Could you triangulate with three satellites in geostationary? Roughly speaking, they are all going to be in a line - and a line isn't a triangle.
Yes, assuming that all three are visible. However, the accuracy would suffer greatly as you correctly point out as there is not sufficient angular seperation. This factor is known as GDOP (geometric dilution of precision) which is a measure of how the geometry of the system affects the accuracy. Also, there is a hidden assumption in the statement that you only need three satellites to obtain a position. The assumption is that you know your altitude by other means. So it is true that you can get your surface lat/long with only three sats, but you need FOUR to get positon with altitude. Obviously this is important for some applications. The instersection of three spheres is in general TWO points.
I think the GPS satellites are in fairly tilted (near-polar) orbits, so that (a) thya cover polar areas efficeingly, and (b) you can always get a nice fat triangle from visible satellites.
Not polar, as I recall it is somewhere around 53 deg inclination. Inclination is more important for coverage reasons, as a fully populated constellation often has many more than four sats visible, so those that result in the best GDOP can be used to find the "best" solution.
Excellent idea! And while you are at it, we should also allow alcohol and cigarettes to be sold to minors as that should also be up to the parents to decide.
I also have this drive. Another big advantage of a drive that burns all formats like the Sony DRU-500ax is that you can buy the cheapest appropriate media. e.g. I use DVD-R for backing-up movies and home movies but use DVD+R/W for backing up data files (faster burns).
If this story had been about US currency implementing this technology, there would be droves of "big brother"/"fascist"/"echelon" posts along with the usual people pointing out how the US is neither a democracy nor free. So far there are no posts of this nature reqarding the EU (at least for the first 170 posts when viewed at >=3).
I hope your parents didn't pay too much for your collage education. What is that anyway? Pasting together lots of pictures rather haphazardly into one large work of art a-la Picasso?
I am next! Every time I knock on someones' door I am in violation of their challenge/response patent. Same goes with calling someone on the telephone (assuming they answer).
Aren't they violating the DMCA in doing this? After all, they reverse engineered the virus' code and are interfering with its copy mechanism... do I need to say "copy protection"?:)
Re:Soldiers aren't worth as much.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
I never claimed that the US military was a deterent to all war... just that the US military has successfully detered any foreign power from attacking the US directly. Of course there have been proxy wars. And as I recall, it was never the "Hawkish" politicians who said we shouldn't be involved in Camboda or Africa atrocities...
Re:Soldiers aren't worth as much.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Everything I have read has indicated exactly the opposite. I did a quick google search of the major wars the US has been invoved in since WW2. I usually went with the highest site ranking for which I could find a number. Note that I didn't choose numbers to prove my point, at least one of the sites was blatantly anti-US but I used their numbers anyway. I also tried to restrict the scope to direct civilan casualties as estimating civilan deaths from secondary war-time effects (i.e. no power, poor medical care, etc.) is extremely prone to propaganda and difficult to ascertain. None-the-less it is a real concern but beyond this scope.
Clearly the number of civilian deaths is dramatically "improving". What most people don't seem to realize is that the philosophy of warefare has fundamentally changed over the course of the century. During WW2 civilians were not avoided as they were seen as an integral part of the war effort, and because there was no way to avoid them if you wanted to (due to inaccurate weapons). In modern day, we have the later, and disagree with the former. Of course, if you are one who believes that the US intentionally kills civilians, then nothing that I say will convince you otherwise.
Re:Soldiers aren't worth as much.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
As a military officer, I can say that my job is not to kill people. Our military is primarily a deterent. By maintaining a strong military, we hope to avoid war. The later half of this century has been one of the most "peaceful" (with regard to percentage of deaths due to war) in the history of man. Every once in a while, some idiot says basically the same thing you just did... that it is my job to die for my country. It is not my job to die for my country. My job is to make sure the other guy dies for HIS country.
Nope... you are wrong (or lying but I will give you benefit of the doubt). I just fired up outlook, word and explorer and checked their ownership. All were listed as user level. (WinXP unmodified w/SP1).
One of the best games ever! I played this on my Atari ST as a teenager. It was one of the first (if not the first) 3-d first-person dungeon walk-throughs. The sound effects were way ahead of their time,... if you turned your volume up really high you could hear a tell-tale "click" if you stepped on a trap door or might hear monsters approaching. However, with the volume cranked, sometimes you would step into a pit trap and you would hear your party scream extremely loud as the screen went dark. It would suck your underwear right up your crack!
I know the history. I simply refuse to allow a group to redecide how they should collectively be referred to... particularly when they ostensibly change their name to avoid a negative conotation. A rose by any other name...
Speaking of last night's episode, it really rang familiar with me. What movie/story dealt with a similiar suicide vs. surrender theme? I really enjoyed the episode.
I don't "get" why Trekies (no, not Trekers) don't like Enterprise. I have never been a fan of Star Trek. The only series that I could tolerate at all was TNG and then only the later episodes. So why is it that I, a non-trekie, loves Enterprise yet the faithful despise it? The characters are well-developed, the acting is impressive and the story lines are not nearly as predicatable as TNG. Oh, and last night's episode was the first one I can recall where there wasn't any ass-kicking at all! None of that sissy Picard diplomacy crap.
Some thoughts:
-is it because the story predates what people are familiar with?
-is it not faithful to the Trek universe?
I am genuinely curious why do you all hate it so much? Does CleverNickName have any insight?
Excellent point... with fear of generalizing a little too much it is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
-parents not involved: kids feel that their parents don't care about them and dye their hair purple
-parents involved: kids bitch about not having any privacy
In the mid-90s blues guitar legend Robert Johnson was honored with a USPS commemerative stamp. Of course they removed the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Both the original picture and the stamp are on the link above.
I wouldn't call a welder or the guy who installed my drywall an engineer. Perhaps the guy who designed my house and certainly the guys who designed the construction equipment.
Now, I am going piss off a lot of people but consider a large software project... say developing the software to run a complete Air Traffic Control System (ATC). This task would likely require hundreds of programmers and many managers and systems engineers. The managers and systems engineers who develop the SPECIFICATIONS, PROTOCOLS, INTERFACES (etc.) and oversee the development and testing... sure, they earn the right to be Software Engineers. The guy who takes a specification and writes his/her very modular piece of code to accomplish a small task == code monkey.
Now, this isn't to say that all programmers aren't engineers,...obviously many of the managers do know how to program but are indeed engineers.
In "traditional" engineering fields, an "engineer" usually refers to someone with a degree in some engineering field (not including software but including Computer engineering which at my college were the guys who actually designed chips and architectures). Even still, there is a difference between "being" and engineer and having the TITLE engineer. To use the title of engineer, you have to pass the Professional Engineer (PE) exam, of which I am completely certain that 99.99% of CS majors would fail with quite a bit of flair.
To make matters even more confusing, there is a degree known as an "Engineer's Degree". It is pretty rare, but falls somewhere between a Master's Degree and a P.H.D. People with this degree would say they have a Masters in Mechanical Engineering AND the degree of Electical Engineer. (as an example.)
The difference is that my mother and grandmother both can add fonts in windows, but can't in linux.
On a side note, this is a good example of how delusional linux users are... they really believe that linux is as easy to use as windows. I won't argue that linux is more stable or configurable but useable? Give me a break.
I forget, is this thread about how much better Linux is than windows? In windows you just drag and drop the font into the Fonts folder of the control panel. If it is confusing amoung Linux users, it is just more proof that Linux will never be mainstream, despite its being superior at certain tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, assuming that all three are visible. However, the accuracy would suffer greatly as you correctly point out as there is not sufficient angular seperation. This factor is known as GDOP (geometric dilution of precision) which is a measure of how the geometry of the system affects the accuracy. Also, there is a hidden assumption in the statement that you only need three satellites to obtain a position. The assumption is that you know your altitude by other means. So it is true that you can get your surface lat/long with only three sats, but you need FOUR to get positon with altitude. Obviously this is important for some applications. The instersection of three spheres is in general TWO points.
I think the GPS satellites are in fairly tilted (near-polar) orbits, so that (a) thya cover polar areas efficeingly, and (b) you can always get a nice fat triangle from visible satellites.
Not polar, as I recall it is somewhere around 53 deg inclination. Inclination is more important for coverage reasons, as a fully populated constellation often has many more than four sats visible, so those that result in the best GDOP can be used to find the "best" solution.
Excellent idea! And while you are at it, we should also allow alcohol and cigarettes to be sold to minors as that should also be up to the parents to decide.
I also have this drive. Another big advantage of a drive that burns all formats like the Sony DRU-500ax is that you can buy the cheapest appropriate media. e.g. I use DVD-R for backing-up movies and home movies but use DVD+R/W for backing up data files (faster burns).
not a troll,... just putting things in perspective re: the war on MS.
Just an observation...
I hope your parents didn't pay too much for your collage education. What is that anyway? Pasting together lots of pictures rather haphazardly into one large work of art a-la Picasso?
I am next! Every time I knock on someones' door I am in violation of their challenge/response patent. Same goes with calling someone on the telephone (assuming they answer).
Aren't they violating the DMCA in doing this? After all, they reverse engineered the virus' code and are interfering with its copy mechanism... do I need to say "copy protection"? :)
I never claimed that the US military was a deterent to all war... just that the US military has successfully detered any foreign power from attacking the US directly. Of course there have been proxy wars. And as I recall, it was never the "Hawkish" politicians who said we shouldn't be involved in Camboda or Africa atrocities...
WW2 Civilian Deaths ~30 million
Korean War Civilian Deaths ~2 million
Vietnam Civilian Deaths (both sides) less than 400,000
Gulf War I 13,000.
Yugoslavia~500
Afganistan ~3000
~2500
Clearly the number of civilian deaths is dramatically "improving". What most people don't seem to realize is that the philosophy of warefare has fundamentally changed over the course of the century. During WW2 civilians were not avoided as they were seen as an integral part of the war effort, and because there was no way to avoid them if you wanted to (due to inaccurate weapons). In modern day, we have the later, and disagree with the former. Of course, if you are one who believes that the US intentionally kills civilians, then nothing that I say will convince you otherwise.
As a military officer, I can say that my job is not to kill people. Our military is primarily a deterent. By maintaining a strong military, we hope to avoid war. The later half of this century has been one of the most "peaceful" (with regard to percentage of deaths due to war) in the history of man. Every once in a while, some idiot says basically the same thing you just did... that it is my job to die for my country. It is not my job to die for my country. My job is to make sure the other guy dies for HIS country.
Nope... you are wrong (or lying but I will give you benefit of the doubt). I just fired up outlook, word and explorer and checked their ownership. All were listed as user level. (WinXP unmodified w/SP1).
One of the best games ever! I played this on my Atari ST as a teenager. It was one of the first (if not the first) 3-d first-person dungeon walk-throughs. The sound effects were way ahead of their time,... if you turned your volume up really high you could hear a tell-tale "click" if you stepped on a trap door or might hear monsters approaching. However, with the volume cranked, sometimes you would step into a pit trap and you would hear your party scream extremely loud as the screen went dark. It would suck your underwear right up your crack!
I know the history. I simply refuse to allow a group to redecide how they should collectively be referred to... particularly when they ostensibly change their name to avoid a negative conotation. A rose by any other name...
Speaking of last night's episode, it really rang familiar with me. What movie/story dealt with a similiar suicide vs. surrender theme? I really enjoyed the episode.
I also know the quarterbacks of the teams I hate. What's your point? (That's a football reference btw...)
Some thoughts:
-is it because the story predates what people are familiar with?
-is it not faithful to the Trek universe?
I am genuinely curious why do you all hate it so much? Does CleverNickName have any insight?
Argh!!!! Who do we hate more?! Spammers or AOL? Thank goodness MS isn't involved in this story or I'd be really perplexed.
If only I had know that to be respected by Slashdot as an "engineer" all I needed was some some tape! Would have saved me a lot of time and effort.
Excellent point... with fear of generalizing a little too much it is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. -parents not involved: kids feel that their parents don't care about them and dye their hair purple -parents involved: kids bitch about not having any privacy
In other news: Iraqi forces are poised to decimate the US forces in Iraq.
In the mid-90s blues guitar legend Robert Johnson was honored with a USPS commemerative stamp. Of course they removed the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Both the original picture and the stamp are on the link above.
Now, I am going piss off a lot of people but consider a large software project... say developing the software to run a complete Air Traffic Control System (ATC). This task would likely require hundreds of programmers and many managers and systems engineers. The managers and systems engineers who develop the SPECIFICATIONS, PROTOCOLS, INTERFACES (etc.) and oversee the development and testing... sure, they earn the right to be Software Engineers. The guy who takes a specification and writes his/her very modular piece of code to accomplish a small task == code monkey.
Now, this isn't to say that all programmers aren't engineers,...obviously many of the managers do know how to program but are indeed engineers.
In "traditional" engineering fields, an "engineer" usually refers to someone with a degree in some engineering field (not including software but including Computer engineering which at my college were the guys who actually designed chips and architectures). Even still, there is a difference between "being" and engineer and having the TITLE engineer. To use the title of engineer, you have to pass the Professional Engineer (PE) exam, of which I am completely certain that 99.99% of CS majors would fail with quite a bit of flair.
To make matters even more confusing, there is a degree known as an "Engineer's Degree". It is pretty rare, but falls somewhere between a Master's Degree and a P.H.D. People with this degree would say they have a Masters in Mechanical Engineering AND the degree of Electical Engineer. (as an example.)
The difference is that my mother and grandmother both can add fonts in windows, but can't in linux. On a side note, this is a good example of how delusional linux users are... they really believe that linux is as easy to use as windows. I won't argue that linux is more stable or configurable but useable? Give me a break.
I forget, is this thread about how much better Linux is than windows? In windows you just drag and drop the font into the Fonts folder of the control panel. If it is confusing amoung Linux users, it is just more proof that Linux will never be mainstream, despite its being superior at certain tasks.