Today the New York Times broke the news that after the Clinton Administration turned off Selective Availability in the GPS system, a bug had been introduced into the GPS satellite software itself, causing systematic and large errors in many GPS signals.
Before getting to the question, for background information here is a brief summary of just some of the issues raised by this discovery:
It turns out that whereas we thought China was located over 11,000 Km from the US, it's actually only 150 Km offshore of Southern California. One San Diego resident told the Times, "we knew there were a lot of foreign-speaking people coming here, but we all took them to be Mexicans. Who would have thought they were really Chinese? And that Chinese make such good landscape helpers?"
Economists have taken notice and are worried. IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, contacted at a meeting in Nanjing today, remarked that "economists and business people the world over are going to have to reconsider the global relationships of supply and demand in light of this. I thought the flight over here from LA was a little shorter than it was supposed to be. Mail-order brides are going to be a dime a dozen; US women will no longer be able to compete."
Geologists are astir because the entire theory of plate tectonics is now in question. Previously they measured the speed of continental drift at just centimeters per year. Now it looks like the North American and Eurasian plates are on schedule to collide on August 23, 2012, creating a land bridge to the Far East (and completing, in some sense, Columbus's original dream). However, on the bright side, that will prevent California from falling into the sea when the Big One hits.
Here, then, is my question: As a GIS professional, what do you plan to do to check and overhaul your data holdings? What will this comprehensive change in all geospatial coordinates mean for your work?
