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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-nope dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Could the world cope if GPS stopped working?

What would happen if GPS - the Global Positioning System - stopped working?

For a start, we would all have to engage our brains and pay attention to the world around us when getting from A to B. Perhaps this would be no bad thing: we'd be less likely to drive into rivers or over cliffs through misplaced trust in our navigation devices.

Pick your own favourite story about the kind of idiocy only GPS can enable. Mine is the Swedish couple who misspelled the Italian island of Capri and turned up hundreds of miles away in Carpi, asking where the sea was.

But these are the exceptions.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:27PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:27PM (#918416) Journal

    U.S. Navy Brings Back Celestial Navigation Over GPS Fears [soylentnews.org]

    A destroyer collision every hour.

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:36PM

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:36PM (#918420) Journal

    A destroyer collision every hour.

    The stealth paint is working like a charm

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:51AM

    by anubi (2828) on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:51AM (#918476) Journal

    I sure hope so. I feel every Navy ship should have star trackers similar to the ones on Apollo, as well as a LORAN like spread spectrum multi-transmitter pseudorandom sequence coding similar to GPS.

    Spread spectrum so that time to travel can be accurately recovered. What I am looking for is a fraction of the wavelength of the carrier by phaselock techniques.

    As far as I am concerned, our TV transmitters could be located in such a manner as to provide location via triangulation and time to travel of their carriers, which is already encoded in their spread spectrum transmission.

    It is my belief that any rogue nation may at any time launch a ton of sand into orbit, and render space unusable for everyone.

    From what I see, the big problem governments have is how to access the creativity of technical artisans while shielding them from the business leadership types that need their asses polished by their subordinates. The guys who destroy a corporate technical base often have helicopters waiting for them. Even the best of us seem to abandon our love of creative artistry and transform into handshaking political whores once we don and display the symbols of money and power.

    --
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:52AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:52AM (#918478) Homepage Journal

    Anyone who doesn't have a plan for when their tech takes a massive shit has no business being in charge of anything, ever.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.