We have been seeing this interaction between user contributions and corporations for a long time, and Amazon is neither the first one nor the last one to engage. It bothers the hell out of me when I see companies taking a lot out from their users and giving little back. When I talk to people, I have the feeling that most of them don't care or don't wanna care. My biggest example at the moment is Tom Tom map and share. I work in the digital map business and have seen what Teleatlas does with user's data. They log your life. Sure: anonymously, but they log it. They log where you go, at what time, how fast you were traveling, who many people, etc. They use this data to map new streets, to create statistics, to route through traffic, etc. this saves them an *enormous* amount of money since they don't need to drive everywhere with their expensive measurement vans. They get literally millions of km per day worth of data, some of which is later up for sale. So you give them data, and it becomes *their* data not yours. You don't get it back. Ever. Openstreet map for instance can't have access to it. To give you an idea of what this is worth, look at the EuroFOT project at http://www.eurofot-ip.eu/ . This is a multimillion-euro European project to collect data for just 1000 vehicles. Tom Tom collects this by several order of magnitudes a day and pretty much for free. Sure: EuroFOT collects video, ACC, CAN, etc etc. but I want to put the price of data into perspective. Tom Tom is profiting from their users big time, and what do they give back? Contributed map updates, not even the commercial map updates that are release every quarter. It bothers me even more how they make users opt for it. They hide their whole "I'll log your ass" behind the "community and friends" slogan. And it works for them.
I'm not against companies engaging with the community, but I'm against them not giving enough back and moreover, not being honest about what they are collecting from you. I personally stop buying from companies that change terms and conditions as you go, but I seem to be an exception to the rule. So I don't blame Tom Tom or Amazon for doing this.
Since this is a new "feature", I'm sure it was no where at the time buyers acquired the product a few months ago.
Besides, that's not the whole point. Sure, Amazons profits from this and they do give part of the benefit back to users, but it should be done in such a way that the users are absolutely informed of what's happening. And it should be disabled by default.
WASS is used to provide corrections to upper atmospheric disturbances in the GPS signal. It works like this: you have a lot of beacons on ground, mostly close to the shore but pretty much everywhere in the country. These stations know *exactly* where they are, but they anyway measure their position via GPS. By looking at the difference between what GPS says and what they know, they calculate the effect of these atmospheric disturbances. These are uploaded to a central system and get in turn broadcasted via WASS.
WASS signals get used mostly by air and maritime vehicles in the North America. Europe has something similar called EGNOS, that depending on the country it could be used with limited advantage on terrestrial measurements. In Germany for instance, the angle to EGNOS is about 20 degrees which makes it almost impossible to capture free-line-of-sight by anyone that is not airborne or in open waters.
Now back to the issue. One WASS satellite is failing. There are two WASS satellites and we are fortunate that the one about to fail is not the most important one. This link has some nice images showing the coverage. Sorry for copy-pasting, it's my first post and don't know how to add tags yet.
http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/augmentation-assistance/news/failure-imminent-waas-geo-satellite-9841
The problem is that airspace people don't like single point of failure so having one satellite only is a yellow lamp. How this will affect air traffic is still to be seen. GPS accuracy is about 16m with a good view, and when traveling 200 mph during approach, this is not crucial if you ask me. Maritime is something different. You don't wanna sail in Sweden and hit an underground island because you are 10m too far left.
For final approach to runway and landing WASS has never been an enabling technology, so business as usual.
The US will either replace the satellite or bring the functionality to another one. Until then, people must know that WASS could be out for a few seconds every once in a while. Nothing new really. None of us here will probably feel anything particular happening in the sky.
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We have been seeing this interaction between user contributions and corporations for a long time, and Amazon is neither the first one nor the last one to engage. It bothers the hell out of me when I see companies taking a lot out from their users and giving little back. When I talk to people, I have the feeling that most of them don't care or don't wanna care. My biggest example at the moment is Tom Tom map and share. I work in the digital map business and have seen what Teleatlas does with user's data. They log your life. Sure: anonymously, but they log it. They log where you go, at what time, how fast you were traveling, who many people, etc. They use this data to map new streets, to create statistics, to route through traffic, etc. this saves them an *enormous* amount of money since they don't need to drive everywhere with their expensive measurement vans. They get literally millions of km per day worth of data, some of which is later up for sale. So you give them data, and it becomes *their* data not yours. You don't get it back. Ever. Openstreet map for instance can't have access to it. To give you an idea of what this is worth, look at the EuroFOT project at http://www.eurofot-ip.eu/ . This is a multimillion-euro European project to collect data for just 1000 vehicles. Tom Tom collects this by several order of magnitudes a day and pretty much for free. Sure: EuroFOT collects video, ACC, CAN, etc etc. but I want to put the price of data into perspective. Tom Tom is profiting from their users big time, and what do they give back? Contributed map updates, not even the commercial map updates that are release every quarter. It bothers me even more how they make users opt for it. They hide their whole "I'll log your ass" behind the "community and friends" slogan. And it works for them. I'm not against companies engaging with the community, but I'm against them not giving enough back and moreover, not being honest about what they are collecting from you. I personally stop buying from companies that change terms and conditions as you go, but I seem to be an exception to the rule. So I don't blame Tom Tom or Amazon for doing this.
Since this is a new "feature", I'm sure it was no where at the time buyers acquired the product a few months ago. Besides, that's not the whole point. Sure, Amazons profits from this and they do give part of the benefit back to users, but it should be done in such a way that the users are absolutely informed of what's happening. And it should be disabled by default.
WASS is used to provide corrections to upper atmospheric disturbances in the GPS signal. It works like this: you have a lot of beacons on ground, mostly close to the shore but pretty much everywhere in the country. These stations know *exactly* where they are, but they anyway measure their position via GPS. By looking at the difference between what GPS says and what they know, they calculate the effect of these atmospheric disturbances. These are uploaded to a central system and get in turn broadcasted via WASS. WASS signals get used mostly by air and maritime vehicles in the North America. Europe has something similar called EGNOS, that depending on the country it could be used with limited advantage on terrestrial measurements. In Germany for instance, the angle to EGNOS is about 20 degrees which makes it almost impossible to capture free-line-of-sight by anyone that is not airborne or in open waters. Now back to the issue. One WASS satellite is failing. There are two WASS satellites and we are fortunate that the one about to fail is not the most important one. This link has some nice images showing the coverage. Sorry for copy-pasting, it's my first post and don't know how to add tags yet. http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/augmentation-assistance/news/failure-imminent-waas-geo-satellite-9841 The problem is that airspace people don't like single point of failure so having one satellite only is a yellow lamp. How this will affect air traffic is still to be seen. GPS accuracy is about 16m with a good view, and when traveling 200 mph during approach, this is not crucial if you ask me. Maritime is something different. You don't wanna sail in Sweden and hit an underground island because you are 10m too far left. For final approach to runway and landing WASS has never been an enabling technology, so business as usual. The US will either replace the satellite or bring the functionality to another one. Until then, people must know that WASS could be out for a few seconds every once in a while. Nothing new really. None of us here will probably feel anything particular happening in the sky.