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Location: Big Island of Hawaii & HOT BuOYS Sailing Vessel
5,277 posts, read 2,801,130 times
Reputation: 1932
I use GPS for my vessel.
One way to look at the cost is on the basis of how much Americans save because vessels are far less likely to run aground and require rescue or damage beaches etc.
This said $2.4 mm per day could be shared around with other wealthy countries.
Cell phone aps that utilize GPS and car navigation systems could be chipping in a dollar each.
At this point I'm not so sure how you could privatize it, for starters any changes to the sytem that could privatize it would likely render all current devices obsolete. It would have to be phased in over a decade or two. You'd start with mandating new devices can handle the new protocol. Set a date for when it goes private far off in the future. That would minimize the impact and costs.
Taxes or fees on the devices would not necessarily fix the issue because those devices being sold outside of the US would not necessarily need to pay them.. the bulk of the tax burden will still fall on US consumers.
Its not a bad idea but in general, that cat is out of the bag, so to speak. Initially, GPS had a built in error that only the military could correct. Then the civilian sector started putting up towers in known locations that would broadcast what the error was and so civilian model GPS units were just a accurate as the military. Soon after that, the built in error was removed so everyone had high accuracy.
The government could probably identify boundaries where GPS would work and where it would not but that would involve modified receivers (phones, navigation systems etc) but that gets messy real quick. GPS has become far to integrated into world wide infrastructure. Not only does grandma use it to get to the grocery store but so do ships, planes, traffic control systems and more. People and vehicles are on the move continuously all over the world from air transport to hikers in the mountains.
Suddenly trying to cripple GPS in anyway in order to make a buck could be catastrophic in any number of ways.
If anything, and it may be too late for that, is to control the manufacture of key chips that decode GPS signals and charge a 'tax' to the manufacturer for each one produced. Thing is, that technology is out there and widespread so anyone with IC manufacturing capability is already doing so including the US, Japan, China, Korea etc.
Status:
"“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”"
(set 3 days ago)
Location: Great Britain
27,182 posts, read 13,469,799 times
Reputation: 19501
Other countries have developed or are developing new systems, indeed the European Space Agency has Galileo, the Russians have GLONASS, the Chinese are developing BeiDou-2, the Indians NAVIC, the Japanese are working on QZSS, the French on DORIS etc.
So GPS is not the only system, indeed billions are being spent on new systems and research.
Other countries have developed or are developing new systems, indeed the European Space Agency has Galileo, the Russians have GLONASS, the Chinese are developing BeiDou-2, the Indians NAVIC, the Japanese are working on QZSS, the French on DORIS etc.
So GPS is not the only system, indeed billions are being spent on new systems and research.
It's a cost of providing GPS to Americans all over the world.
It is what it is.
The headline is purposely misleading. It isn't lost money in real times.
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