On 6/10/2011 8:22 PM, Invisible wrote:
>>> 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?

Well I bet it is significant to you or me.  Sure divided by the number 
of beneficiaries the spread cost would be small.

Didn't this start with something about how much it costs to run 
Facebook?  No doubt it is a lot of money.  However the incremental cost 
of providing Facebook to any one user is immeasurably small.  You could 
even say that denying Facebook to any one person would cost more than 
allowing it.

GPS is a similar example with the critical difference that I don't see 
how a user is being sold.

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