It’s funny the things you can take for granted — for example, I figured that you could go just about anywhere in North America with a GPS navigation unit in your car and not cause any offense. In Quebec, however, you’d be breaking the law.

After a fight lasting more than a decade, Quebecois cabbies have succeeded in getting the government to legalize in-car GPS navigation systems, which had previously been illegal due to a prohibition on all display screens visible to the driver. But Quebec is not as crazy as it may seem on the surface — the law seems to have been lightly enforced, with only a few hundred tickets given out in the past few years, and they haven’t gone after the rental car agencies openly offering GPS as a option, or the thousands of OnStar customers.

Much like our local prohibition on shooting buffalo from the second story of a hotel, this appears to be just another law left over from the olden days… and much like our speeding limit, one that almost everybody breaks just a little.

Although we commonly say “GPS” when referring to any satellite-based location system, the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System is just the first (and for a while, the only) satellite navigation service, or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), specifically the network of American satellites providing location services. Although GPS is available and used worldwide, the fact that it’s under a single country’s control has led several other countries to work on their own satellite positioning system.

Russia’s system is called GLONASS, and was started in 1976 with the group of 24 satellites (the constellation) being completed in 1995. Much like GPS, it has a low precision (civilian) signal and a high precision (military) signal. When it was operating, it would locate horizontal position within 57-70 meters, and vertical positioning within 70 meters. With the fall of the Soviet Union, satellite location funding was quickly cut, and so the system has fallen into disrepair.  Currently, the system only works about 16 hours/day in Russia, and even less worldwide. Repairs were started in 2001 and are scheduled to be returned to service worldwide in 2009 (with the help of the Indian government in return for access to the high precision signal).

Along with assisting Russia in returning GLONASS to service, India is also working on their own satellite navigation system, The Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS), started in May 2006 and targeted to be finished by 2012. The goal of this system is to have a regional navigational system that’s completely under Indian control (including launching, timing, and ground control), and preferably built by Indian companies using Indian components. Its 7 satellites should provide accuracy to within 20 meters within the Indian region.

Also covering the Asian continent is Beidou, China’s navigation system. This system uses 4 satellites in geostationary orbit. This limits their coverage to the region of the world from which they are always visible, but allows for constant coverage (and roughly 10m accuracy for the civilian signal) with relatively few satellites. These satellites served as experimentation for the Chinese space program, and they have just in 2007 started launching satellites for Beidou-2 (aka Compass), which is to be a global navigation system with both geostationary and Middle-Earth Orbit satellites. No completion date has been announced for Beidou-2. China had previously (in 2003) agreed to participate in the European Union’s GNSS program, but has not made clear whether they will support the EU’s program as well as China’s.

The European Union’s next-generation GNSS is called Galileo, and is intended to provide both independence from the US-controlled GPS as well as more accurate positioning. Galileo will have two tiers of service. The free ‘Open Service’ will be accurate horizontally to 4m and vertically to 8m, while the encrypted ‘Commercial Service’ (usable only by paying a licensing fee) will be accurate to 1m, which they envision will allow usage of GNSS in new ways, such as aircraft landing via Galileo signal. The Galileo project was started in 2003 and is targeted for completion in 2013, and has been joined by numerous non-EU countries, including China, Israel, Ukraine, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. The project has been plagued by cost overruns, and is currently over budget by 3.5 billion dollars, a number that is only likely to increase. The cost increases have caused several of the member countries to question their involvement in a project that was originally intended to be mostly paid for by commercial participants, but as of now it seems that the Galileo project has enough support to be completed.

In an interesting use of mostly existing technology, companies have begun reporting on street traffic based on data received from vehicle GPS units. Just recently, 16 states along I-95 spent $5 million to provide this capability to both motorists and government users. I had been aware that this was already among many technologies available, and had even been used in a few projects (on a smaller scale than the I-95 project), but what surprised me most from this article was the fact that there are a dozen companies all exploring this approach to providing traffic data.

What I like the most about this is how well the effect scales up — for example, with only one or two motorists every 20 miles or so you can provide thousands of people with a fairly decent picture of how well traffic is moving along the interstate. As the number of vehicles providing data goes up, that figure gets more and more accurate. I would expect you’d see the same effect as in random polling, where an impressively small number of samples can give you a surprisingly accurate result.

One day, this will be nothing more than just another input into the fully automated cars which will all be driving us to work. Until then… keep listening to the traffic reports.

With all the discussion recently about the JoeyTracker going online, I was amused to see that three Harvard mathematicians recently released a paper showing a formula for the optimal time that you should wait for a bus at a bus stop before giving up and walking it. Most students have to make this decision all the time (I know I did at Texas A&M, one of the largest college campuses in the nation). The outcome? I’ll spoil it a bit — you should either walk or wait right away, as waiting and then giving up and walking is the worst solution.

Of course, this is just the best you can do if you don’t know when the next bus is coming. Students at Tufts University know where the Joey is, and they can always make the optimal walk-or-wait choice.

Walk versus Wait: The Lazy Mathematician Wins: Paper (PDF), Coverage in New Scientist

Most people are familiar with Second Life, Linden Lab’s virtual world. I’d always wanted to do something interesting in SL but nothing had really piqued my interest — until I heard that they had added support in their scripting language, LSL, for making HTTP calls. With the huge growth of web-based apps, it could easily be said that HTTP is now the client-server protocol of choice for today’s developers — and it got me thinking: If Second Life could talk the same protocol as many of the M2M user interfaces we’ve written, could Second Life become an interface itself? Not only providing a view on real-world data, but controlling it?

Turns out that it can. We decided a Nabaztag would be a great ‘control subject’ and set to work.

We decided to use Second Life not only for control, but also for display — in the video (streaming from a webcam pointed at the bunny), you can see an avatar ‘touching’ (clicking) on the sphere floating next to him, sending a web request over the Internet to a server (the local device) which handles the request and activates the bunny… no different than if we had an ‘On’ button in our M2M webapp! We later extended it to have the sphere light up when the server reported that the bunny was active, providing feedback in both directions.

So… what did we learn from this? Not to be beholden to traditional ideas of what an M2M application should be. Modern web applications in a browser are great, but what if a user wants to see data in Facebook? Or wants their data in a GeoRSS feed? If your teen users spend all their time text-messaging and in MySpace, then your world-class website is worthless to them. You have to give them what they want, and you have to make it fit the way they work.

If you’re interested in the details behind the Second Life integration, there’s a technical explanation on my personal blog.