disclaimer: I spend 10 years working in food distribution in the UK.
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It's better to be inefficient then depending on a foreign power for your food.
Previous government here was arguing that we could buy our food from China (how the world has changed) and that the free market would take care of food safety, those Chinese would never have unsafe food as it would be bad for business. Now, half a dozen years later, the Chinese are really pissed off at us and would possibly cut us off if we were that dependent. Our allies such as America are undependable as well.
Completely dependent on a singl foreign power, yes (Score:2)
> It's better to be inefficient then depending on a foreign power for your food.
Certainly you wouldn't want to be dependent on a single foreign power for the majority of your food. That does NOT mean it's bad to buy bananas from India and coffee from Brazil. The United States imports more food than it exports, we are not self-reliant. We are also not at the mercy of any other nation for our food. Choose any country and we could stop importing food from them and it wouldn't hurt us much - and it would pro
Btw, weather happens in the UK sometimes (Score:2)
It also occurs to me that sometimes the UK has a draught (comparatively, for the crops they grow), severe storms, or other other issues that cause a growing season to be largely unproductive. The land area devoted to farming in the UK is small enough that a bad season can affect most of it.
I would much rather have diverse food sources.
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Not in the slightest. As I mentioned, Germany is putting in over twice as much in absolute figures. So the analogy would only hold up if she was spending about $12,000 on herself. (there are other holes in the analogy, but that's the biggest one).
I shouldn't have said "your reasoning" (Score:2)
I should have worded that differently. I shouldn't have said "by your reasoning". I should have said "by percentage of her income".
Of course you're already aware of the problems with the "as a share of their economy" reasoning.
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By your reasoning, I'm not supporting her, she's supporting herself.
The UK got pulled out of the deepest of economic shits by joining the EU and now just wants no part of it.
Think of it this way. Your daughter rebelled and left home. Then when she got into financial strife after being kicked out by her boyfriend she came home for support. You put her on her feet, and then she buggered off again.
That bitch!
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Tiny? The UK is #8 in the EU by the area. Larger, in fact, than the very agricultural Romania.
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The whole Brexit debacle is being handled by people that are bungling it purely out of spite. The UK is to the EU as the US is to NATO - pay for everything all the time but get bullied by your only reason and biggest dependent - Germany
Talk about deluded. The Brexit negotiations were done by professionals on the EU side and by unprepared amateurs on the UK side - no wonder they got their ass handed to them. And what you call "spite" and "being bullied" should have been the simple realisation that the EU negotiators act in the best interest of their member states - and the UK isn't one.
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Even with professionals the UK couldn't have got a good deal from the negotiations, simply because of the political situation in the UK.
The UK didn't know what it voted for or what it wanted. All sorts of nonsense was proposed before the referendum, none of it at all realistic except for the "Norway model" that was immediately rejected within hours of the result. So all the UK had left was cakeism - the strategy document literally said "have our cake and eat it".
Naturally the EU simply stuck to the basic pr
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WTF is that even trying to mean, you fat cunt?
Dollar Pounds (Score:2)
Heheehe I just realized i said $1.4 billion pounds. I guess that's like £1.4 billion dollars.
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isn't good enough to have any say or special access.
Of course it's good enough, but the problem is not what's logical, it's what the two world leaders in bureaucracy defined in legal contracts at a time where no one expected someone to leave the EU.
It's not a case of "wants, or asks" it's a case of piling through a metric shitton of legal documents to see what at all is even possible.
I will bet you a dollar that within a few years the UK is back in the Galileo program as part of the post Brexit trade agreements.
Re: Payment (Score:4, Insightful)
The EU has, quite properly, been looking after the EU's interests. May still doesn't seem to have worked out yet what she wants. And Galileo isn't scheduled to provide full operational capability yet, so it's no big deal that it doesn't.
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Yes, because typically the US uses methods that are dickish at best.
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May still doesn't seem to have worked out yet what she wants.
I think what she wants is besides the point.
Half of her party are fucking nutcases who'd be happy to crash out with no deal. Even the most assholeish of those, Reese-Mogg, has conceded that we'll et benefits in 50 years (i.e. never). And yet he wants to leave anyway, because personal power is the number one goal.
The other half won't accept a deal which makes us worse off which in practice means no deal.
Oh and Corbyn and his fucking idiotic "6 test
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the UK is being shut out because _the UK_ demanded that non-EU nations would not have access, back when Galileo was being set up. In other words, it is the UK's own bloody fault for making that demand in the first place.
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It seems a large amount of the shitshow is our fault. If you find that one grain of truth in the owner of less abouth about bent bananas, you'll find that it was actually British rules that the EU as adopting. Apparently this is reason to leave.
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Even if the bananas rule was suggested by British supermarkets, the EU was under no obligation to comply.
What if they'd suggested jumping in a lake?
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But they did comply which made it easier for our industry to trade in Europe.
Vegetables generally have a class 1,2,3 or unclassified rating. For better or worse people like buying nice looking vegetables. Most countries in Europe had standards for such things. This is good because if you want to buy a box of veg for general sale, you can buy from anyone (rather than a known vendor) and you know what you'll get. Likewise if you're putting them in things instead, you can buy a lower grade and not overspend.
Co
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Oh, I'm not disagreeing with that assessment. I certainly don't think this is a big problem by any means (and as I said, there's literally no problem from the technology side). Calling it a "war" is rather overblown - just pointing out the potential area of contention the article was postulating on.
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How many Satellites will this be in total ?
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GLONASS is global. Do you even know what the acronym stands for?
The network had coverage issues because they did not launch new satellites at a fast enough rate to replace broken ones fast enough after the fall of the Soviet Union. But this is not the case anymore.
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Glonass is not a Global positioning system at all. It has 100% coverage of Russia and environs, but much less as you move out from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The system requires 18 satellites for continuous navigation services covering the entire territory of the Russian Federation, and 24 satellites to provide services worldwide. The GLONASS system covers 100% of worldwide territory.
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> This may mean fragmentation in certain markets
It may, by I don't really see any reason it should in most cases. Since a GPS receiver is basically just a radio receiver + computerized signal analysis, it makes multi-network compatibility really easy - all you need is a receiver that can receive signals across all the frequencies used (probably not an incredibly expensive upgrade), and somewhat more complicated software that can calculate your position from any of the networks (which has no inherent per
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You clearly missed the point about the Chinese having ability to shoot down satellites some while ago. /sarcasm
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
I miss the 'war' part of the article.
Back in the 1990s, the US DoD put out a statement that in the event of a conflict, GPS augmentation systems (which would now include things like the EU's EGNOS) would be considered a valid military target whether on friendly soil or not. It's part of the reason other States started to develop their own systems (except Russia, which was already well established with GLONAS by then).
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Precision and bespoke rockets from France.
Thats decades of new work making GPS French.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a few of issues.
When it was just GPS it was easier to jam/spoof. Now we can compare data from multiple systems to detect spoofing. Other services can provide greater precision than the US wishes civilians to have, or remove other restrictions like the maximum altitude and speed limits.
It's a good thing.
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Other services can provide greater precision than the US wishes civilians to have, or remove other restrictions like the maximum altitude and speed limits.
These are generally intentional artificial export restrictions necessary for US companies to make chips with GPS capabilities available outside the US.
It's perfectly legal to get GPS receivers without the restrictions in country. It costs too much to differentiate just for US market so most everyone ends up with lowest common denominator crap in their cell phones and computers.
yes its a good thing to compete... (Score:2)
all of the systems currently are VERY easy to block
hopefully the UK system might have some Point to Point information or mitigation
being able to get to the raw sensor data on a receiver is crucial as well as calibration
you can see a list of android phones and their capability here :
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/gnss
Apple need to step up in this regard and offer L5 Support, SBAS and BeiDou with offsets
Currently apple supports GPS (GALILEO which is compatible) GLONASS and augmentation fro
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More satellites, more precision.
Nope, doesn't quite work like that beyond a certain (rather low) number of satellites.
Wrong story headline (Score:5, Funny)
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Midichlorians! No more Star Trek references or I'll say Midichlorians again. I'm serious.
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How does it feel to have your geek card revoked for confusing Star Trek and Star Wars?
Worse than that time General Grievous took his star destroyers into the neutral zone.
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GPS can be arbitrarily degraded by the US (Score:3)
The synopsis left out a critical detail .. the fact that the US can either intentionally degrade the accuracy of the resulting signal by hundreds of meters.
Or they can disable its functionality completely over a certain area.
That's all on the whim of the US government. They haven't degraded the signal for decades, but they can and would in areas like a war theater or over an arbitrary "enemy" nation / region.
Under normal circumstances I would never expect the US to do so, but with the current government being as erratic as it is, you never know, and that uncertainty is certainly enough to have other nations redoubling their efforts to build competing systems.
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Why is this such a terrible thing? Of course they are going to degrade the civilian signal in a war zone, so the enemy can't use it to target them. Why is that in any way surprising? If you are in a war zone, the last thing you should be caring about is getting your fucking cell phone location services to work.
I absolutely, positively, guarantee that the Russian and Chinese systems have the same capability.
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Why is this such a terrible thing? Of course they are going to degrade the civilian signal in a war zone, so the enemy can't use it to target them. Why is that in any way surprising?
It's not surprising, but part of the issue is how precisely they can define the area over which the degradation can be applied. If you're a friendly State near a war zone, and the US cripples your aviation and/or shipping as collateral damage because you're in the degraded area, you might not stay friendly for long.
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It's a terrible thing if you aren't the American side of the conflict.. it means they'd have accurate data (the high-precision encrypted signal would still work) but the other side would be stuck using civilian grade signal.
Countries that are potentially hostile to the US don't want to be put in that situation, and putting up their own system is a hell of a lot easier than breaking strong encryption (especially if they have to do it repeatedly, which they almost certainly would since the US military isn't s
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I would not dispute that. However, degrading the accuracy of the enemy's weapons is likely to have the effect of killing a lot more people on my side. It is the kind of foot-shooting we have come to expect from Trump supporters - so, yes, we do need to worry about this kind of thinking.
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>"Under normal circumstances I would never expect the US to do so, but with the current government being as erratic as it is, you never know"
? The "government" is really no more "erratic" now than the year before, or the year before that, or before that, on and on. There is zero reason the GPS signals would be switched off or to "degraded mode" unless there were a credible threat.... and even then, you can bet it would be cautiously seriously considered before doing so, and then probably only under are
Another fine example (Score:3)
Another fine example of how competition leads to duplication of effort: the world only needs one constellation of positioning satellites, but has more than that already, and with more to come (because WE can't trust THEM. Insert your own candidates for WE and THEM)
This also demonstrates how the idea of a nation state is not compatible with space faring civilisations: we need to have more that one of everything because we can't trust the other groups on this one planet.
How would that look when we occupy more than one planet? USA.Earth vs China.Earth vs Muskia.Mars vs Bezostan.Mars all fighting over the same space rock containing vast amounts of water ice?
Will all the nations of one planet band together to fight/compete with the nations of other planets? Everyone.Earth vs Everyone.Mars?
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Having different systems is also necessary for redundancy. The Japanese incorrectly thought having multiple backup generators at the Fukushima nuclear plant constituted redundancy. It does not. If your backups are identical, they're all vulnerable to a comm
Re:Another fine example (Score:5, Insightful)
Your entire response is a blind reaction to someone telling you that competition isn't always a good thing, built upon the strawman that redundancy does not feature in what I'm talking about, because I didn't explicitly write it down for you.
This was an opportunity to think outside your box and you opted not to, so I'm going to break it down for you:
The point I was trying to make is: "Competition can be counter productive for certain use cases", and this is one of those use cases.
If your GPS goes down today, and for example you think everyone can just switch to a competing platform, go ahead and switch to BeiDou, Galileo or GLONASS right now and see how that goes. It may or may not work, depending on satellite coverage and/or the manufacturer of each device (most will likely be phones where they all support GPS but only a subset support a competing standard); therefore, your competing location services idea might not work for you as an individual, and certainly does not work for the entire group of people who depend upon GPS today. When shit happens, you'll find yourself using printed maps from a convenience store.
Now for an alternative example that might work if the competitors could trust each other enough to collaborate, and if these collaborators could operate in a non malicious manner (the non malicious and trust aspects are the root problem):
Instead of redundancy from many networks built around the premise that one could just switch to a totally alternative network, consider that at the hardware level a failure might look something like a satellite going down over one region, but there can be many replacements already in orbit ready to serve the exact same purpose for the same region, built by many different companies and/or governments, but built to work on the same communication protocols.
Once that's in place the next step might be for the collaborators to design a "Next Gen" service together that may or may not be backwards compatible with their existing system. Some of the competitors might even want to start supporting some other frequency as a form of "let the market decide which technology is better" by having their new satellites support both the global standard and their own side show project.
Consider how many satellite launches would be needed for such a system vs doing the same thing over and over for competing systems, along with all the other requirements for supporting it (such as ground stations for managing the satellites)
Your internet is already a collaborative system that works (in the sense that you send bits on a wire without thinking "My bits can only go on the Verizon wires" ) yet you are arguing for the equivalent of this for your location services. The same applies for your road network (The Fords and the Teslas share the same road) and for your airlines (Different planes and airlines share the same airports)
Your Fukushima example doesn't even make sense within the context of competing, or for preventing that specific failure in a reactor. Would multiple generators of the same bad design at Reactor A all failing at the same time, be solved by having Reactor B next door built by a competitor with a better design? No, Reactor A still fails and causes an environmental disaster. Your redundancy example only serves to provide backup sources of power if Reactor A goes down
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Competing systems provide REDUNDANCY.
If you've three alternative GPS signals and one is shut down, you still have two alternative systems.
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Competing systems provide REDUNDANCY.
If you've three alternative GPS signals and one is shut down, you still have two alternative systems.
As stated above, try and toggle between BeiDou and GPS for example and see how that works out for you. If that idea is going to work during a failure it ought to work right now. It should work on Pixel 2 for example, but your phone manufacturer may not have included support for the other systems
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My older cheap Moto E handles all 4 systems, or at lest sees all their satellites. Currently sees 18 satellites of which 6 (4+2) are not GPS. Once all the competing systems finish coming on line, it should work good enough.
The war metaphor is inapplicable here (Score:3)
Because each new GPS satellite adds accuracy to the existing set of constellations, it’s technical cooperation, not war. The only reason why any country needs to add its own GPS constellation is to assure that it can never lose the ability to navigate, whatever other countries do.
Got it Wrong (Score:3)
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Yes, civilian (unencrypted) GPS could be turned off while the encrypted signal remains on. Unlikely, the civilians would be very unhappy. But if a large enough event occurred and the government thought it was a good idea, yes.
Re: Do GPS satellites have an off switch? (Score:5, Informative)
That is just *so* incorrect! The satellites send precise timing signals, along with two sets of orbital details: the almanack, rough positional information so the receiver knows which satellites to search for if it knows its approximate location and time, and the ephemeris, precise orbital information, for the actual position calculation. It works by measuring the time taken from the satellites to the receiver and triangulating from that (it actually does that in 4 dimensions, needing at least 4 satellites, because the receiver's clock won't be accurate enough to use the timing signals directly to work out the distance from the satellites). When it was introduced, the DoD only made one of the frequencies, L1, available and deliberately degraded it (which was called "selective availability"). That degradation was turned off in May 2000, and further enhancements to the civilian availability have been made such as the introduction of further signals that are easier to detect, make the satellites easier to locate, and compensate better for atmospheric effects.
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GPS goes by signal strength...it doesn't read any data. Just uses multiple signals to do triangulation...
Even LORAN, an analog nagivational system that's been in use since the 1950's is more sophisticated than your belief of how GPS works. GPS signal timing is so precise that general relativity is used in the calculations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Do GPS satellites have an off switch? (Score:5, Informative)
"Each GPS satellite continuously transmits a radio signal containing the current time and data about its position. Since the speed of radio waves is constant and independent of the satellite speed, the time delay between when the satellite transmits a signal and the receiver receives it is proportional to the distance from the satellite to the receiver. A GPS receiver monitors multiple satellites and solves equations to determine the precise position of the receiver and its deviation from true time. At a minimum, four satellites must be in view of the receiver for it to compute four unknown quantities (three position coordinates and clock deviation from satellite time)."
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Yes, of course there is an off switch. There is also a "degrade" switch that can make it less accurate for anyone without the proper encryption keys.. Furthermore, both of these switches can be geographically selective, so GPS could continue to work over most of the earth, but be degraded over, say, Southwest Asia.
GPS-guided munitions are much cheaper and more accurate than the laser-guided munitions they replaced. Furthermore, they are fire-and-forget. There is no need for an aircraft or vehicle to stay
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The degrade/selective ability function was deleted from the design after Clinton signed the executive order turning it off. They can shut it off in certain regions, but that also harms military users.
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Do some research, please. GPS can both be made less precise and be switched off for a relative coarse target area.
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The assurances GPS gives are public. They are pretty bad. The usual reality you get is pretty good. Also there are documented instances of GPS having been degrades. So actual reality does handily destroy your theoretical argument. Not that it was really good in the first place.
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You are a brexiteer? Fascinating. It is rare to watch people commit economic suicide and be proud of it. Free-trade areas are something you move heaven and earth to get _into_. They are not something you ever want to leave.
Re: UK (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)m sure various USSR satellite states would beg to differ.
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No, they would not. The USSR was not a free-trade area. But your attempt at cheap, dishonest propaganda is noted.
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The USSR was indeed a free-trade area, at least according to the USSR. Now whether agreement within the zone was coerced or if someone flexes their muscle to set prices (like the EU and US often tries to do as well) is another thing entirely, but then you can throw out pretty much every 'free trade zone', especially the EU where every country/area has been granted monopolies on 'their' exports.
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And the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere really did bring prosperity to all, according to the Japanese.
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No, they would not. The USSR was not a free-trade area. But your attempt at cheap, dishonest propaganda is noted.
USSR was theoretically[1] free-trade within the entirety of the USSR.
[1] They claimed it was, I wasn't living there at the time but for all anyone can tell, it was indeed free-trade.
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It was not a free trade area, but a federation with planned economy.
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You mean like Turkmenistan or Tajikistan that are far poorer than they have been during the Soviet times? Yep, go ahead, ask them. Almost all former Soviet republics and satellite states that are truly better off nowadays are EU members.
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You do realise that Ukraine never had a population this large? 50 millions Ukrainians killed due to starvation would be killing them all twice over. How is that even possible without resorting to necromancy?
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Sure, we could build our own satellite navigation system, to rival Galileo. But it needs a bit more than just launching bits of hardware, and we certainly did not provide all of the satellite technology - the work was deliberately spread all around the EU. Still, I'm sure those EU-based companies will happily sell us back the technologies we already partially paid for anyway - and all because of May's fit of pique, in saying that we're not even to get the access the rest of the non-EU will get to Galileo.
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Politicians are involved. Laughably stupid for reason of pique is the most likely outcome.
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This is really about military applications. Weapons like missiles can use GPS for guidance to targets. Currently the US can and does turn off GPS or scrambles it over war zones, or to mess with NK and China.