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I find it sad that What3words were used widely at all in government services, given that this is a proprietary service with single point of failure with many op
by theamk 6y ago
I find it sad that What3words were used widely at all in government services, given that this is a proprietary service with single point of failure with many open alternatives available.
- 4wsn 6y agoIt's not ideal, but I'd rather something like this get adopted from the bottom up (actual rescuers taking initiative) rather than the alternative, where an overly complex, expensive, and barely working attempted solution is implemented by bureaucrats.
- Avshalom 6y agoI mean you already need a working phone and gps. Why would there ever have been an alternative
- 4wsn 6y agoI don't know, I'm not a rescuer. I assume having someone communicate "49,9842159, 10,1134713" over a staticy radio signal is harder than using something like this.
- rozab 6y agoThat's a huge false equivalency since that number of decimal places gives your location to 1cm accuracy
- theamk 6y agoI don't think anyone says we should have the coordinates -- there are many other systems which are open and not patent encumbered. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words lists all the problems with the system as well as provides some alternatives. I personally like "plus codes": for your location it would be X4M7+M9 . Over a noisy channel, "xray four mike seven" is much easier to recognize correctly than difference between "steak" and "stake", especially if the person is not a native english speaker.
- snypher 6y agoPlenty of people don't know how to show their grid coordinates on their phone, outside of dropping a google maps 'pin', which doesn't work great offline.