Chinese GPS System To Be Offered Free

MattSparkes writes, "The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government's National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, 'Frankly, China's behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago.'"

Comments

Kind of like MicroSuse eh?

[pair-a-noyd]

Invest some $$ in project X then subvert the system and cause damage from within.

This applies to this situation and the M$/Novell deal..

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. And enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."

  -Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Lets think about this for a second

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

China, a known totalitatian dictatorship, is making and freely supplying to its citizens, a system by which those citizens' geographic location can be constantly tracked.

Does ANYONE think that the Chinese government might have an ulterior motive?