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India Joins Galileo Consortium
ghoul writes "Yahoo! is reporting that both India and China have joined the Galileo Consortium as part of an effort at building a Multipolar world.
Of note is the fact while China is giving money (200 Million Euros) India is giving 350 million Euros(almost half a billion dollars) in parts and services as Indian satellite makers are considered world class. Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end and this century will belong to India or China. After all one of them is 1/6th of the world and the other 1/5th."
wha? ... ohhhh.
Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end
Not sure about the outsourcing but you're bang on about the "stuff". It'll bring down any civilization.
The European satellite navigation project Galileo is at http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/gal ileo/index_en.htm.
That's what India and China are getting involved with. Airlines, not nations, get involved with Galileo.com.
"India Joins Galileo Consortium"
I haven't had enough sleep today. I read that as "Indiana Jones and the Galileo Consortium." I just had this image of Harrison Ford saying with that ever so famous smile on his face "The old fool was right, the Earth does orbit the sun."
"Derp de derp."
At present, the only global satellite system available to civilians is GPS, but it is accurate only to 100 metres (325 feet) for civilians, or 22 metres (71 feet) for the military, and is under the control of the Pentagon.
What the hell are they talking about? With off-the-shelf equipment and a clear sky, you can easily get under 10-foot accuracy (I do on a very regular basis). With averaging and/or fancy equipment you can easily exceed that, too.
If they're talking about accuracy while the military has implemented that signal degredation stuff, it's misleading not to mention that fact. But either way, the military would still be able to do a hell of a lot better than 71-foot accuracy... that's ridiculous.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
As a citizen of the USofA I face facts about the huge wastes of money we endure every day, such as:
- The dead-end Space Shuttle program
- Farm subsidies
- Ethanol subsidies (which intersect somewhat with the above)
- Mandated "special education" to the student's needs regardless of cost, while regular classrooms languish and the gifted are conspicuously neglected
- Million-dollar healthcare for very premature infants (who will be lucky to ever get past "special ed")
That doesn't include other things which could save piles of money, such as making the people who "develop" rural areas pay the full cost of all the roads, sewers, schools and whatnot that they require while abandoning cities where all those things already exist.Getting back to space, it no longer surprises me that the price of several Apollo projects has not taken humans beyond LEO in 3 decades nor given us a real space station, while a few tens of millions in SDIO gave us an SSTO technology demonstrator and one aerospace engineer was able to construct a scenario for a full manned mission to Mars for a fraction of the Shuttle budget. It disgusts me, but it is not surprising... it's all money politics, and the future is sold down the river because it has no constituency while the past chows down at the trough. Kind of like the pandering to old people with "free" drugs while the children whose future is going to be largely determined in classrooms over the next 10 years are ignored beyond mandates on top of mandates which all go unfunded.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Our American political, educational and economic problems, never insignificant, are starting to counterbalance our original advantages of unspoiled resources, strategic position, and freedom. In Confucian China, complacency is a sin; in America, it's a way of life.
--
make install -not war
> India has an illiteracy rate about 70%.
Erm, that hasn't been true since around 1970.
Indian Literacy Rates:
1951 - 18.33%
1961 - 28.31%
1971 - 34.45%
1981 - 43.56%
1991 - 52.21%
2001 - 65.38%
Assuming another 13% Jump in literacy, India will be at western standards in less than twenty years. It might even be faster than that, because between 1991 and 2001, there was greater change in India as a whole in terms of economic reforms than the whole fifty years since Indian independence before that. In any case, there is already more literate people in India than in the US.
okay the story doesnt really have that much information, if you want to find out more, try:
w ww.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2003%2F10%2F31%2Fwspace31.xmls pacedaily.com/2003/031030141843.79tqo7 1o.htmll eshow/293 953.cms8 9-184676_ W_1017248,00.html. cn/200310/28/eng200 31028_126977.shtml
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/2003
http://
http://www.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/artic
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,47
http://english.peopledaily.com
that should quench your thirst!
Actually in todays service oriented world what matters is more the no of skilled people you have to do the work than the amount of land. For example Japan is much more densely populated than India and is a rival to a United States 50 times larger.
Till now Indias population was that while it had the population the population was not skilled which made it a liability instead of a resource but now the trickle down effect of the nuclear and space programs is being felt in higher levels of education and competency at all levels
**Life is too short to be serious**
Indian economic potential will be witnessed in few years. Despite the Asian currency crisis, India fared very well. Indian economy is booming right now. Indian space program is painfully put together with many setbacks. Let's give credit to a developing nation that has built it's own launch vehicles and satellites that are very good.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
> You are extrapolating in a linear fashion based on the highest growth rate recorded this century.
No, as I started, there was a large amount of economic and social reforms put in place after 1991 (when the Rao government took power, and instituted massive reforms in not only education, but the economy-- moving from post-Gandhist "lets leave most Indians as farmers", to a different post Cold War reality. Much like China did in 1978, but in a perhaps more accelerated manner)
> Western Europe and the US have literacy rates circa 95%
Of course, that's why I said "western standards". It's unlikely India will ever reach 99% literacy.
- The Shuttle program mainly continues to keep the program's suppliers and contractors in business. The same people could produce far more in the way of truly useful goods and services if they were merely diverted to working on different launch systems, but today's gravy train is guaranteed while any change implies risk to the contractors (the taxpayer would properly see it the other way, but the taxpayers do not have lobbyists working the capitol).
- The USA used to have a program of farm set-asides, where farmers were paid to idle some of their acreage and prevent overproduction. This guaranteed farmers a profit on those acres and kept prices from tanking. This program was replaced with one of pure subsidies 20 or so years ago. The results have been predictable: we have rampant overproduction while prices remain too low for many farmers to remain in business, all at taxpayer expense.
- Ethanol subsidies mostly go into the pockets of wealthy corporate interests like Archer Daniels Midland. Some of the surplus corn (from the excessive subsidies) is consumed by the ethanol program, but the taxpayer pays more for a gallon-equivalent of motor fuel produced by this method than a British driver paying 75 p per liter. Ethanol production requires roughly a gallon-equivalent of fossil inputs to produce 1.2 gallons-equivalent of output, at a subsidy of $1.90/gallon; if I have that right, the taxpayer is paying $9.50/gallon for the energy actually created by this process. The rest of the energy is merely transformed from other forms, such as coal, gas and petroleum used on the farm.
- "Special education" for children who will never be able to function on their own is likely wasted. "Education" for those who are both mentally defective and dying from their conditions is completely wasted.
- Spending a million dollars (or a half, or a quarter million) to save a very premature infant, when the parents cannot support such a child's needs and the child will sustain serious brain damage, is wasted. Once these babies are born there is nothing medical science can do to make up for the damage that results. We would save more lives by letting them die naturally and putting the money into prenatal care, schooling and programs to prevent pregnancies among people who won't take prenatal care seriously.
These programs are not worth it; they destroy value, not create it.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.