When they try to leave they just tend to not get very far because they never learned how to pump their own gas.

I think I already addressed your first paragraph pretty well in my comment.

If you’re touting something as an alternative to the Global Positioning System, I think it’s reasonable to expect that it’s going to cover at least most of the globe.

It also doesn’t really seem like it’s intended to be an alternative, more like an extension or backup to GPS. If I available you should still be using GPS, this is just something you’d fall back on if regular GPS goes offline. Sort of like how you wouldn’t want to run your house off a generator 24/7/365, but if a tree falls on the power lines by your house you at least have the generator to keep your fridge running.

EDIT:

Also, for pretty much the entire history of TV, different parts of the world have operated using different and often incompatible broadcast standards. I don’t really see that changing and the rest of the world adopting ours, especially with the current administration being blatantly hostile to our allies. At best they’ll adopt their own standards that will do something similar to BPS but probably won’t be directly compatible, there may be devices that can make use of both, similar to how a lot of GPS devices can also use Galileo or Glonass.

It does sound a lot like LORAN-C, which I admit I forgot was a thing that once existed.

I know that in areas it covered, LORAN was supposed to be pretty accurate for positioning. I don’t know exactly how well this would compare to that, things like what frequency they transmit on, how much power, digital vs analog, number of transmitter sites, etc. will all come into play, and I don’t feel like digging into exactly how the two systems would stack up against each other. Could absolutely be the BPS totally blows LORAN out of the water, they might be comparable, it might be markedly worse, we’re well outside of my pay grade now.

If I understand it, the title while technically accurate, may be a little misleading.

And to be clear, it’s very possible I’m misunderstanding it, and a brief Google search doesn’t turn up a whole lot of good information in a format that’s easily digestible to me.

When most people hear “gps alternative” I think most of us are picturing some kind of system that will tell you where in the world you are.

It seems to me that BPS is mostly concerned with time and not location.

Gps relies on having very accurate time information, you need to know exactly where the satellites are supposed to be at any given moment, and since they’re whizzing around the earth every 12 hours or so, you need to know exactly when it is to know where those satellites are supposed to be in order to properly triangulate a position from them.

So since we have these super accurate clocks flying around overhead beaming out time information, a lot of other critical infrastructure that relies on accurate timing has just latched onto using those time signals because they’re already there, no need to reinvent the wheel and come up with your own timing system.

But since GPS is theoretically susceptible to jamming, anti-satellite weapons, etc. we need a backup time signal in case gps goes down.

And since we already have television stations everywhere already broadcasting all kinds of digital data, we can just kind of piggyback off of them to broadcast the same sort of timing information you’d get from GPS.

I’m unclear whether it could actually be used for navigation, the name (Broadcast Positioning System) would seem to imply that it can, but I can’t seem to find anywhere that’s talking about it being used in that way.

In theory I suppose it can, no reason you can’t triangulate your position from some radio towers. In at least one sense it’s probably easier than satellite because those towers aren’t moving much (maybe swaying a few feet in the wind or so, but otherwise they’re about as stationary as anything is on this rock hurtling through space) so they make for a nice fixed reference point.

On the other hand, I suspect there’s kind of a line of sight issue. In general there’s not much between you and a gps satellite except for a few thousand miles of atmosphere, that signal is coming in a straight line down to you from space. That makes the math nice and easy.

That may not be the case with a TV signal, theres a good chance that there’s all kinds of buildings, hills, valleys, etc. between the tower and you, and so it’s harder to know if that signal is coming to you in a straight line or if it took a longer route and bounced around off of some hillsides and skyscrapers.

If it does bounce around, it takes longer for the signal to reach your device, which would make the calculations show that you’re further away from the tower than you are.

It’s also not at all a global system. It’s part of the ATSC 3.0 standard, which is mostly only used by North America and South Korea, the rest of the world uses different broadcast standards (that may or may not have similar provisions, I haven’t looked into them) so if you’re not in one of those places, you’re probably not going to be able to make use of BPS in any capacity.

Again, I’m a bit out of my depth here, I’ve said a lot of words, but I don’t have great confidence in a lot of it, I didn’t do any deep research into any of this and a lot of this was just me throwing thoughts out there. If anyone knows this stuff better than I do I’m excited to hear from you and for you to tell me what I’m wrong about.

Just kind of spitballing

For starters, you design a robot whose design is to take, for example, 100 steps forward, then take 100 steps back. Then you could:

Have it take a scoop of soil before it turns back, you now have a sample to test

Put some kind of chemical test strips (litmus paper, water quality, etc.) on it and send it towards a puddle of water you want to test. It splashed into the water and comes back, now you can see what the results on those test strips say

Not all electronics are so sensitive to radiation, and to some extent they can be shielded. Building a whole digital robot that’s hardened against radiation would be difficult and expensive. Sticking a couple radiation hardened sensors on an otherwise dumb pneumatic robot that doesn’t need to be hardened would be much cheaper.

Send the robot in with analog measuring tools- thermometers, barometers, film cameras (radiation can expose film, so picture quality may not be great, but it’s better than nothing, and just seeing how exposed the film is could be used to get a rough idea of the radiation level) etc.

Say there’s a big rock, and you need to know what’s behind it. Nowhere in the safety zone has a good viewing angle, and it’s either unsafe to fly over the area or there’s too much tree cover so you can do aerial photography. So you stick a mirror on the robot and send it out somewhere behind the rock off to the side o bit. Now you can look at the mirror through some binoculars or a telephoto lens and see what’s behind the rock in the reflection.

These are just a couple off the top of my head ideas as a layperson, I’m sure that a scientist or engineer actually doing this kind of work whose entire job is to think about this could come up with plenty of other good ways to use this sort of thing.

Electronics definitely make things easier, but we’ve had people doing science for millennia before we figured out how to do anything particularly useful with electricity.

Ah, you mean the original “razor and blades” business model that ensures repeat customers.

(Yes, I’m aware that many people who use safety razors these days are not necessarily buying from brands that make both the razor and the blades, I am such a person myself, I’m somewhat joking on that)

But even in the realm of “buy it for life” items, you can still end up with repeat customers. Maybe you want a second razor for your travel toiletry bag, or to keep in your second bathroom. Maybe you just see one that looks cooler, or the handle is more ergonomic, or the way you change the blade seems more convenient.

And BIFL items still do sometimes get lost, stolen, given away, thrown out, or sometimes even broken and need to be replaced.

And unless the world’s population starts shrinking, there will always be new shavers hitting puberty who will eventually need their own razor.

With a DNA test, unless you’re questioning paternity or testing for specific genetic traits like cancer risk and such, once your parents have taken a test, you and your siblings don’t really need to, you know what your parents are so you know what you are.

I work in 911 dispatch, I had a call once upon a time, just an open line from a cell phone. Couldn’t make any contact, just heard what sounded like a male and female arguing, it was hard to make out, sounded a little muffled. It didn’t sound super heated but just enough enough that for liability reasons I felt like it should be checked out as a possible disturbance/domestic.

The cellular location was decent but not pinpoint accurate, and it dropped in the middle of a fairly densely populated area, so it could have been any of potentially a few dozen or so houses, apartments, or businesses. No answer when I called them back.

Entered the call with whatever information I had, and checked where the location was dropping on Google maps.

It was dropping at a small local playhouse. Out of curiosity I checked what shows they were doing.

It was Gaslight.

Police checked the area and didn’t find anything. So I’m pretty sure I was just listening to them rehearsing from inside of an actor’s pocket or something.

Yeah, steam has definitely done a lot to improve the situation and I’m very impressed with the current state of things.

I just have a bit of a mental block from the last time I seriously tried to use Linux (circa 2009 probably) that I need to get over. A lot has changed since then

Lol, I’ll keep that in mind, internet stranger. I do have a lot of techy friends who I’ll probably offer it up to first, and I haven’t quite ruled out running Linux myself either to keep as my main PC or to use as a media server or something, but I’ll keep you in mind if I’m looking to get rid of it in a few months.

If it does come to that, pay for shipping (or pick it up if you happen to be local) and it’s yours. Feel free to hit me up to ask about it come november-ish if I don’t reach out first. No guarantees it will be available, but I’d rather it go to someone who’s going to use it than be waste

My PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11.

I cobbled it together from spare parts as my wife has upgraded over the years. It was a pretty beefy computer when she first built it, and it’s gotten a couple upgrades along the way, but the CPU and MoBo are probably about 10 years old if not older (it’s an AMD FX-something, I’m unsure of the exact specs, it’s whatever parts were in her bin of cast-offs stuck with a new case and hard drive)

And I’m happily gaming on it. I may not be maxing out the latest AAA titles in glorious 8k epic quality 120hz HDR VR yadda yadda yadda, but I can still run pretty much any game out there on some acceptable mid-to-high quality settings and decent performance.

I’m probably going to have to either upgrade the MoBo and processor come October, or make the jump to Linux (which I’m not exactly opposed to, but I do like not having to fuck with wine and proton to run my games)

It’s a perfectly serviceable board, still doing just fine by me, and there’s no reason it can’t give someone at least a few more good years of use, even as a gaming computer if you’re not a graphics snob.

But if I decide to upgrade, unless I find someone who wants to run Linux on it, or understands the risk of running win10 with no security updates, it’s probably going to become e waste.

They make canned hard boiled quail eggs. I like to get them for cocktail garnishes for Bloody Marys and such.

I have a few friends who used to go to game jams, events where you get a bunch of people together, split them up into groups, and give them a set amount of time (usually a day or a weekend) to make a video game.

Most of the people who went to these were programmers of course, and there were a couple in my friend group who were techy people as well, but mostly they were writers, artists, and musicians.

And the groups they ended up in usually handed up doing pretty well. Having the whole team there and involved from the get-go helped them make a pretty polished game, where a lot of the groups that didn’t have that ended up with music, writing, or visuals that felt kind of tacked-on as an afterthought.