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To: ctdonath2

I have to admit I’m actually surprised this information is not already available. How does my GPS know exactly how to get me to any address I punch in?


392 posted on 04/30/2009 5:37:28 AM PDT by brytlea (Jesus loves me, this I know.)
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To: brytlea

Over the last couple decades, companies have been buying all kinds of databases and corellating the data in them. There are public maps indicating which roads are where, there are real estate records indicating where houses are on the roads, and there are phone books telling who lives there. Some of the data was easily available on-line, some of the data had to be meticulously typed in and/or reformatted into a usable medium. In some cases - such as the door-to-door GPS marking - they just had to go out and physically get that data. It was a lot of work. Eventually, all that data starts to come together into a (mostly) complete, comrehensive, easy-to-process form where (say) Tom-Tom can just buy a database of addresses and dump it into a fat (but cheap!) memory card in your car’s GPS device.

As noted elsewhere, this data is not always accurate or correct, and some of it is old enough to be out-of-date/wrong. Most of the time your “GPS knows exactly how to get you to any address”, but sometimes it’s wrong - really really wrong (as not long ago I was looking for a town and my GPS dumped me in a middle-of-nowhere forest on a one-lane dirt road). Ergo, in the government tradition of taking its obligations too far, the Census Bureau is now making that information very accurate by literally sending agents door-to-door to exactly marke each and every home.


400 posted on 04/30/2009 5:52:47 AM PDT by ctdonath2 (John Galt was exiled.)
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