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Comment by joncp | Hacker News Reader

Well keep in mind that US GPS was developed by and is owned/operated by the US military. They're just letting us use it.

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Well the only reason military can own /pay for anything is because it takes our money in a first place. So unless there are specific security concerns civilians should be able to use whatever military tech they've paid for.

Military and government can pay for stuff also using deficit spending, which is not "our" money. It's either FED's money which they create (and thus steal value from us) or it's borrowed money from wealthy interests.

Half-joking that Uber and [Tech Major]s' Map products are among the greatest government subsidy stories of all time. Those satellites are expensive!

I wish I could use my phone on GPS only. Somehow the damn thing still needs a cell connection despite having the hardware allegedly.

You can, you just need to download the maps for offline use. Google maps makes it easy:

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838

It's very useful for navigating crowded touristy areas, remote nature preserves, sports/music events that jam the towers, etc.

Some more specialized apps also support doing the same thing with other types of maps, like USGS quad sheets.

I wish you could download a lightweight map of the entire country. The way the selector rectangle works in my city makes it awkward to capture it well since its kinda longer east west rather than north south. If a garmin from 2002 could hold maps of the entire country, surely my iphone with 512gb of storage should be able to do it too.

Use OSMAnd instead, it can download entire country map with a click without dragging rectangles around

I'm still surprised when people are still surprised that this exists.

The military serves the taxpayers.

That doesn't entitle them to access to military systems, either individually or as a collective. And surely citizens of other countries are not entitled to access to military systems.

Surely it entitles the citizenry to access military-funded systems that do not benefit from secrecy, like GPS or the internet.

The military serves the tax payer by preserving their sovereignty.

It's nice that they allow civilian use of GPS, but it doesn't follow that they need to. It's perfectly acceptable to say that a civilian organization, government or otherwise, is responsible for providing satellite-based location services for civilian use.

The way GPS is operated is very unusual. The military doesn't provide satphone service to people around the world; are you arguing that they should?

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