Disoriented in D.C.
This is not a political commentary. ;-)
I was recently in Washington DC on business. Per usual, I get into the airport, go grab a rental car, program the GPS in my iPhone to get me to the hotel, and set out...
If you've never driven in DC, it's an experience. The layout is weird; there's a grid with an overlay of diagonal streets. They have traffic circles -- what UK folks call a roundabout, but the things they do with them in DC are obscene. There's a lot of traffic. And on top of everything else, it's distracting. Hey, that's the Washington Monument! What's that big building? The Capitol! Hey, it's the Smithsonian! Oh, cool, an embassy!
But even so, I'm an experienced GPS user now, and I spend a lot of time driving in cities I don't know well. So it was very strange when I got completely messed up on the way to my hotel -- where the GPS had me didn't make sense, it was like it was one traffic circle off. I chalked it up to the city being distracting and confusingly laid out (National Archives? Cool!) and kept on through. I wondered a bit when I saw a sign pointing the way toward the White House and remembered articles about worries regarding GPS data and security. But when it did the exact same thing to me in the same place on the way out of town, I really started to wonder.
Does anyone know whether GPS data is deliberately corrupted in part of DC?
I was recently in Washington DC on business. Per usual, I get into the airport, go grab a rental car, program the GPS in my iPhone to get me to the hotel, and set out...
If you've never driven in DC, it's an experience. The layout is weird; there's a grid with an overlay of diagonal streets. They have traffic circles -- what UK folks call a roundabout, but the things they do with them in DC are obscene. There's a lot of traffic. And on top of everything else, it's distracting. Hey, that's the Washington Monument! What's that big building? The Capitol! Hey, it's the Smithsonian! Oh, cool, an embassy!
But even so, I'm an experienced GPS user now, and I spend a lot of time driving in cities I don't know well. So it was very strange when I got completely messed up on the way to my hotel -- where the GPS had me didn't make sense, it was like it was one traffic circle off. I chalked it up to the city being distracting and confusingly laid out (National Archives? Cool!) and kept on through. I wondered a bit when I saw a sign pointing the way toward the White House and remembered articles about worries regarding GPS data and security. But when it did the exact same thing to me in the same place on the way out of town, I really started to wonder.
Does anyone know whether GPS data is deliberately corrupted in part of DC?