On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 10:36:19 +1100, Nick Coleman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I must have missed it, sorry about that. Oh yeah, 2 months ago was exam > time, I stopped reading the list for a few weeks. No harm done. We're all unhappy, of course, but it's hard for non-Americans like me to complain too much -- the U.S. is removing information about our countries that our own governments never made freely available in the first place. The FAA database is still available for the U.S., but other governments (like mine) do not make their aero data available freely at all, and we've been lucky that the U.S. has made data for Canada, Europe, Asia, etc. available. It's so bad that the Garmin 296 GPS (which displays terrain and manmade obstructions) does not even display towers in Canada, because the Canadian government wanted royalties for every Garmin unit sold (!!!). The real solution to this problem is to come up with a worldwide, peer-reviewed open-source aero database, for use both by the simulation community and by the aviation community. That's an enormous undertaking, of course. Originally, the excuse for pulling DAFIF was the Australian government's attempt to sue Jeppesen for royalties on Australian aero data, or something similar. Now, the reason is simply national security. I wonder if the Australian thing died out, or if it was just easier to use the security boilerplate than to get into the complex legal details. All the best, David -- http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
