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Re: Export laws don't just affect crypto
On Tue, 1 Oct 1996 00:05:16 -0700 (PDT), Lucky Green wrote:
>The recent posts about GPS made me research the state of the art of GPS
>receivers. Seems they are getting pretty good. Two pounds, sub-meter
>accuracy, attitude determination, all at altitudes up to 60,000 feet and
>speeds up to 1,000 nmph. But what really caught my eye was the fine print
>at the bottom of the spec sheet:
>
>"Higher altitude and velocities up to 25,000 nautical miles-per-hour
>options are available in the U.S."
>
>I gather from this that as long as you are in the US, you are welcome to
>use this technology for applications that require larger than 1,000 nmph
>speeds.
>
>Seems the software industry is not the only industry that's suffering
>from silly export control laws.
Possibly - certainly there are plenty of legislators who'd do it. I'd
heard, however, that the precision of your signal could be increased by
getting a fix on more than 3 satellites at a time - and that the GPS network
had been designed to 'blanket' the Northern Hemisphere.
# Chris Adams <[email protected]> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp
# <[email protected]> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY"
"That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them."
--- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)