Open US GPS Data?

tobiasly writes "I read an article today about a map error on the popular Garmin GPS devices which often leads to truckers in a particular town becoming trapped. From my own experience, every electronic map I've ever seen (Google, Mapquest, my Mio GPS) has the layout of my neighborhood completely and frustratingly wrong. A quick search turned up only one open-source mapping project, but it's for New Zealand only. Why are there no comparable projects in the U.S. or elsewhere? Obviously such a project would need a good peer-review/moderation/trust system but I'd gladly put in the time necessary to drive around town with my GPS in "tracking" mode, then upload, tag, and verify my local data. Has anyone with more technical knowledge in maps and auto-routing looked more into this? Are there technical limitations to such a project? Should the government subsidize a project to create open, free, up-to-date electronic maps? Surely there is a public benefit available from such a project."

open street map?

[by Anonymous Coward]

http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [openstreetmap.org]

Re:open street map?

[Jim_Maryland (718224)]

Open Street Map is a good start but needs some enhancements to allow for proper data attribution and segregation of the different feature types (point, line, polygon) into "layers". Being able to distinguish a bike path from a highway is significant. A community based approach to data reviews would also be nice (i.e. if a user always enters bad data, other users could moderate them so that their input doesn't have the same "value" that a good contributor does).

Re:open street map?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Being able to distinguish a bike path from a highway is significant

Are you looking at the same OpenStreetMap as me? I just looked up the area around my house on OSM and Google Maps. OSM has more accurate mapping of the extents of the park (Google Maps is just plain wrong here). It also shows footpaths through the park (as dotted lines - Google doesn't show them at all) and indicates the different road types correctly (Google uses nonstandard colouring for roads) and shows roads inside the university campus, where Google just shows a grey blob. OSM also shows the hospitals and carparks correctly (sadly not the pubs). When it comes to road names, both have some that the other lacks (neither has complete coverage, but both have all of the major ones).

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

OSM also shows the hospitals and carparks correctly (sadly not the pubs).

Correction: If I zoom in more, OSM also has pubs (and churches) labelled correctly, and gains the road labels that were missing (Google doesn't).

Re:open street map?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke (850482)]

Around where I live (rural England), OSM seems only to have the medium-small roads on it that lead to pubs - make of that what you will!

No? There are commercial applications...

[Lord Satri (609291)]

I disagree. OSM is very useful in many areas, including where it is hard to find maps (try Baghdad [openstreetmap.org] for example). With the recent addition of TIGER data [slashgeo.org] for the whole U.S., OSM became useful even in the U.S.

this project is lllloooooonnnnggg ways off from being useful everywhere

This is obviously not true when considering there have been commercial applications of OSM for a long time [slashgeo.org] (Isle of Wight - October 2006). See also this related wrap-up entry [slashgeo.org].

I am amongst the ones who believe we're only seeing the beginning of OSM everywhere. Contrary to your comment, I believe it is happening and will not take that long to reach some level of overall maturity. As to why is doesn't need an army of volunteers? Because, as done with the TIGER dataset, datasets are directly piped into OSM, as done in the Netherlands last year [slashgeo.org].

Re:open street map?

[ageforce_ (719072)]

I could help that project by uploading my route tracks but what if I use mapsource (garmin software) to look up the road name am I infringing on something?

Yes. Unfortunately you are not allowed to do that. Map-vendors are protecting themselves against copying by deliberately introducing errors. See for example http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Copyright_Easter_Eggs [openstreetmap.org]

Re:open street map?

[sumdumass (711423)]

Well, map makers don't really make maps anymore. They collect data like that which is available at tiger maps (if it is still around) but they get this data from cities, state, county and federal courthouses. The cities and political entities makes the maps and basically just sell the information to the map makers who organize it and compile it to the same scale and fit it to their presentation.

Often the errors you see is because there was a planned development that never went through it they (the city/county whoever) changed the traffic flow more recently then the map data is. I found this to be the case back in 1991 when I was delivering pizzas. I grabbed a city map from a tourist booth only to find some roads didn't exist. I purchased a random McNally or whatever the name is from a gas station to find the same errors. After I went to the city engineers office looking for an accurate map, they explained this to me. It was also interesting that I would watch development projects going up and already have a map complete with street names several years after this.

If you see a map problem with any map, I would bet it is something to do with the political entity more then the map maker. It might be them in some cases but roads dead ending when they should go through a town is the cities fault. And you will likely find the same error across multiple maps.

Re:open street map?

[budgenator (254554)]

Street names in the US are assigned by the government and the government can't own a copyright in the US. All most all of those maps have errors and they have a lot of the same errors because they are based on the TIGER, Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, database. The TIGER database [census.gov] is maintained by the U.S. Census and while they are huge, you can have a lot of fun with them especially when you mix in the Perl module Geo::Coder::US [cpan.org] and GMT, Generic Mapping Tool [hawaii.edu]. The TIGER is a database of any known and and a huge number of interpolated data points, for example my house is listed as a known point with it's "official" latitude and longitude, two blocks down is another known point and every house in between is estimated. One thing you quickly notice when playing with the database is that roads often have multiple "official" name, Roads may "officialy" exist but not physically exists and roads may physically exist with out "officially" existing. Roads can even meander and move, especially dirt fire-roads and trails in the woods.

Re:open street map?

[pipatron (966506)]

So fix it. You're obviously a geek since you read slashdot. You obviously have a lot of spare time, since you read slashdot. You also know about the errors and how it's supposed to be. Give an hour of your time to the project. The more complete it is, the more people will fix the details.

Frustrating

[mrxak (727974)]

It can definitely be frustrating. There's a street near my house where I grew up that is complete on every online map I've ever seen, but the truth is it's actually two dead ends that don't meet up. I've seen other mistakes as well. Unfortunately the same bad data keeps getting recycled everywhere, because companies are too lazy to verify things. I'm all for an open source mapping project, or at the very least better ways of reporting errors.

Re:Frustrating

[Kagura (843695)]

Unfortunately the same bad data keeps getting recycled everywhere, because companies are too lazy to verify things.

I think you are underestimating just how many roads there are in the US.

Source: National Highway System (United States) [wikipedia.org]
The National Highway System (NHS) of the United States comprises approximately 160,000 miles (256,000 kilometers) of roadway, including the Interstate Highway System as well as other roads, which are important to the nation's economy, defense, and mobility.

Further down in the same article:
The 160,000 miles of NHS include only 4% of the nation's roads, but they carry more than 40% of all highway traffic, 75% of heavy truck traffic, and 90% of tourist traffic.

That's a lot of roads. Stupid lazy companies... :)

Re:

[rdawson (848370)]

I had cartography friend tell me that often map errors were introduced intentionally as a form of copyright. A mapmaker inserts a bogus item, street, landmark etc. into the map as a watermark to detect copies of his work.

Re:Frustrating

[gnasher719 (869701)]

I thought about that for a while when I read about some mapping company being sold for a few billion dollars.

The USA has a total of about four million miles of road. How would you go about mapping it all, and at what cost? Take a car, a driver and a passenger, the passenger having a notebook with GPS. And the notebook needs some pretty clever software. As the driver drives along, the passenger keeps track of everything that is going on - his job is to type in the name of the road, suitability for what kind of traffic, obstacles, and where you can turn. You'd probably want a separate input device for special functions, like road to the left, road to the right, or for "missed something" (the driver probably can't just stop anytime). So the software keeps building up a database, keeps track of things that are missing (if you typed in "there is a left turn here" then you'll have to follow that turn at some time).

With all overhead, you should be able to build a road map at about 10 miles per hour (less in New York, but more on country roads that stretch for miles). That is 400,000 hours. Lets say you can do 2000 hours a year, that is 200 cars driving around for a year. 400 people doing the work. If the job pays $60,000 a year, that is $24,000,000 in wages. You'd drive a total of say 12 million miles; at 100,000 miles per car that is 120 cars destroyed. Say $20,000 per car, that is $6 mil. $30 million, double it for everything I forgot, that is about $60 million to get complete road maps of the USA from scratch.

So do something about it...

[bunratty (545641)]

I've reported errors to several map makers, including Google maps and the makers of the maps in our phone directory. They all have ways to report errors. If each one of grabs a map right now and reports just one error, just think how much better the maps will be next year...

To the submitter:

[caluml (551744)]

From my own experience, every electronic map I've ever seen (Google, Mapquest, my Mio GPS) has the layout of my neighborhood completely and frustratingly wrong.

So why not move to somewhere with exquisitely accurate and detailed mapping? I hear that the nuclear reactors in Pyongyang and Iran have been mapped out quite well.

for Argentina...

[hjf (703092)]

For Argentina, there is www.proyectomapear.com.ar

That's a pretty big job

[Exp315 (851386)]

The only two suppliers of nav map data in North America are Navteq and TeleAtlas. They have both invested huge amounts of money in creating their maps, including driving around cities doing street-by-street mapping with vans, although most of their data came originally from official public street maps. Both companies have been the target of multi-billion dollar take over offers in the last year. In addition to capturing the map data, tagging (street names, one-way, turn restrictions, road type etc.) and validation (making sure streets link up correctly in the database) are also huge jobs. I wouldn't want to say that an open-source effort is not possible, but we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of the job. It involves a lot more effort than just driving around a few streets in your neighborhood.

Re:That's a pretty big job

[fireboy1919 (257783)]

I work at a GIS company.
Keep in mind that there's USGS [usgs.gov], and that's not the only source of public maps (though that particular source isn't really focused on making navigation easier).

Most states are now working on providing a unified system for people to put their map info into (currently the best source of maps is counties and property appraisers - both of which can easily be mandated to upload their data if it doesn't cost them much).

So give it time. In the US this will become something provided as a government service, and the only people selling things will be the ones writing software that analyzes the data.

Re:

[Jim_Maryland (718224)]

Building a community based dataset may have some benefits but it also has many problems. The benefit is that it will be an open source of data and anyone can provide updates to the data. The downsides are: - enforcement of attribute: either people must be forced to enter certain attributes to ensure consistency in the data (which will cause some to not participate in collection). Without this, the data can not be used for more complex usage (geocoding being a primary problem for typical web usage) - acc

Odd routing

[Scratch-O-Matic (245992)]

I had an experience recently where I was driving through an unfamiliar town the next state over, following my Garmin. It took me on a route that, while leading eventually to the right place, did not seem to make much sense given the other roads available. I noticed a camper in the lane next to me that didn't seem to belong, and that driver also had a GPS navigator mounted on his windshield. So I found myself wondering: does he have the same unit (or data source) as me? If I did a study of all the non-local cars driving down this road, how many of them would have the same unit in their cars?

There are several interesting implications, the most obvious being "sponsored routing" down a particular street in a business dist.....gotta go, I'm on the phone with my patent attorney.

Re:

[Zerbey (15536)]

You may be right, bear in mind that this is a computer trying to set up the best route it can from a complex set of algorithms. My GPS wants me to turn on a certain street on the way home. It makes sense, it's a main road and will take me right to my street. What my GPS does not know is that the intersection it wants me to turn on is a) VERY dangerous and b) the busiest intersection in my city so I would be stuck there for 10 minutes.

The next left will add 0.3 of a mile and an extra turn to my journey bu

Government Maps - of course

[whm (67844)]

The government already creates these maps (TIGER [wikipedia.org]), which are in the public domain. But I'll admit, it's a little fun to pretend that Google/MapQuest/Yahoo and whoever else are driving around all of the Western world with GPSs attached to their cars :)

~whm

Re:

[Azure Khan (201396)]

*cough*google maps street view*cough**cough*

Re:Government Maps - of course

[Trailer Trash (60756)]

Yes, and TIGER is put together by the USGS, and it already *is* the "open source" data that the geniuses here are talking about. If you find an error, alert the USGS. I've done it myself - call their number and ask.

Now, as for the fantasy of people driving around with a gps attached to their car (ha ha, isn't that stupid!), um, oh:

http://www.navteq.com/about/whatis_difference.html [navteq.com]

"NAVTEQ digital map data is built on the roads of the world. Over seven hundred NAVTEQ field researchers from approximately 168 offices drive millions of kilometers of the road network each year. To provide uniformity and maximize precision each team works to a single global specification. And each team has state-of-the-art equipment, including our proprietary GPS-based collection technology and GWS software.

These field teams are constantly verifying and updating the database, not only in terms of road geometry, but also in details. Each team finds and records up to 260 attributes--everything from addresses and road signs to turn restrictions--for each segment of road. The result is the NAVTEQ difference: digital map data that is precise, robust and multifaceted."

There's no pretense; Navteq has people driving around, with gps's, verifying speed limits, road conditions, etc. That's why companies like Google and Yahoo buy their data. Before you act like an ass, you might want to do some rudimentary fact-checking...

TigerData et al

[chelanfarsight (835467)]

1. I use TigerData as a GIS professional and frankly its often crap. It was a good start for a rushed product in order to launch a project, but I would not now nor would I ever rely on its accuracy without checking it. The TigerData for my area regularly has roads going off the sides of mountains, roads where there have never been roads, etc. Also, the TigerData for my area has not been updated since it was released almost 8 years ago.
2. As for "driving around" it would depend upon how accurate the device is. The local utility company I work closely with spent 5,000$ just on the handheld to receive subcentimeter readings and about 20,000$ on the base station to accompany it. Your typical yellow DeLorme unit is great for driving around but it is not a data collection unit I would use when building maps. Depending upon satellite coverage for your area (weather, tree cover, geography, the placement of the 3 satellites needed to position accurately) your store bought unit could be as much as 100ft or more off your actual location and rarely closer than 5ft. Again depending upon coverage and the device. Then add the need for regular updates and mapping changes.
3. An open source mapping project would be great, but it is currently rather expensive to actually collect and process the data needed to build accurate maps. A terrific source of addressing and centerline information is your local E911 Board. At least in my part of the world they do much of the fire district, centerline, and, of course, addressing for mapping.

Tracks4Australia

[shogun (657)]

In Australia there is the Tracks4Australia [gpsoz.com.au] project which uses user contributed GPS track logs to generate rural and remote area trail and road maps, mostly useful for 4WDers etc. They are working on a commercial product now but the basic mapset appears to be staying free.

Maemo Mapper!

[Alizarin Erythrosin (457981)]

If you use one of the Nokia internet tablets, try Maemo Mapper [maemo.org].

Make a U-Turn

[techpawn (969834)]

The funniest thing about the Garmin is that is will tell you to make illegal U-Turns.
The story goes like this: My girlfriend got one for Christmas and we where going to test it by going to get grandmothers house. Halfway there my girlfriend went on autopilot, so to speak, because she's done this trip so many times. All the sudden we hear "Make a U-Turn... Recalculating" What the hell? Then we hear it again... The Garmin was telling us to perform illegal U-turns to work on its gps calculations.
I wonder if that would hold up "But officer. The GPS told me to!"

Re:Make a U-Turn

[SoundGuyNoise (864550)]

So it might ACTUALLY send you over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's House????

Story

[Chrisq (894406)]

In France I was lead down a country lane that got narrower and narrower and eventually I came to the conclusion that I would not get my standard car through, so I turned round. Now My wife has a terrible sense of direction - or to be fair she is American and navigates by intersections, junctions and so on rather than by landmarks like you have to with the squiggly roads in Europe. (Actually I am as bad in the USA, all the roads and junctions look the same to me and by the time I read an exit sign's road nu

Mapshare?

[Zerbey (15536)]

My TomTom device has mapshare built in, I'd be astonished if Garmin did not. I've made dozens of map corrections (mostly silly stuff like incorrect street names) and they seem to update the maps often. My neighbourhood has been around for a while so no problems with the street layout here. I believe TomTom use Teradata maps whereas most other GPS systems use a different company.

I would love to see an open mapping project though.

Check your local streets dept.

[kabocox (199019)]

You can blame the government mainly your local streets dept for this. I've noticed state and federal highways being much more accurate than local or rural streets. May your deity help you if you live in a town that likes to rename side streets every few months.

Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that. I doubt it'll ever be that clean cut or that your local street department will want to even give any other city much less state or federal government department access to updated street info. This is just my personal experience working in a city police department and occasionally trying to get this information from the city entities that physically make and should be tracking these things.

The more that I see that its difficult or impossible for intercity departments to communicate I tend to think that the only real solution is for Pizza companies or UPS/FedEx to partner with Google streets to actually physically map out where their fleets move through.

If your city has a GIS department, then that should be keeping track of this information.... You could always do a FOIA request for any arcview street centerline data.
The problem is that most of us have problems getting that "updated" arcview street centerline data into our lowest price GPS device.

Open Source UK GPS Data

[killthebunny (755776)]

We have been collecting GPS positions at 10 second intervals since we began operations in London in 2004 (we're a courier company with a technology twist). We have collected 173 million positions on a 24/7 basis (growing by about 1 million per day) across our bicycle, motorbike, and van fleet. We have been donating to OpenStreetMap for years and have released our data for noncommercial use via a public API http://api.ecourier.co.uk/ [ecourier.co.uk] under a CC license. Have fun!

Fixing errors on mapping sites

[halfabee (685633)]

Please forgive the slightly off-topic post...

Two of the biggest map data providers are Navteq [navteq.com] and TeleAtlas [teleatlas.com]. Each company has a section on their website where you can report errors in their maps.

Since they will need to review your submission and mapping sites like Google Maps and Mapquest only update their map data a couple times a year, it will be a while before your correction goes public (if ever).

The obvious solution...

[MadMidnightBomber (894759)]

Come and live in New Zealand, eh? [newzealand.com]

Prior art

[goodmanj (234846)]

Should the government subsidize a project to create open, free, up-to-date electronic maps? Surely there is a public benefit available from such a project."

This is a great idea. We could have some federal government institution which deals with lots of maps anyway take the initiative and create digitized map data for the whole country, using information from USGS quads. For "fact checking", they could mail out the map data to every municipality in the country, who would make corrections which would be incorporated into the system. The data would be publicly available from the government for free, to be used by open-source or commercial makers of maps and map tools.

Congrats! You've just re-invented TIGER, run by the U.S. Census Bureau. If you use map software, it probably uses TIGER data. If the data in your town is inaccurate, it's because your local government sucks.

The dancing dog observation

[bfwebster (90513)]

I'm amused at the thought of trying to create an open-source version of a typical North American commercial GPS street/address database and navigation program. I've used a GPS system in my car for about 3 years now, and while I encounter the occasional error or omission, most of the time I marvel that it works at all, much less as well as it does. As someone who has worked on some very large scale software projects, I have to say that the software quality assurance (SQA) challenges and issues for both the database itself and generating navigation routes from Point A to Point B are enough to give me the heebie jeebies -- particularly given the IT industry's general track record on SQA practices.

Here's a reality check. Pick any one-square-mile area of your community and attempt to create (and keep up to date) a GPS navigation system that will legally, safely, and efficiently navigate you between any two addresses within that square mile, keeping in mind your civil liabilities should your system cause accidents, injuries, or illegal driving maneuvers. Oh, and your navigation system has to fit in a device that's about the same size as a Palm Pilot or an iPod touch and that runs on rechargeable batteries.

Now scale this up by about 3.5 million to cover the United States. ..bruce..

Surveying (CAD and GIS)

[esocid (946821)]

I worked as a surveyor for a private engineering firm a few years back and it isn't a simple task just to collect data and upload it. This applies for GPS data as well that you have to upload into GIS, or the like, software and manipulate it with any data-correction and overlays to aerial or satellite photography. Trust me, I spent hours cleaning up collection points and trying to get it to match up with the overlays with GPS data for invasive species management plans for a national park I worked at using ArcGIS (which is absolutely terrible to work with in comparison to ArcView). The surveying part usually requires some sort of CAD to properly map out what information you have collected during surveying and in-the-field math to figure out what goes where. It's not as simple as you think it might be.

Re:

[juanfe (466699)]

Open Street Map [openstreetmap.org] has a good and growing base of data for the US. Plus they link in to open source or freeware applications that you can load on PDAs, GPS-enabled cell phones, laptops, etc to begin creating traces that can then be turned into map data.

Combine that with Open Source GIS software [opensourcegis.org] to query the data source and you're in business.

For this to work, you have to have a huge pool of people willing to drive a lot. Even the big map players (NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas) have problems keeping data up to speed, a

Re:TomTom MapShare

[Laughing Pigeon (1166013)]

Try TomTom MapShare.

Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with an "open source project". It is more like:

1. Make something that is so-so.

2. Profit!

3. Let the people who pay a lot of money for this so-so product do work for You without paying them for it. These users will take Your product from the so-so stadium and turn it into a good product.

4. Even more Profit! without any costs.

Reminds me a bit of cddb... What the OP wants is something like Freedb.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

No, no, not so-so, TomTom!

Re:TomTom MapShare

[Creepy (93888)]

If you wait for a manufacturer to make all the corrections, you will wait forever because they can't check all places at all times and certainly wouldn't know all the best PoI and restaurants even if they're full time residents. For instance, both TomTom and Garmin GPS list a TGI Fridays that was a few blocks from my home as still in business when, in fact, it moved 2 miles away over 6 months ago and is being replaced by a new restaurant. There is also a fantastic Thai restaurant (it has won awards for best Thai) tucked behind a strip mall that isn't listed and I'd love to add it.

Personally, I like features like this [gizmodo.com] on TomTom, but yes, an open source database would rock. Even something that pulled from google maps would be cool, IMO, as long as google maps stays free.

Re:TomTom MapShare

[Da Fokka (94074)]

Apparently you don't understand the concept of cuisine so I'll try to enlighten you. There is very little quality difference between a reasonably priced and expensive restaurans. By and large the food is pretty decent but you'll end up with mediocre food in restaurants with a Michelin star just as often as you will end up with stellar food in a more mundane place. The difference, my friend is exclusivity. There is some part in our brain (I believe it's called the Nucleus Superfluous) that makes regular stimuli more enjoyable when you have been waiting for very long. This is exactly why so many people went to see Episode One, while there was very little reason to assume it was going to be good even before it was reviewed.

The same principle holds true for restaurants. The first couple of bucks will go into food quality and better service. There is a very real difference between a $5 hamburger meal and a $15 steak. But the next $50 will go into square plates, french accents and, of course, exclusivity in the form of missed opportunity costs. You pay for the fact that they might have sold the food to the person currently waiting at the bar.

In this light you'll probably understand how downright stupid it is to share that little known Thai restaurant behind the strip mall with the rest of the planet. Before you know it, hordes of TomTom-toting patrons will crowd your once lovely restaurant. Prices will skyrocket, portions will shrink and before you know it it will obtain a Michelin star and you will have to find somewhere else to eat.

Note that Mapmakers make intentional mistakes...

[PatSand (642139)]

Folks, be aware that one way that a mapmaker "improves" on a copyright protection is to intentionally alter a small section of a map (and in a book, a few at random) that is hopefully not used. This helps them to prosecute somebody that steals the map information and resells it. Granted, this is known for hard-copy maps, but I believe it is also true for GPS maps as well (call them the "soft-copy" versions).

I can attest to this because near where my parents live on most maps there is a road that appear

Sometimes they're easy to spot...

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke (850482)]

Try searching Google maps for "Dummy1456".

Re:Sometimes they're easy to spot...

[TooMuchToDo (882796)]

Link for the lazy:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Dummy1456&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.80241,75.146484&ie=UTF8&ll=52.784492,-1.615934&spn=0.012225,0.036693&z=15 [google.com]

Re:Note that Mapmakers make intentional mistakes..

[mollymoo (202721)]

Folks, be aware that one way that a mapmaker "improves" on a copyright protection is to intentionally alter a small section of a map (and in a book, a few at random) that is hopefully not used.

Having mapped a couple of square miles for OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], I can attest to the fact that these alterations are incredibly common on Google Maps. There are half a dozen within half a mile of my house, most being added curves or extensions to dead-end roads and added or removed traffic islands. Google also cunningly add fake roads to the map data which correlate with features which look like roads on the satellite imagery but actually aren't - they're private drives, streams, paths rather than roads through woodland etc. The ones near me wouldn't seriously affect navigation, but some I've seen in the past would. Oh yes, Google Maps is also shifted by about 5m from WGS84 (GPS coordinates) round here, I presume this is intentional too.

Re:Government involvement

[fistfullast33l (819270)]

You think adding the Government would help improve mapping products? I'll keep my tax dollars, thanks.

I would point out that Government funding is the reason that you are able to A) connect to thousands of computers/websites across the globe right now, and B) the reason that you even have a "computer" sitting on your desk. Ironically, this funding is also the reason that satillites in space can provide us with overhead images that you see in Google Maps and the like as well.

Re:Depends on the GPS you buy

[zippthorne (748122)]

Reading the post he's clearly from UK. Over in Europe, everything's better than in the US, even the problems.