Slashdot Mirror
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?"
What happened with the usa requesting that they can jam the sat network when needed?
Did they get this denied or incorporated in this network?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
it not 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency it's 'you cannot prevent us from using this one USA' by the European Space Agency.
this isn't a chance for the EU to show off...it is just another way for the EU to become more independant, because remember, the US can shut down GPS service to the EU at any time. >tg
Yeah, because God forbid those Europeans act unilaterally on a technological matter involving their self-interest. You would think that five years of the Bush administration would have convinced the rest of the world that we always have their interests at heart. OK, that's all I wanted to say, time to cook up another batch of Freedom Fries.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
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.
or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
What the hell is this?? More like anybody with more than 1/2 a fuckin brain realizes its a BAD idea to have the only positioning system run by a country who has made it blatantly obvious they don't care about what any other countries feel.
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.
Not to mention that it won't be turned off or degraded in times of war, or on the whim of one country's military - quite a necessity for a technology that people and corporations will come to rely on more and more.
Argh.
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?
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?"
What the hell is news of a new satilite navigation system passing it's first tests doing in the Politics section? Competition does not hurt, the lack of it does. Doing something better than the competition and never tolerating monopoly, Isn't that in the best traditions of a modern market economy? I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should be in our interest to allow the US-Military to monopolize the satilite navigation business. Please let's not turn this into another US vs. Europe pissing contest...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Why include such idiocy in the story? One very obvious advantage over GPS that is stated in the fucking article is that the USA reserves the right to switch GPS off. And, with ten seconds over at Wikipedia, you could find out that Galileo has a much better resolution than GPS. So mod entire story as -1, Flamebait - because there's no -5, Fucking Idiot At The Wheel option.
Had this been put in the proper category, like Hardware or Science, I'd say: Great, maybe I could get 10cm accuracy with this, GPS and GPRS combined.
But since it's politics we're discussing here, I say: how long before France, Germany and the U.K. start argueing over trivial issues. This whole European Union thing is too de-centralized, it's only a matter of time before it's torn apart.
This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how Americans get a bad reputation as arrogant fools. I was agreeing with this poster until the "The United States of America is the greatest country in the history of the world. This Earth belongs to the US, the rest just live here." line.
Yes, the US does do great things. Yes, the US does make some mistakes (as does any country.) But to say that the world belongs to the US is just pure arrogance.
-Mike
A proud citizen of the United States of America
Now the wording of an article already tries to whip up nationalistic frenzy. What happened to this site? Am I the only one who remembers that /. used to be about cool open source technology? Technology that brings us together across all borders rather than drive us apart.
You know, any geek worth his salt has heard of the importance of redundancy in a high-dependency system.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
People mention the "jamming issues" -- here's the scoop... GPS transmits signals intended for both cilivian and military use, in distinct frequency ranges. The military one is encrypted and can (theoretically) thus only be used by the US military and its friends. In a war zone, the US military can "jam" the civilian bands while leaving the military signal intact, which from a military perspective is a Good Thing.
The originally proposed Galileo design was such that the frequency range used by Galileo's equivalent to the US civilian signal overlapped the GPS military one. Thus, if the US wanted to jam or block Galileo's civilian signal, it would also have to jam the GPS military one -- which (to the US military) is a Bad Thing.
I don't know if/how this situation was resolved. Anyone?
/* "Specialization is for insects." -Heinlein */
Slashdot should really not post simple minded flame-bait like this:
"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?"
Yeah the system will offer major advantages and they are the following:
It will work when the the US decides to turn off, or disrupt the GPS. The US has never promised that it will always keep the GPS working, and why should they -- we paid for it with our tax money and the US government will always turn it off or disrupt its operation when suitable for American interests.
For example, the civilian GPS has signal has an intentionally added error in order to prevent it from being used for military purposes. Also, the civilian GPS signal gets further disrupted over war zones (such as iraq) to make it especially useless for anyone that is not the US military. Apparently, the military uses another GPS signal which is not useable by other parties.
And thats the reason why Russia already has their own alternative GPS system in place and the Europeans are building their own. It seems pretty reasonable to me.
Americans conveniently overlook the fact that Europeans have chosen to be a bit more socialist in their economic policies in order to build kinder and gentler societies. Just compare the crime rates between the USA and Europe. The Europeans have largely succeeded.
This Galileo system launched by Europe also demonstrates that Europe continues to be technologically competent and that slightly socialistic economic policies have not diminished Europe's ability to compete.
The Europeans should continue to build competitive national projects to demonstrate (1) that they can continue to compete with the USA and (2) that you do not need a huge military budget to spur innovation. Civilian budgets work just fine. The military industrial complex be damned.
If by "workaround", you mean centimeter-level accuracy, sure. Differential GPS is already being used by many people who require insane levels of accuracy - I've seen it in action, and it's damned impressive. You can also use it while moving, so the idea that GPS isn't good enough for aircraft is kind of stupid. P-code is not the end-all, be-all of accuracy, in any case.
Reading these posts, it's pretty obvious that the last exposure some people had to GPS information was in 1997 or something. Low-res selective availability? That got turned off in like 2000. And "turning off GPS for Europe" sounds kind of stupid, too - are American pilots just going to fly into the dark all the sudden? A little less paranoia, and a little more education, please...
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
My neighbour has a swimming pool which he says my friends or I can use any time we like (unless there's an emergency), but we're decided to put our money together and build our own swimming pool, which will be slightly better than his. For some reason he accused us of showing off when we told everyone about this, we just thought that it was best to have our own in case we're not always friends.
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.
Whatever the merits of these points, I'm not sure how reimplementing GPS 27 years after the analogous US satellite was launched demonstrates them.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
...it is always a good idea to have redundancy.
Why don't you hate America? ;)
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Whether it is the Internet you are surfing on now,
Where is Tim Berners-Lee from? Which research organisation was he working for when he invented HTTP/HTML?
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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 ;-)
Fighting wars to prevent wars - is just plain idiocy.
Sure. But fighting wars to prevent potential enemies isn't. Eliminate all dangerous states and replace them with democracies structured in such a way to make it very difficult for them to wage war. Then advocate free trade, with disputes mediated by an international organization and you take away a reason for other powerful states to make war on you. Then you can get buy with a minimal army.
Just look at history and you can see the value of such a plan.
The US *government* (note: not the PEOPLE) are a bunch of fairly dangerous hippocrites at best.
"We want free trade!" (unless of course, we're talking subsidising our farmers so that they can produce "cheaper" than 3rd world countries.
The US is a democracy ruled by a congress full of people both for and against free trade. On some issues one side wins and on other issues the other side wins. This isn't hypocrisy, it is democracy. And if it is so hard to pass laws that hurt a few farmers in a democracy, how hard would it be for a democratic Iran to nuke Israel and bring about a response sure to kill millions of Iranians?
When an Iranian president calls out for wiping Israel off the map - "What an outrage". When Pat Robertson calls for the US to assassinate Robert Chavez "He's just a loony"
Pat Robertson is just a guy with a TV show that says crazy things because he seems to be suffering from some sort of dementia. Just this past year he has said things offensive to Venezuela, Israel, and Pennsylvania. He asks God to smite people all of the time. Now, the Iranian president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) is a crazy old man who participated in the holding of the hostages from the American embassy when he was younger, and is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. If Pat Robertson did either of those things, he would be thrown in jail in two heartbeats.
And Pat Roberstson's comments have been sparking outrage in the US for years... to claim that more than a small percentage of Americans aren't outraged by him is a gross distortion of the truth.
And while I AM absolutely grateful that the US helped free Germany 60 years ago...
I guess the US freed Germany from fascism and communism, but neglected to light the beacons of logic and reason. How the hell is Pat Robertson as big a threat as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad??
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
It is amazing that switzerland apears to have a larger crime rate then the US. This site http://www.gunowners.org/sk0703.htm apears to say that gun ownership has the oposite effect in crime then what is popularly taunted too.
It's funny how ignorant you are. Your sources are highly biased and you even succeeded to counter your own assertions.
Switzerland and Finland have most guns per person in Europe. In Switzerland many of the guns people have are military grade. That's because militia personnel are required to keep their guns at home as part of their military obligations. So how do you explain that even though people in Switzerland have powerful guns at their homes, there's still according to your sources a higher crime rate than in US? Weren't the guns supposed to lower the crime rate?
In Finland guns are mostly hunting rifles. Virtually nobody in big cities owns a hand gun. I'm from Finland, and can guarantee you that the low crime rate is not because people in the country side own guns, it's mostly because Finland is a very socialistic country when compared to US or even Switzerland. We take care of our poor, so they don't have to steal from other people to make a living. We also give a decent education to our poor, so they have a chance to get a decent job.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Perusing the DoJ report you linked to, it shows that in 1999, you were about 1.5 times more likely to have your house robbed or car stolen in the UK, but twice as likely to be raped and 4 times more likely to be murdered in the US (using the reported/1000 population rates). While the totals of all these show an overall rate in the UK as 1.45 times higher in the UK, the difference is nearly entirely in property crimes.
What was your point again?
-- Cerebus
Another 'trend' in US property crime statistics is that often unless the victim can prove that the property was intentionally stolen, the police are systematically and fraudulently classifying the thefts instead as 'lost property' to reduce their reported crime rates.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
You don't understand, it's nothing personal. In the first place, Europeans don't hate ordinary American people as such. But it's not ordinary American people who are running the show. Most ordinary American people don't even know or understand what their government are doing, including (especially) most the ones who think they *do* know. The only problem we have with (some) ordinary Americans is their slavish tendency to believe whatever line of bullshit they are fed by the political and corporate establishment on Fox and CNN and disbelieve everybody else.
Secondly, global politics isn't about good and bad, it's about the exercise of military and economic power and control of information, to pursue the interests of the groups you represent.
To cut straight to the chase: I promise you that Washington's invasion of Iraq had nothing at all to do with liberating anyone and everything to do with gaining control of significant oil supplies in order to forestall an imminent and rapid worsening of the ongoing energy crisis.
To the extent that forestalling the effects of "peak oil" will keep everyone in the US comfortable for a couple of years longer than would have been the case without the Iraq invasion, you could say that the US govt's actions were beneficial for the US public. But because it is only a temporary fix, this is a policy that doesn't lead anywhere other than to further wars, both military and economic. It only buys time. But time for what?
If the US government were interested in the long term future of the US economy there would already be two crash programs in effect: one to reduce the nation's debt, and another to reduce dependence on oil, the latter starting with both a significant increase in tax on gas station pump prices right now (with much of the increase being spent on development of renewable energy sources - wind, wave, geothermal, solar, nuclear) and an aggressive program of public education aimed at decreasing domestic fuel consumption. These are the only actions that could make a positive difference.
I am talking about massive investment here, not the peanuts that is currently being spent or even considered. It is just not happening though. Instead the actions that *have* been taken, in toto, contribute to one goal only - to prevent the public at large, for as long as possible, from cottoning on to what will happen when either one of the following two scenarions hits:
(1) the growing disparity between global demand and global supply of oil pushes the price up (slowly at first, then over 5-10 years up to the $200-$400 a barrel range);
(2) one or more of the world's larger economies decides to divest their national reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars, in favour of something more stable and less inflationary - massively devaluing the dollar overnight and precipitating a complete collapse of the US banking system within days.
Both of these scenarios are on our doorstep right now. The Iraq adventure was intended to address both. But it will not solve either problem for long.
While the US very probably intended an expanded military presence in the Middle East to make OPEC think twice about redenominating oil sales in Euros (coming as it did right after Saddam Hussein did the very same thing), it hasn't made much difference to Iran who intend to open their own petrochemicals trading exchange on March 26, just ten weeks away. They are expected to offer at least some contracts denominated in Euros, and possibly all. Russia has also been making noises about moving their own oil and gas sales onto the Euro. And China already unpegged their currency from the dollar last summer.
I raise the question of what the US government thought they were buying time for, with their current economic, energy and foreign policies. Now the longer they manage to prolong the current situation the worse it will get for the unknowing public at large when these crises do finally emerge. As far as the economy is concerned it will be like falling off a cliff ed
WTF?
"Each other, for starters. You Europeans were a goddamn bloody bunch, with major wars going back every decade for as long as history has been recorded. This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe."
1: In 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland (Sept. 1st), America was working out how it was going to manage a relationship with a Nazi controlled Europe as it only expected Britain to hold out for 3 weeks after the "inevitable" defeat of the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Hitler's biggest mistake, if anything, was to turn and attack the Soviet Union (22nd June 1941) splitting his forces across another front on top of the Western and North African wars that were already in progress. If Britain had fallen in 1939, Europe would have been fucked anyway so the phrase "This ended when the US came along and cut your balls off by crushing the Axis powers and parking our military all across Europe" which negates the contributions of all the other allied powers is an insult to the millions of non-Americans who died in that war as well as being an expression of an obscene level of arrogance.
Your tone also suggest America's involvement was a totally selfless act despite the fact that America entered the war wholesale after it had been attacked by Japan and Germany had made a declaration of War against it. You also neglect to mention the arrangements from which America benefited, i.e. technology transfers including Radar, the jet engine, the cavity magnetron, Azdic, etc. and, post-war, faster than sound technology (developed by Miles Aircraft Corp and used by Bell to build the X-1, sideways looking terrain following all weather radar (developed for the BAC TSR 2 Nuclear strike aircraft - used in the cruise missile) and more that I can't be arsed to list. On top of this, America gained access to a global span of British territory for military use as part of Lease Lend as well being in a position to isolate itself from Communist Russia by transferring any fighting with the USSR away from Alaska which would be a bitch because no-one wants to fight a war at -40 in an environment where everything that moves leaves a trail that can be spotted from the air and into region that could form a handy missile launching platform close to the intended target.
"This made engaging the US a prerequisite to starting any European war, and defeating the US military was too high a bar for anyone to really consider trying."
Er, Nope.
The world's leaders understanding that there were enough thermonuclear warheads on both sides to blow the entire planet up stopped another war from starting.
"As a consequence, most of Europe has allowed its military to degrade into near-uselessness."
The ex-Axis forces were deliberately prevented from having an army large enough to cause any trouble while what was left of allied Europe had been so bombed to shit that it was bankrupt and couldn't have supported the kind of Army needed to fight a war. One country is notable as having actually come out of WW2 richer than when it went in primarily through selling arms to it's allies under the guise of Lease Lend opening up potential lines of argument as to whether it was an alliance or a business arrangement.
"Muslims are usually looking for wars"
What the fuck are you on? That is just the sort of statement made from a position of such supreme ignorance that it borders on being not worth answering.
Muslims and Christians have existing next door to each other for several thousand years. In fact, when the christian crusaders commissioned to fight a "holy" war in the middle east arrived, the cities they found under Muslim control contained mixed populations of Christian, Muslim and Jews and the laws enacted within the cities prevented anyone from attacking a holy building of any denomination. The rulers of the Muslim lands also endorsed the crusaders activities as a holy war and offered them food and shelter within the hous
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
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.