China's Beidou GPS-substitute opens to public in Asia
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Mao_Dang
Anyways, just one of the strange things about living in China, but they are mostly harmless and uninfluential on English boards (now on Chinese boards...).
How are they worse on the Chinese boards?
Part of the reason is because posting comments on certain web pages is not a highly sophisticated task, so wages can be low for the commenters.
* in 2011
* contracted out to a corporation called Ntrepid, see more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid
* worth $2.76M
* targeted non-US websites to counter-act extremist propaganda
That is hardly representative of the US military rather than pet project, let's stop the fear mongering.
However, the project is probably didn't end in 2011 as you have implied, but is still ongoing since there has been no news that it has been shut down.
Also, this is only what the US government has admitted, and only as a response to the information that was leaked as part of the HB Gary hacking. These types of programs are usually not publicized. It is entirely possible that the program is larger than reported or has grown since 2011, especially in light of the NSA whistle-blower's report about data collection of US citizens.
Furthermore the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) are known to engage in both foreign and domestic clandestine operations while it would be scandalous for the US Military to operate domestically, so I highly doubt they're operating domestically.
what evidence do you have that the program ended in 2011?
Since most information about these classified programs comes from documents that are unclassified well after the program has ended, all that's available right now are piecemeal reports from hackings, like anonymous's attack on HB Gary, or whistleblowers, like William Binney.
While, it's possible that the reports we have outline the entire program, it's just as likely that they have only revealed part of a larger program.
The function of a military is a large tool, it feels neither love nor hatred but a sense of duty; however the same cannot be said about the TLAs as they operate with impunity.
As an aside, how does the US government make money from the GPS? As a consumer, I pay no money, so I can only assume the GPS chip manufacturers pay some sort of royalty fee?
I think it's more a matter of national pride issue: to show the world that China doesn't have to rely on the US for technology. Russia's GLONASS system (briefly referenced in the article) is more or less the same thing. The good news is that this system, like GLONASS, will likely improve positioning speed / reliability, since there will be more navigation satellites in the sky. Already, receivers can tie GLONASS and GPS together; it's only a matter of time before Beidou is integrated as well.
The military retains control (which is why other nations are still working on their own systems), but this really was a remarkable act of generosity by the US government.
Do they? What would the royalties be for, licensed chip design?
Or, rather, you will have. If the project ever finishes.
I don’t have the RF/SP domain knowledge to back this up, but I speculate that multiple low-end receivers for 2–4 of these networks on a single chip might be more useful in practice than a single good receiver for any one network. In other words, a $20 Galileo chip + a $20 GPS chip might give me a faster time-to-fix than a $40 GPS chip. (In terms of units shipped, most GPS goes into phones, where time-to-fix is way more important than centimeter accuracy.)
Faster time to fix translates into longer battery life. Whether this matters in practice for much of the Continental US I don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if China does something similar with Beidou and mobile phones sold in China.
For one, neither Beidou nor Galileo are operational GNSSes, so there is no economic incentive to create receivers that work with those services.
Also, the Chinese government only just today published Beidou's ICD, the document that specifies the open-access Beidou signals: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3331
And my point was that no one who isn't compelled to use only the Chinese system need trust the Chinese system - for most navigation consumers around the world Compass will be there to provide redundancy and to make the error bars smaller.
GPS (United States)
GLONASS (Russia)
Galileo (European Union)
Compass/ Beidou (China)
Domestic GPS devices have a reverse transform to mask the effect, but the result is you can never be sure exactly where you are. Seems like Baidu maps have fixed their map+satellite overlay now, but when I visited, they had the same problem.
http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20081109_all_maps_in_c...
Not saying they're going to do it, but just the smallest uncertainty means you'd rather trust one of the 3 other competitors in the area.
edit: I wonder if putting keywords on this page will get them denied access to these comments 六四事件 天安門廣場抗議 天安門事件
Nothing frightens me more than a society with no freedom of speech, except for one that gleefully has none.