China has a new GPS system set up, but don’t worry, it probably stinks

As you may be aware, GPS is actually owned and run by the United States Military, and when the Chinese want to blow up somebody they don’t like, they’d rather not have the U.S. Army shutting off their location beacons. So they invented Beidou, which is basically their version of GPS only, likely, crappy.

For all the bellyaching about how dangerous China is this will inevitably produce, here’s why we’re not too concerned about it, and also why when Beidou receivers start hitting the US that you shouldn’t buy one: it was made by the Chinese.

For all the paranoia about China, one thing that has been overlooked is that the reason they turn out so many knockoffs and reverse engineer everything is that, as a society, they’re pretty terrible about actually coming up with and executing their own ideas.

The Chinese educational system does not exactly encourage creativity and following your dreams, and the net result are “engineers” who might, might, be able to compete with your auto mechanic in terms of technical knowledge. Their engineering is so terrible, a bunch of electronics engineers on a nuclear sub caused a massive and dangerous radiation leak, despite the fact they shouldn’t have even been handling anything radioactive. We’re not talking about world-shaking geniuses here.

Similarly, we don’t have great information about the actual quality of Beidou. Shockingly, the state-run media claim it’s absolutely awesome and way, way better than GPS…and since it’s only used in China right now, reports on how it actually works are thin on the ground.

It is true that a military needs a satnav system to be more effective at fighting. And Beidou is taken seriously by the U.S. military. But don’t worry: the satellites will probably all be falling out of the sky in about five years.

China GPS Rival Starts Offering Navigation Data [BBC]

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