I am not going to comment on this article too much. I have only casually followed the LightSquared thing so I do not feel like I can give an informed opinion. I think it is important to keep an eye on and everyone should read the article. By posting it here I think it will force me to look into it a little more.
Crowd-Sourcing the National Map: Now a National Effort
Now this article I do want to talk about. Naturally I gravitate to the crowd sourced article. I just think it is interesting how we are venturing into a world where large populations can produce data sets in sizes that we have never seen. People argue about statistically relevant sizes now, imagine what the argument will be like in the future. "Yeah, but your population is only 375 million, you can't possibly think that is large enough to make those arguments." Should be fun.
This project calls for citizens to help maintain data on a national level through The National Map Corp program. The Corp volunteers add, update, or remove structures from the data set creating an evolving look at what the U.S. is like. The USGS as relaunched the program and it looks like now that technical capability is considerably better than it was in 2008 the program should be able to document far more structures and better quality of documentation.