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Galileo Sends Its First Signals
VVrath writes "Galileo, the European answer to the US Military-owned GPS has sent it's first signals to ground stations in the UK and Belgium. The first satellite in the Galileo system, Giove-A was launched on December 28th 2005, and is set to be followed by a further 29 satellites by 2010. At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
Galileo has a bunch of advantages over GPS, like being designed to work to a higher degree of acuracy and to work inside buildings and in built-up areas. Take a look at this article http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/article/articleDe tail.jsp?id=61295 for more information.
Military grade GPS hardware is accurate to within a few centimeters as well. Consumer equipment isn't, but this isn't due to technical limitations of the satelites.
Much of the equipment has been upgraded in recent years, too. Signals were originally intentionally inaccurate because the military didn't want Kim Jong Il to have a $99 missle guidance system. Recent upgrades have allowed the military to distort signals based upon geography: selectively, certain "hostile" areas are subject to this distortion.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
I would think the reason is completely obvious: It's a really bad idea to have your critical infrastructure depend on something external you can't control.
In a data center, do you trust your ISP has full redundancy and will never, ever fail, decide to disconnect you or go bankrupt? Or you you use several ISPs, have an UPS and a standby generator just in case some day something does go wrong?
here is the slashdot bit.. heard it on bbc as well about the same time.0 7
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/01/12262
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
GPS is blockable by any idiot with a soldering iron, you don't need the permission of the US government just a little knowledge of electronics.
Galileo offers:
- Higher accuracy for commercial subscribers than offered by GPS.
- Non-military, muli-national control. No one country/entity can turn it off.
- Availability on Arctic and Antarctic waters. While not useful to most, apparently including the US military, it is useful for shipping and search and rescue for many European countries.
- Interoperability/compatibility with GPS. One can back up the other to offer higher availability and/or accuracy.
The only problem I can see is that they use the same frequencies. If some one jams one they are also jamming the other. Given the military capability of the countries funding both systems I can imagine such jamming will be very short lived.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
probable means this...
http://www.phrack.org/phrack/60/p60-0x0d.txt
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
A cursory review of the literature leads your statements to be fatally incorrect. Crime rates are in fact lower in the US than in many European countries.
Burglary rates for Scotland, Austria, and England and Wales are reported as higher for the entire period of 1980 through 2000. For England and Wales, this difference is as much as 50% higher crime rate per capita than the US after 1993.
Don't believe me. Check the figures yourself. I should also point out that these figures come from a UK authority, not another "American urban legend".
The blog you point to seems to choose the figures that back its theory up. From the same papers it cites as source[1], you can read:
e venth.html
Homicides / 100.000 inhabitants 1999
US: 4.55
France: 1.63
Germany: 1.22
Italy: 1.4
Switzerland: 1.25
[1]http://www.unodc.org/unodc/crime_cicp_survey_s
Well... how about checking some official and non-propaganda sites? I was really wondering (as a european feeling possibly overly safe at home?) wether these statistics might actually be true. Go check for yourself:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/hmrt.htm which is from the US department of justice and claims the murder rate in the us for 2002 is 6.1 cases per 100.000.
A little more difficult to understand might be the official german site (as its in german...), but easy enough: the word "mord" means "murder", and the number of cases for 2002 in the table is cited as 873. As we have 80 Million people in Germany that amounts to a rate of 1.1 per 100.000. So the US has nearly 6 times the murder rate of that in germany. Here is the link to the official german statistics (the BKA is the german version of the FBI): http://www.bka.de/pks/pks2002/p_3_01.pdf
Btw. the table on the top of the page includes the number of attempted homicides in red, the number of sucessul ones in blue. Without so many guns available, obviously (and luckily) most murder attempts are doomed to fail.
Phew. So I can still feel safe here ;-)
Who invented packet switching, the premise upon which IP builds?
You think ARPANet was somehow the *only* packet-switched computer network in the 70s/80s? Ever heard of Cyclades? You think the internet was the only widely deployed computer information network? Ever hear of 'Minitel'?
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.