America is too dependent on tech developed owned and operated by the american military?!
the fuck?
But Elon doesn’t own the American Military (yet) so this makes sense. Its just vertical integration, really.
GPS? You mean the technology that we as a country collective maintain? And have continued to maintain since it’s immediate inception?
Yeah, ok.
Call me when you start using glonass.
GPS isn’t just for google maps. I’m a land surveyor and we literally use GPS every single day. Without it we’re basically fucked. We do hydrographic surveying and without GPS we’d have to basically go back to analog as 90% of the equipment on our boat would be useless. Good luck figuring out how much water is left in the Colorado river without it.
Im not exactly an expert on this, but i am very familiar with what my job requires. The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) will be completely fucked without it as it’s built on decades of data and monitoring. You can’t just look for “alternatives.” Whatever Elmo has is not robust enough for the precision that is required for what we use GPS for. And without shit like that you couldn’t hit the broad side of a city.
These guys don’t care. They’re a bunch of gangsters trying to profit by dismantling the government and selling corporate replacements for its services.
We’re either headed towards long term fascism or a massive civil backlash.
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Most receivers already use GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and beidou.
And this is why the EU should have ignored the US when they whined that our Gallileo system used different frequencies from GPS.
As it stands now Gallileo was built to using frequencies that the US can jam using GPS.
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Sounds like the FCC chair is taking his orders from Musk
I’m kind of surprised that Musk hasn’t proposed turning Selective Availability back on.
I hope I’m not reading into this too much and thinking he just wants to use Russias standard of satellite technology. L5 GPS is better accuracy. Also if you look at 3GPP’s future planning and goals, the game is to utilize all RF technology together. 5G broadcast and LoRaWAN will make sensors happens within cities and highways and that working together with GPS and cell, you can get readings about a foot or less.
this is just some autistic shit from musk most likely.
One interesting alternative would be the Visual Positioning System (VPS) that Niantic has built from Pokemon go player data. Basically you can take a picture outside and your phone will know exactly where you are:
https://www.nianticspatial.com/locate#vps
Too bad they’re getting close to being bought out by a company that’s notorious for squeezing out every penny from their player base.
Edit: Correction, Pokemon Go is being bought from Niantic… The company itself is not being bought.
I really hope this means another attempt to use the magnetosphere itself. MAGNAV might actually be possible at this point.
Edit: better article. AI advancements make MAGNAV a real possibility now. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3408951/magnav-project-successfully-demonstrates-real-time-magnetic-navigation/
How does that handle high tension lines and the like, doesn’t it disturb the magnetosphere far too much? Kinda the reason even compasses don’t work anymore in town?
this would also be susceptible to magnetic field switching as well, shouldnt be a huge technical limitation, but im not sure accuracy is going to be quite as good.
No idea. I think there’s a lot of machine learning - enabled mapping up front.
Maps still work without GPS though. I wonder how many people could find their location on one?
A good 5 years ago or so I was getting a breakfast burrito when an older couple came in asking for directions. They had an old school mapbook. It took a minute to orient myself, but I found they were on the wrong page.
Its one of my bucket list items, but an old school road trip with nothing but a mapbook and a compass. No real destination, no time frame. Just the open road and exploring. And no GPS to make it efficient or optimized where I’ll soar right past everything.
Don’t really need a compass for a road trip given you are just following roads. I went on a bike ride somewhat recently following a similar idea, using a tablet instead of a book but I just had an offline map and it doesn’t support GPS. I followed various paths and roads going around. Was a nice day trip.
There’s already a startup trying to get the FCC to give them half of the 915mhz band (meshtastic, smart home stuff, ELRS, ham radio) for a pay to win GPS alternative.
first time hearing about this, any more details you can provide or link to a news release? is this Ubiik?
That’s weird, I always viewed GPS as a form of American Imperialism. Sure, it’s a bit extreme maybe, but America does own and operate it and jam it when enemies try to use it.
Calling GPS part of imperialism is a stretch. It was put in the air at no cost to another country and can be used without cost by anybody, but nobody has to use it. Other countries can launch their own satellites if they want, but they don’t because that’s expensive and GPS is free. The US isn’t making money off of it or exploiting another country with it.
Yes, the US can jam it regionally when in conflict but of course why wouldn’t we? No reason to help the enemy.
technically, originally the GPS system was private, until made public, where it had error obfuscation, until semi recently it was released fully.
It was originally funded by the US government, still is, it’s just publicly accessible now.
(the original usecase being for shit like ICBMs and what not, obviously)
The one thing I miss from the TomTom era is I can’t have Brian Blessed give me directions anymore.
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