>> Allow me to refute: The US government *needs* GPS, whether you have
>> access to it or not. Once you have a GPS service, it costs nothing to
>> allow civilians to access it as well. (Indeed, it would cost money to
>> *stop* then accessing it.) Ergo, in fact giving you GPS isn't costing
>> anybody anything.
>
> Perhaps that is true. But it contradicts your definition:
>
>  >> A better explanation might be "if it costs somebody money but you
>  >> didn't pay for it, you're being sold"

The idea being that if providing something to *you* costs money, but you 
didn't pay for it, you're probably being sold.

If it's a service which exists anyway, letting you use it might not cost 
much.

> As you probably know the GPS signal used to have a publicly available
> accuracy of about 100m. Accuracy to about 20m was available only to the
> military as that part of the signal was encrypted. That was the original
> design and implementation.
>
> It took a deliberate decision to make the full accuracy available for
> civilian use. Simply deciding this and implementing it no doubt cost a
> significant amount.

Not really. Just turn off the encryption hardware. (I'm sure on the 
longer term they'll probably try to remove it completely, but there's no 
rush.)

> Then the military has developed extra capability to
> 'deny' GPS to selected areas when they desire.

That's new to me.

> That and other requirements no doubt cost more than the strictly
> military requirements.

Yes, but does it cost /significantly/ more?

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