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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: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:27AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday November 10 2019, @12:27AM (#918468) Journal

    Not that they're mutually exclusive, of course. But I am a map geek, and I have never found GPS particularly useful. On a blank piece of paper, I can draw almost all the US Interstate highway system from memory, plus a lot of other major roads.

    In the 1990s, I gave this MS Streetview (I forget the exact name) a trial, and wow, was it bad. We've only known shortest path algorithms since the 1950s, but MS didn't use any. Best as I could tell, their method was to draw a straight line from source to destination, then pick the roads closest to that line. If that road was one of those lesser US highways that wastes a lot of the traveler's time on 5 and 10 mile jogs to the left and right, it would pick it anyway, even when there was a nearby major route that was both shorter and faster.

    Google Maps is much better, but on a trip of some complexity, it's still easy to beat. Google Maps might give you 3 different routes, and while good, often, none of them are the very best.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:52AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:52AM (#918517) Journal

    That sounds a lot like Household Mover's Guide. It maps the most direct route from Point A to Point B, and cares nothing about traffic, construction, up- and down-grades, tourist traps, or anything else.