I am afraid to say that this is somewhat of a pipe dream at the moment.
I did a study into ways to increase the accuracies of GPS recently (mine involved the use or neural networks, a friend's involved map matching) and both techniques are not all that accurate. Unless the government is wanting people to add an extra $AU1000 expense on top, then it wouldn't work. The extra expense would come from the dead reckoning system that would be needed to get any decent accuracies, especially within the "urban jungle" or areas where there is a lot of buildings/trees/other obstructions overhead. One way to overcome this is to have the GPS initialise by remaining stationary for a couple of minutes, but how many people want to run their GPS for a few minutes.
The study in itself is interesting as it only deals with a 40 mile (whats that ~70 km), which isn't all that far really. They also don't have technical details posted so I can't comment on them.
I can perhaps see governments using these on chronic speeders, much like the breathalizers used in chronic drink drivers cars, but for the general population, I don't think that could do this accurately enough yet for this to be anything more than a pipe dream.
Accurate GPS is a very bad thing in the hands of the general populace.
Some people crack me up. Really. The encrypted GPS signal (the P-code) was only useful when selective availability was present. Since it was turned off, the difference isn't alot. The accuracy you can get know is about 20m with a $1000 Australian dollars (around $500 based on the current exchange rates;).
Apart from that little fact, it you really wanted to, you can get an accuracy 5-10 cm (yes about a 2-4 inches) in real time using differential GPS (real time kinematic). This is used a lot in areas such as data capture ie, a power company wanting to know where all of it's power poles, so they fit a car with GPS and a couple of video cameras, and drive around for a few days/weeks (depending on how many), and they can then determine where each of there power poles are accuractely. Why is that important? If this is then put into a GIS (geographic information system), then the power company can make more informed decisions on what maintenance needs to be done, the most likely place of a failure during a blackout.... the list goes on.
But if 5-10 cm is accurate enough for you, you could always use geodetic systems, anywhere from $50K - $100K, which will give you sub-centimetre accuracy, although it needs post processing. Why would anyone want to do this. Japan uses this for earthquake monitoring, other countries use this for volcanic measurement, national geodetic systems which then connect into the land title system, which is the basis of most first world economies.
If hitting off target by 20m is not going to make much difference, but we have all of these extra benefits from accurate GPS, then why wouldn't you make it available to the general populace. Of course, the terrorist could always use GLONASS, the Russian equivalent....
Just reading through some of the comments here made laugh and laugh and laugh. Why? Everyone seems to jumping up and down about something that they haven't read properly, or only skimmed the abstract. This is just how over reactionary some/. readers are.
So lets give this some context. Firstly, the patent is for operating over HTTP or protocols to supplant or improve HTTP (section 1 of the aforementioned patent), so for all those that suggested prior art in the form of local copies, or it preventing local copies, ba-baam. Wrong answer.
As for relational databases and fuzzy matching. Wrong again.
The patent covers ways to identify unique identifiers for CDs based on the lengths of the tracks on the cds, and method for retrieving information from a network (preferably the web), based on this information. Another section of the patent is to distribute music to all users of an IRC chatroom at the same time.
So, the prior art that we are instead looking for is firstly, where there is a database containing the tracks, length, and so on, which can be identified by a unique identifier based on the time of the recordings. The last part, the unique identifiers based on the time would be the hardest part. But perhaps a music company somewhere around the world had already implemented something like this on an internal network, or a radio station with a huge cd library.... The second part of the prior art one would be wanting is something related to chat rooms, and trying to send this music to everyone at the same time. Something I know nothing about so I will leave it to someone else to think about this.
Advogato has a good discussion
on this. One of the good links from this was Bazaar, in the sense of the cathedral and the bazaar, where there is a list of other peoples itches.
I guess the one major hurdle is getting a understanding of the code, because one program where I found an annoying bug, I downloaded the source, and there wasn't a single comment in the code relating to what was being done. I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to look for this bug, so I couldn't do anything about it. It doesn't matter it bugs are shallow if the water is muddy. See ESR's cathedral and the bazaar to put the last comment in context (yes, I just read it fully again).
I am in a similar position to the original poster. I am just about to graduate (6 months from when I was meant to, but anyway), from the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. There basic policy, from what I can garner from this statute is that so long as there is no commercial exploitation, i.e., making money from it, of the IP, then the uni doesn't care what you do. If you do make money from it, then either the uni wants a piece of the pie, or, you must get permission from the IP officer of the uni. That is how things such as Mercury can be released under the GPL.
As for the publishing of thesis, they don't want these published commercially because that means the won't be able to include this in there citation statistics to show that they are the "premier research institution in Australia", as shown here. The more research they do, the greater the income for them.
Firstly, from my brief reading, they are meant to clear it after seven(?) years, correct me if I am wrong, but I can't see that happening.
Secondly, this sort of data used to be available in Victoria on the web, through the department of justice(http://www.justice.vic.gov.au/), can't find it at the moment though...
Thirdly, Australia is actually implementing some privacy controls. The federal government is (was?) trying to introduce a law which would mean that anyone collecting personal information to put into huge databases would have to have your permission first. Problem was, this doesn't apply to current databases, which means that they can get together with you credit card company,..., (satellite imaging company[1]), big brother, and get together all the info they like, so long as they set it up before July 1, 2001 (I think), they can do whatever they like.
[1] Any that actually believes that satellite photography can be used to track you is greatly mistaken. It is used by people such as surveyors, to make big great whopping maps of countries, especially road networks, ecologists and the like in remote sensing, i.e., finding out what vegetation there is without having to surevy the whole field (quick hide those mull plants out the back, big brother is spying on us from above...)...
1. Growing trend of installing GPS gear into cars for preventing theft and navigation
2. If the GPS is inaccurate, it is useless in cities with the above applications
With Differential GPS (see other posts), and inertial navigation systems, measuring speed and direction, then no it isn't. You just use GPS to update errors in the INS, and vice versa, using a technique known as kalman filtering, and you can get pretty good accuracies. There is currently a project on at my university, to see if neural networks can be used... it is actually my project, so feel free to ask any questions....
I think someone had one of these going yesterday when I was using GPS to measure some points to sub-centimetre accuracy and the bloody thing kept losing lock on us....
Now, for all of those unenlightened(?) people out there, who think they know about GPS but don't, here are some facts.
Firstly, the the comment about the P-code and C/A-code is correct. And yes, there is a thing called selective availabilty, so therefore with a single gps receiver, you can't get any better than about 100m [1].
Secondly, Differential GPS at sub-centimetre accuracies requires post-processing, you can't do it on the fly. It you want real-time kinematic, or on the fly calculations, the best you will be able to get is around 2m.
Thirdly, for DGPS to work, it doesn't need to be coastal, it needs a DGPS set up so that the same sattelites are being received by both a static and the roving receivers.[2] The static has a known location, and the errors from the ionosphere will be around about the same, and then a vector is calculated from the measurements. To get subcentimetre accuracy, you need to sit there for 2 epochs, i.e., 20 secs, so that an accurate position is gained. This is done by post processing. When the roving receiver is moving, then won't be as accurate.
Fourthly, the error determination in height is less accurate than that in plan due to the nature of the network involved. Ask any surveyor about survey networks and they will tell you the same thing. This is simply due to the way that errors are propogated.
Fifthly, to gain a subcentimetre accuray, there needs to be five, yes, five sattelites visible, so there is an overdetermination of the solution, and therefore, the least squares solution gives better accuracy. They should also be 15 degrees above the horizon, not 5 degrees, to help eliminate errors.
Sixthly, to get subcentimetre accuracies you need to set up a baseline, which generally takes 10 - 15 minutes, so that errors can be determined. If at any time, the number of sattelites able to be viewed drop below 5, or you lose lock on a sattelite, the baseline needs to reestablished.
And last but not least, the time at which these readings are taken needs to be taken into consideration, as you don't have enough sattelites overhead all the time.
[1] The sooner that the US and UK move to metric systems, is they day that people all over the world rejoice that they no longer have to use antiquated methods. And this from countries that are supposed to be ahead of the rest of the world.... Ha ha ha ha....
[2] The Australian state of Victoria, and Japan are two examples where the government has set up GPS networks around the country for differential use. In Australia, corrections can be picked up on a sideband of a radio station that is nationwide (JJJ). Japan has it set up for it's earthquake monitoring. Other places such as some South American countries are moving to setting things like this up.
Who is Sandman you are talking about. Coming from Australia, the Sandman is a bloke originally on a radio station, now on tv, that is a "loser" at everything.... Actually very funny. His trademark lines are "I choose to start this story now.", and "The end.".
The one metre is when taking the pictures on an angle, ala to the sides, but when facing straight down the performance is much better. Also at the sides of the image the distortion due to a number of factors, lens distortion, refraction..., means that the accuracy at the corners is less than that of the middle. The error function is a spherical one.
But they aren't as white as they are in real life. Have a look at any of the images and those building with white roofs are really white compared to the lines. What is happening is that for each pixel, i.e., one meter square, it is an average of the entire pixel, so the white in the lines contributes to the entire pixel showing it as grey. So, if you are really paranoid, you could just wear black and walk the roads, or any other color to match your surroundings, and you wouldn't be distinguishable. Perhaps that will mean black will be the new black, or whenever another color becomes the new black, all of the paranoid/fashion conscious people will have to buy some paint the same colour as there outfit and paint everywhere they go.... just a suggestion.
In the Australian state of Victoria, there was a state government trial of growing hemp for commercial processes. This was a few years ago and there isn't any info I can find on the web about it, but from what I can recall there where a number of problems with this.
1. Hemp is a tougher ( i.e., harder to cut) plant than the normal crops harvested ( wheat, barley, canola....), and so the blades on the harvesters needed sharpening and changing more often. Yes, you could harvest it all by hand with a sickle, but that would take a hell of a lot longer ( scientific term meaning around a googleplex) than traditional crops. Note: This was done on "traditional farms" rather than forests areas.
2. The yield wasn't as good as was thought.
3. The government had to continually monitor the crops to make sure that there wasn't to much THC (the active chemical) in the crop. This is a bad thing because it meant extra money had to be spent and in these days of economic rationalisism and downsizing especially within this government department, meant the the powers that be didn't like it.
Sidenote: THC is the active component in marijuana and is normally around 10%, but these crops had to be less than 3%, so smoking these would give you nothing a headache.....
Hemp is actually considered a noxious weed that is the highest class of these weeds, and must be eradicated. NRE Info
Dvorak:There are numerous GUI shells for the thing, and there's no reason the Linux community can't standardize one and stick with it (except that there seems to be a rule against even imagining such a concept as agreement).
This is one of Linux most valuable assets. If you don't like a program, go searching, generally someone else will have written another one that might suit your purpose. If we look at window managers (or GUI shells as Dvorak likes to put it), there are so many that if one doesn't suit you, look for another. If I want to impress someone with Linux, start up enlightenment and show them a flashy window manager. If I want to do work, then I switch to AfterStep. Nobody is forcing me to use one particular window manager. By standardizing this aren't we taking away people's choice. Granted, there are some situations where there are places where standards are needed, for example directory layout, where if you switch distributions these will be in a standard place, and those distributing software will know that hey, if in my make install I know that/usr/local/bin, will be in the path of 100% of users makes it a hell of a lot easier. But at the same time, choice between which program to use makes Linux stand out.
And this is an average over the entire 1m square, so a person standing up would not have a great impact. It is aerial photography that is something that more people should worry about.
1000m flying height 230mm x 230mm Film between 87 and 152mm focal length (generally)
87 mm lens
~70 degrees at the focal point
Scanned at 7.5 microns (i.e., 10e-6 m), giving a resolution of 1 cm on the ground....
Just think of all the helicopters that fly around and what could be done..... Note: This is what I recall from my photogrammetry class. Please correct if wrong.
url is Computer Bank, if you want to have a look. It basically gets old computers ( i.e., those from companies that have updated their computers and would otherwise chuck them out), and putting a customized version of Debian on them, and giving them away for nothing.
Same applies at my parents place... From where they are, 100 km's east of the SA border in Victoria, to Ballarat, a good 220kms away, all has the same area code 03-53xxxxxx, so if that was a local call, then my olds would have been on the net a lot quicker ( I told them I would only send emails, no phone calls NOTHING....).
According to this article in Fairfax IT , the main problem for windoze users will be that they can't use their current browsers. It is also a bit of a plug for Trumpet software, the company that first introduced the tcpip stack for windoze under ipv4, and has now introduced new stack for ipv6 for windoze. This is interesting as they have also have introduced a new OS called petrOS, which is meant to run windoze programs, but will run on a 486 with 2 Mb of ram.....
As an ozzzzzztralian (sic), we do get sick of these silly references after a while, and then we start bringing up references to other things about other countries...
Take for instance, this joke(?, perhaps true story)...
A man goes from the US to Canada, and at the border is stopped by customs and asked if he has any guns. The man say no, and is allowed to continue on. On the way back across the border to the US, the customs officers stop him again, and ask the same question, have you got any guns, and again, the man says no. So the customs officers ask him which one he wants......
As for us bringing up other references in regards to other countries, the whinging poms just don't get it, and the kiwis are to busy doing unmentionably things with sheep that we australian have grown thick skin.
Note: Vegemite is no longer Australian, and so being the patriotic person I am, I am going to hold off buying vegemite until Dick Smith releases his Ozziemite to the world.....
http://www.lion-nathan.co.nz/news_release.cfm?Page ID=508 Tooheys and their parent company Lion Nathan have been doing that for a while ( a couple of years ) down here in australia..... perhaps we aussies aren't that far behind the times.....?????
Slashdot Mirror
I did a study into ways to increase the accuracies of GPS recently (mine involved the use or neural networks, a friend's involved map matching) and both techniques are not all that accurate. Unless the government is wanting people to add an extra $AU1000 expense on top, then it wouldn't work. The extra expense would come from the dead reckoning system that would be needed to get any decent accuracies, especially within the "urban jungle" or areas where there is a lot of buildings/trees/other obstructions overhead. One way to overcome this is to have the GPS initialise by remaining stationary for a couple of minutes, but how many people want to run their GPS for a few minutes.
The study in itself is interesting as it only deals with a 40 mile (whats that ~70 km), which isn't all that far really. They also don't have technical details posted so I can't comment on them.
I can perhaps see governments using these on chronic speeders, much like the breathalizers used in chronic drink drivers cars, but for the general population, I don't think that could do this accurately enough yet for this to be anything more than a pipe dream.
Some people crack me up. Really. The encrypted GPS signal (the P-code) was only useful when selective availability was present. Since it was turned off, the difference isn't alot. The accuracy you can get know is about 20m with a $1000 Australian dollars (around $500 based on the current exchange rates ;).
Apart from that little fact, it you really wanted to, you can get an accuracy 5-10 cm (yes about a 2-4 inches) in real time using differential GPS (real time kinematic). This is used a lot in areas such as data capture ie, a power company wanting to know where all of it's power poles, so they fit a car with GPS and a couple of video cameras, and drive around for a few days/weeks (depending on how many), and they can then determine where each of there power poles are accuractely. Why is that important? If this is then put into a GIS (geographic information system), then the power company can make more informed decisions on what maintenance needs to be done, the most likely place of a failure during a blackout.... the list goes on.
But if 5-10 cm is accurate enough for you, you could always use geodetic systems, anywhere from $50K - $100K, which will give you sub-centimetre accuracy, although it needs post processing. Why would anyone want to do this. Japan uses this for earthquake monitoring, other countries use this for volcanic measurement, national geodetic systems which then connect into the land title system, which is the basis of most first world economies.
If hitting off target by 20m is not going to make much difference, but we have all of these extra benefits from accurate GPS, then why wouldn't you make it available to the general populace. Of course, the terrorist could always use GLONASS, the Russian equivalent....
Just reading through some of the comments here made laugh and laugh and laugh. Why? Everyone seems to jumping up and down about something that they haven't read properly, or only skimmed the abstract. This is just how over reactionary some /. readers are.
So lets give this some context. Firstly, the patent is for operating over HTTP or protocols to supplant or improve HTTP (section 1 of the aforementioned patent), so for all those that suggested prior art in the form of local copies, or it preventing local copies, ba-baam. Wrong answer.
As for relational databases and fuzzy matching. Wrong again.
The patent covers ways to identify unique identifiers for CDs based on the lengths of the tracks on the cds, and method for retrieving information from a network (preferably the web), based on this information. Another section of the patent is to distribute music to all users of an IRC chatroom at the same time.
So, the prior art that we are instead looking for is firstly, where there is a database containing the tracks, length, and so on, which can be identified by a unique identifier based on the time of the recordings. The last part, the unique identifiers based on the time would be the hardest part. But perhaps a music company somewhere around the world had already implemented something like this on an internal network, or a radio station with a huge cd library.... The second part of the prior art one would be wanting is something related to chat rooms, and trying to send this music to everyone at the same time. Something I know nothing about so I will leave it to someone else to think about this.
Advogato has a good discussion on this. One of the good links from this was Bazaar, in the sense of the cathedral and the bazaar, where there is a list of other peoples itches.
I guess the one major hurdle is getting a understanding of the code, because one program where I found an annoying bug, I downloaded the source, and there wasn't a single comment in the code relating to what was being done. I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to look for this bug, so I couldn't do anything about it. It doesn't matter it bugs are shallow if the water is muddy. See ESR's cathedral and the bazaar to put the last comment in context (yes, I just read it fully again).
And don't Telstra administer AARNET? I seem to remember they took that over when connect.com.au went full-on commercial...
Nope. The AARNET mirror homepage seems to answer that question for you. Also, the AARNET network page has more details
I am in a similar position to the original poster. I am just about to graduate (6 months from when I was meant to, but anyway), from the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. There basic policy, from what I can garner from this statute is that so long as there is no commercial exploitation, i.e., making money from it, of the IP, then the uni doesn't care what you do. If you do make money from it, then either the uni wants a piece of the pie, or, you must get permission from the IP officer of the uni. That is how things such as Mercury can be released under the GPL.
As for the publishing of thesis, they don't want these published commercially because that means the won't be able to include this in there citation statistics to show that they are the "premier research institution in Australia", as shown here. The more research they do, the greater the income for them.
A DGPS unit as such only receives, for use in an inertial navigation system it works in a number of ways, mobile phones, microwaves, uhf....
Secondly, this sort of data used to be available in Victoria on the web, through the department of justice(http://www.justice.vic.gov.au/), can't find it at the moment though...
Thirdly, Australia is actually implementing some privacy controls. The federal government is (was?) trying to introduce a law which would mean that anyone collecting personal information to put into huge databases would have to have your permission first. Problem was, this doesn't apply to current databases, which means that they can get together with you credit card company, ..., (satellite imaging company[1]), big brother, and get together all the info they like, so long as they set it up before July 1, 2001 (I think), they can do whatever they like.
[1] Any that actually believes that satellite photography can be used to track you is greatly mistaken. It is used by people such as surveyors, to make big great whopping maps of countries, especially road networks, ecologists and the like in remote sensing, i.e., finding out what vegetation there is without having to surevy the whole field (quick hide those mull plants out the back, big brother is spying on us from above...)...
2. If the GPS is inaccurate, it is useless in cities with the above applications
With Differential GPS (see other posts), and inertial navigation systems, measuring speed and direction, then no it isn't. You just use GPS to update errors in the INS, and vice versa, using a technique known as kalman filtering, and you can get pretty good accuracies. There is currently a project on at my university, to see if neural networks can be used... it is actually my project, so feel free to ask any questions....
Now, for all of those unenlightened(?) people out there, who think they know about GPS but don't, here are some facts.
Firstly, the the comment about the P-code and C/A-code is correct. And yes, there is a thing called selective availabilty, so therefore with a single gps receiver, you can't get any better than about 100m [1].
Secondly, Differential GPS at sub-centimetre accuracies requires post-processing, you can't do it on the fly. It you want real-time kinematic, or on the fly calculations, the best you will be able to get is around 2m.
Thirdly, for DGPS to work, it doesn't need to be coastal, it needs a DGPS set up so that the same sattelites are being received by both a static and the roving receivers.[2] The static has a known location, and the errors from the ionosphere will be around about the same, and then a vector is calculated from the measurements. To get subcentimetre accuracy, you need to sit there for 2 epochs, i.e., 20 secs, so that an accurate position is gained. This is done by post processing. When the roving receiver is moving, then won't be as accurate.
Fourthly, the error determination in height is less accurate than that in plan due to the nature of the network involved. Ask any surveyor about survey networks and they will tell you the same thing. This is simply due to the way that errors are propogated.
Fifthly, to gain a subcentimetre accuray, there needs to be five, yes, five sattelites visible, so there is an overdetermination of the solution, and therefore, the least squares solution gives better accuracy. They should also be 15 degrees above the horizon, not 5 degrees, to help eliminate errors.
Sixthly, to get subcentimetre accuracies you need to set up a baseline, which generally takes 10 - 15 minutes, so that errors can be determined. If at any time, the number of sattelites able to be viewed drop below 5, or you lose lock on a sattelite, the baseline needs to reestablished.
And last but not least, the time at which these readings are taken needs to be taken into consideration, as you don't have enough sattelites overhead all the time.
[1] The sooner that the US and UK move to metric systems, is they day that people all over the world rejoice that they no longer have to use antiquated methods. And this from countries that are supposed to be ahead of the rest of the world.... Ha ha ha ha ....
[2] The Australian state of Victoria, and Japan are two examples where the government has set up GPS networks around the country for differential use. In Australia, corrections can be picked up on a sideband of a radio station that is nationwide (JJJ). Japan has it set up for it's earthquake monitoring. Other places such as some South American countries are moving to setting things like this up.
I choose to start this comment now.
Who is Sandman you are talking about. Coming from Australia, the Sandman is a bloke originally on a radio station, now on tv, that is a "loser" at everything.... Actually very funny. His trademark lines are "I choose to start this story now.", and "The end.".
For more info, go to Triple J.
The one metre is when taking the pictures on an angle, ala to the sides, but when facing straight down the performance is much better. Also at the sides of the image the distortion due to a number of factors, lens distortion, refraction..., means that the accuracy at the corners is less than that of the middle. The error function is a spherical one.
But they aren't as white as they are in real life. Have a look at any of the images and those building with white roofs are really white compared to the lines. What is happening is that for each pixel, i.e., one meter square, it is an average of the entire pixel, so the white in the lines contributes to the entire pixel showing it as grey. So, if you are really paranoid, you could just wear black and walk the roads, or any other color to match your surroundings, and you wouldn't be distinguishable. Perhaps that will mean black will be the new black, or whenever another color becomes the new black, all of the paranoid/fashion conscious people will have to buy some paint the same colour as there outfit and paint everywhere they go.... just a suggestion.
In the Australian state of Victoria, there was a state government trial of growing hemp for commercial processes. This was a few years ago and there isn't any info I can find on the web about it, but from what I can recall there where a number of problems with this.
1. Hemp is a tougher ( i.e., harder to cut) plant than the normal crops harvested ( wheat, barley, canola....), and so the blades on the harvesters needed sharpening and changing more often. Yes, you could harvest it all by hand with a sickle, but that would take a hell of a lot longer ( scientific term meaning around a googleplex) than traditional crops. Note: This was done on "traditional farms" rather than forests areas.
2. The yield wasn't as good as was thought.
3. The government had to continually monitor the crops to make sure that there wasn't to much THC (the active chemical) in the crop. This is a bad thing because it meant extra money had to be spent and in these days of economic rationalisism and downsizing especially within this government department, meant the the powers that be didn't like it.
Sidenote: THC is the active component in marijuana and is normally around 10%, but these crops had to be less than 3%, so smoking these would give you nothing a headache.....
Hemp is actually considered a noxious weed that is the highest class of these weeds, and must be eradicated. NRE Info
Dvorak:There are numerous GUI shells for the thing, and there's no reason the Linux community can't standardize one and stick with it (except that there seems to be a rule against even imagining such a concept as agreement).
/usr/local/bin, will be in the path of 100% of users makes it a hell of a lot easier. But at the same time, choice between which program to use makes Linux stand out.
This is one of Linux most valuable assets. If you don't like a program, go searching, generally someone else will have written another one that might suit your purpose. If we look at window managers (or GUI shells as Dvorak likes to put it), there are so many that if one doesn't suit you, look for another. If I want to impress someone with Linux, start up enlightenment and show them a flashy window manager. If I want to do work, then I switch to AfterStep. Nobody is forcing me to use one particular window manager. By standardizing this aren't we taking away people's choice. Granted, there are some situations where there are places where standards are needed, for example directory layout, where if you switch distributions these will be in a standard place, and those distributing software will know that hey, if in my make install I know that
And this is an average over the entire 1m square, so a person standing up would not have a great impact. It is aerial photography that is something that more people should worry about.
1000m flying height
230mm x 230mm Film
between 87 and 152mm focal length (generally)
87 mm lens
~70 degrees at the focal point
Scanned at 7.5 microns (i.e., 10e-6 m), giving a resolution of 1 cm on the ground....
Just think of all the helicopters that fly around and what could be done.....
Note: This is what I recall from my photogrammetry class. Please correct if wrong.
url is Computer Bank, if you want to have a look. It basically gets old computers ( i.e., those from companies that have updated their computers and would otherwise chuck them out), and putting a customized version of Debian on them, and giving them away for nothing.
Same applies at my parents place... From where they are, 100 km's east of the SA border in Victoria, to Ballarat, a good 220kms away, all has the same area code 03-53xxxxxx, so if that was a local call, then my olds would have been on the net a lot quicker ( I told them I would only send emails, no phone calls NOTHING....).
According to this article in Fairfax IT , the main problem for windoze users will be that they can't use their current browsers. It is also a bit of a plug for Trumpet software, the company that first introduced the tcpip stack for windoze under ipv4, and has now introduced new stack for ipv6 for windoze. This is interesting as they have also have introduced a new OS called petrOS, which is meant to run windoze programs, but will run on a 486 with 2 Mb of ram.....
As an ozzzzzztralian (sic), we do get sick of these silly references after a while, and then we start bringing up references to other things about other countries...
Take for instance, this joke(?, perhaps true story)...
A man goes from the US to Canada, and at the border is stopped by customs and asked if he has any guns. The man say no, and is allowed to continue on. On the way back across the border to the US, the customs officers stop him again, and ask the same question, have you got any guns, and again, the man says no. So the customs officers ask him which one he wants......
As for us bringing up other references in regards to other countries, the whinging poms just don't get it, and the kiwis are to busy doing unmentionably things with sheep that we australian have grown thick skin.
Note: Vegemite is no longer Australian, and so being the patriotic person I am, I am going to hold off buying vegemite until Dick Smith releases his Ozziemite to the world.....
You have forgotten the "mate", Ostrailia, mate.... Also, it was the ASIC, not ASEC.
http://www.lion-nathan.co.nz/news_release.cfm?Page ID=508 Tooheys and their parent company Lion Nathan have been doing that for a while ( a couple of years ) down here in australia..... perhaps we aussies aren't that far behind the times.....?????