You can look at a home with an IR camera and figure out other stuff -- like if they have any strange heat sources that suggest illegal grow operations
And how would you be able to determine whether or not what they were growing was illegal? I've seriously thought of growing tomatos in my basement because the ones you buy at the grocery taste like cardboard, but fear of the War On (some) Drugs keeps me from doing it.
We grow orchids in our basement under high pressure sodium lights, and have never been bothered by the police. None of the other members of our orchid society have encountered problems, either.
Exercise your rights! If you live in constant fear of the police state, they've already won.
So the newspapers are finally realizing what Slashdotters have known for 10 years -- nobody RTFAs.
My guess is that the newspapers that switch to a "pay model" are going to try to provide an aggregator feed that their editors will fill only with teaser headlines: "The Massachusetts Election" instead of "Brown Wins in Massachusetts." We'll see how that flies when the aggregators continue to display free news sources, such as NPR headlines.
By the way, for the rest of you who never RTFA, the summary above really contains all the useful information in TFA. There isn't a need to click through in this case.
They can (and do) track you by IP address and User-Agent.
You have to understand that Google doesn't just track you when you're searching on www.google.com. Google provides javascript links to web page authors so that google can place ads on their page, and they produce analytic information regarding surfing habits of everyone who visits the site.
This way they can pay the web page author for the ads. In return, they track visitors from unrelated site #1 to unrelated site #2. They might notice that people who start the day surfing on Slashdot commonly follow it up with a visit to boingboing.net. Perhaps they then place ads that are relevant to both/. and boingboing on both sites. Or perhaps because they specifically track you, they place boingboing ads on/. when you view it.
What the GP does is blocks the javascripts from being received by the browser, preventing their loading, using an extension such as Adblock Plus or NoScript. If your browser doesn't even know it's supposed to open a script from Google, it won't send a request to Google, and they therefore can't track you.
TFA is all about an extension that randomizes the calls to Google's scripts, rather than blocking them entirely. Unfortunately, google's sample set is so incredibly large that any attempts to poison it with false data will be tossed out as sampling errors. The only thing this script can do is make a lot of very noisy requests to Google rather than giving them your true habits.
There's another way to keep them cheaper for clinical use. Create an approved testing regimen, and certify each one that's going into a clinic. For those prices you could afford to perform $9,000 worth of tests on each and every board, and they'd still be half the price.
It's also really good advice:D I've worked for megacorps for over 15 years. It's soulless.
I'm not quite sure I agree with your soulless comment. I've been at a Mega-Corp for almost 25 years now, and I really still enjoy my job. I got lucky when I was hired, and got in with a development group that has always had work to do. I also got lucky and worked for a pretty good boss for the first 8 years (he knew how to shield his people from crap.)
Since then I've had bosses who range from follow-the-3-ring-binder-plan type to some who have more of a sense of humor. Managers have come and gone as they follow the corporate advice to "move around to get ahead", and there's a definite correlation between the ones with longer tenures being the most effective. And I've had co-workers ranging in talent from "So, wet paper bag, you've thwarted me once again, but next time I shall escape!" to "Rock Star!" (seriously, he's a wicked fine coder AND he plays guitar in a metal band.)
So why do I stay? I *choose* to enjoy it. If I chose to hate it, I would hate it, and it would suck, and I'd leave. Instead, I have a very positive attitude about it. Life is too short to work at a job I hate, and if I didn't have an income the rest of life would be pretty damn hard. So if I have something I like to do, something I'm good at doing, something I choose to find rewarding, and I get paid to do it, well that's a winning hand. I'm deliberately going to appreciate it.
Sure, not every day is great, and there are corporate tragedies and comedies, and sometimes the penthouse office gets a bee in their bonnet and hands down their stupid ideas that if we just had one more re-org, everything would be all better; but that's all noise I simply choose to ignore. Let the managers run around all panicky about how many people they will or won't have after their re-org. I don't care. At the end of the day, I'm still doing basically the same thing; maybe for a different boss, but that's almost an inconsequential detail.
Soul exists only when you put it there yourself. And sure, I know it'd be damn hard to remain positive if I worked under a smothering micromanager, or a screaming executive director. But if you report to someone who's fairly reasonable, the only reason you can't thrive is your own choice.
because video games should not be about pleasing shareholders, but pleasing gamers. If you please the gamers, you will mechanically make money.
That's not necessarily true at all. It's way more complicated than that. A complex game with all the development, artwork, mechanics, music, actors, promotion and packaging can easily cost over $50,000,000 to produce. At those costs you have to please a million gamers before you make your first dime.
That's a huge risk. You don't know it in advance, and there are no guarantees. When some guy comes in and says "I've got this great idea for a game. We'll have these soldiers who..." you have no way of knowing if he's pitching the next WoW or the next Daikatana until you build it.
It's risk all along. Anything can kill the game's appeal. Unrealistic mechanics, incomprehensible controls, too easy, too hard, ugly scenery, short levels, long levels, inappropriate music, bugs, etc. The whole time you're pumping tons of money into production, hoping that when it comes out the other side that you can sell at least a million copies to cover expenses. And for every problem you encounter in its production, you have to decide "do I trash it or fix it?" Smart companies have learned to do the smallest investments up front, saving the big costs of things like artwork for the very end. That way if they kill it they've wasted less money.
Once it leaves the factory, it's in the hands of some barely rational people who are not in your employ. Games sell based on their reviews -- nobody will buy a one star game. A bad review by a well respected reviewer can wreck your $50,000,000 investment with the click of a mouse.
Even assuming Wall Street was behaving rationally and not just playing some derivatives market, your company takes a hell of a risk every time they do anything, or nothing. It's impossible to say that games based on "fun" are simply automatic money makers.
Good question. This will really affect low income people, as corn and other grains are cheap and filling. In lots of cases processed corn cereals such as breakfast cereals serve as whole meals, and make up a sizable fraction of a person's diet. Many snack foods are corn based, and there are many people who will eat this kind of "junk food" for one of their meals.
Some of the states' low income food programs try to provide some balance to their clients. Texas WIC is computerized, and you can redeem only so much of your benefit for certain foods. You can't spend 100% of it on Fritos, for example. But other states simply provide a fixed amount of benefit, and you can choose to spend all of it on tortillas if that's what you desire.
The Colossal Cave Adventure had an elaborate game ending and it was written in 1972, years before the Atari 2600 was even created. Old school indeed.
(Of course prior to that we had Hunt the Wumpus and Blackjack, neither of which had a classic story ending.)
I think you're right regarding the story nature of games being the type that delivered entertaining endings, but I think it took a combination of time, technology and imagination to come up with the idea of a story based game. Craps or Blackjack were easy ports of traditional "games". Creating interactive fiction as a game took a lot longer, required a lot more resources (or careful reuse of the resources you had), and a whole lot more work.
The only people with anti-sat missiles are the same people who are operating the GPS satellites (the USAF); and the Chinese. (I suppose we can presume the Russians or Japanese could come up with something if they needed to, also.) And in both cases, the anti-sat missiles demonstrated were able to strike low earth orbit targets, in the range of a few hundred kilometers in altitude. GPS satellites are in medium earth orbits, which at 20,000km are considerably further away than any anti-sat missile ever tested has struck. Consider that the highest private rocket ever flown hasn't even reached orbit yet.
Detonating a nuke in space to disrupt communication is a video game plot device, not an actual strategy. It could theoretically disrupt or destroy nearby earthbound electronic chips, (taking out both GPS and LORAN-C receivers at the same time,) but at those distances even a big nuke would deliver little more energy to the satellites than a flashbulb. The birds themselves are separated from each other by distances of over 30,000 km, so even if your nuke got close enough to damage one it's safely distant from all of the others.
Space is really, really big. Mind-bogglingly big. These satellites are very, very safe right where they are. Not even James Bond could take out enough of them to be disruptive, but I'd suggest keeping a close eye on Chuck Norris.
I'm disappointed in all the geeks on this site misusing the term "bandwidth." Bandwidth is a measure of rate, not of volume.
I can understand a Comcast marketing droid calling it a "bandwidth meter" because it's a non-geek selling it to non-geeks. But we shouldn't use the word improperly just because some stupid people do.
Google claimed all along that they were hoping their **CENSORED AT THE REQUEST OF THE PRC** results were pressuring Chinese citizens to demand the government tear down the Great Firewall. They hoped they were doing more good than harm, (and they planned to make sh!tloads of money while doing it.)
Now that the ROI isn't there any more, they can take the even higher road by not censoring their results.
Damn. Google is always swinging back and forth between "good and evil" on my corporate-o-meter, and I don't really want to like them, but I have to say this is a very good step.
The sun affects communication with the satellites most often when the satellite is in a direct line between the receiver and the sun. Since the GPS constellation has coverage that provides for six satellites at almost all times, the temporary loss of one means a temporary reduction in accuracy, but not a total loss of location. The sunspot cycle can impact overall reception, but again this primarily results in a momentary loss of signal, not a permanent or extended loss.
Unlike a television uplink (a typical Ku band user), GPS doesn't require a continual high-reliability feed sending megabytes per second to be of use. Periodic reception of a few small packets is adequate for all but the highest precision uses. And RAIM technology can be used to detect when a signal is inadequate for a precision approach, for example, and to warn the pilot not to trust the GPS nav unit at this time.
Submarines can't receive LORAN-C when submerged. ELF is the only way to communicate with them, and we dismantled our only ELF transmitter five years ago.
And EMP pulses are like any other energy source - they fall off as the distance cubed grows. GPS satellites are in a 20,000 km orbit, so for an EMP to affect them it would have to be literally earth-shattering. At that point the GPS satellites would simply be among the last of the man-made objects to care.
Anyway, I was thinking of the Baudette, Minnesota tower. It is truly in a deservedly ignored corner of the planet. It is located at the northern end of one of the largest peat bog swamps in America. Here's a look at the tower itself: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=48.7125,-94.595&ie=UTF8&ll=48.613853,-94.55497&spn=0.006157,0.01222&z=17 From Wikipedia: "The "Big Bog" is composed mostly of wetlands and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. It is also almost entirely unpopulated, except for the town of Waskish along Highway 72. Waskish consists of about a hundred people who live entirely off pulp-wood sales, a gas station and a bar.
If they take down the tower I will definitely miss the light at the top, as I can see it almost immediately after I leave Waskish, and it stays with me for the next 20 miles. At 2AM that blinking red light is pretty much the only companion on that road, apart from the occasional deer, bear, fox, or the snores of the spouse.
So technically, I suppose I use LORAN-C more than most drivers.:-)
LORAN-C towers are a hell of a lot more vulnerable than a satellite constellation. Have you ever visited one? Some of them are located in the most god-awful corners of the planet. They're set in woods, swamps, mountains, and other remote places. Anybody who wanted to disable one badly enough could do it with a small group of people, because there's no more than a couple of token guards present. But nobody on the planet apart from a few governments or billion dollar corporations can touch the satellites, which are located in MEOs, not LEOs.
I will give you cheap: the cost of LORAN-C is a fraction of the cost of GPS. But to what end? Why continue to pour any more of my money into a technology that is NOBODY's primary navigational system? Right now it's no more than an inaccurate backup system, a job it was not built to perform. And it will never become more than that.
LORAN-C is being used and maintained only for a handful of commercial shipping concerns. Nobody in the general public uses it (if you tell me you have a LORAN-C based TomTom on your car's dashboard, I'm calling you a liar in advance.) If the shipping companies think that LORAN-C is worth it as a backup, then they can damn well pony up the money to keep it going as a private company. Otherwise, pull the plug and auction off the towers today. We don't need it.
Are you always this paranoid about the U.S. government? Seriously, the Russians have had their version of GNSS flying for 35 years, and you can buy a completely non-American GLONASS receiver that will give you the same data as an American (made in China, of course) GPS receiver. We know full well that we don't have a monopoly on global navigation.
They are shutting LORAN-C off because it's expensive to maintain a separate system, especially one that is not nearly as accurate as GPS, and is at risk of terrestrial attack (a determined terrorist group could easily destroy a critical LORAN-C tower, but the same group does not have physical access to the GPS satellites.) In addition, its consumers are not widespread, and are already using GPS for their primary navigation systems.
You should think before you make up bogus conspiracy theories. They make you look kind of crazy.
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I shall ready the trebuchet!
Then I shall fetch thee a lawyer, that thou may'st have ammunition.
You can look at a home with an IR camera and figure out other stuff -- like if they have any strange heat sources that suggest illegal grow operations
And how would you be able to determine whether or not what they were growing was illegal? I've seriously thought of growing tomatos in my basement because the ones you buy at the grocery taste like cardboard, but fear of the War On (some) Drugs keeps me from doing it.
We grow orchids in our basement under high pressure sodium lights, and have never been bothered by the police. None of the other members of our orchid society have encountered problems, either.
Exercise your rights! If you live in constant fear of the police state, they've already won.
Does it bother anyone else that a guy named "Lineweaver" is making a car analogy that doesn't involve alcohol?
How'd you figure that out?
From the RSS feed.
Actually, I only click-thru for the comments.
(For those of you too young to get the joke, it was originally said by a comedian who claimed to read Playboy only for the articles.)
So the newspapers are finally realizing what Slashdotters have known for 10 years -- nobody RTFAs.
My guess is that the newspapers that switch to a "pay model" are going to try to provide an aggregator feed that their editors will fill only with teaser headlines: "The Massachusetts Election" instead of "Brown Wins in Massachusetts." We'll see how that flies when the aggregators continue to display free news sources, such as NPR headlines.
By the way, for the rest of you who never RTFA, the summary above really contains all the useful information in TFA. There isn't a need to click through in this case.
They can (and do) track you by IP address and User-Agent.
You have to understand that Google doesn't just track you when you're searching on www.google.com. Google provides javascript links to web page authors so that google can place ads on their page, and they produce analytic information regarding surfing habits of everyone who visits the site.
This way they can pay the web page author for the ads. In return, they track visitors from unrelated site #1 to unrelated site #2. They might notice that people who start the day surfing on Slashdot commonly follow it up with a visit to boingboing.net. Perhaps they then place ads that are relevant to both /. and boingboing on both sites. Or perhaps because they specifically track you, they place boingboing ads on /. when you view it.
What the GP does is blocks the javascripts from being received by the browser, preventing their loading, using an extension such as Adblock Plus or NoScript. If your browser doesn't even know it's supposed to open a script from Google, it won't send a request to Google, and they therefore can't track you.
TFA is all about an extension that randomizes the calls to Google's scripts, rather than blocking them entirely. Unfortunately, google's sample set is so incredibly large that any attempts to poison it with false data will be tossed out as sampling errors. The only thing this script can do is make a lot of very noisy requests to Google rather than giving them your true habits.
There's another way to keep them cheaper for clinical use. Create an approved testing regimen, and certify each one that's going into a clinic. For those prices you could afford to perform $9,000 worth of tests on each and every board, and they'd still be half the price.
It's also really good advice :D
I've worked for megacorps for over 15 years. It's soulless.
I'm not quite sure I agree with your soulless comment. I've been at a Mega-Corp for almost 25 years now, and I really still enjoy my job. I got lucky when I was hired, and got in with a development group that has always had work to do. I also got lucky and worked for a pretty good boss for the first 8 years (he knew how to shield his people from crap.)
Since then I've had bosses who range from follow-the-3-ring-binder-plan type to some who have more of a sense of humor. Managers have come and gone as they follow the corporate advice to "move around to get ahead", and there's a definite correlation between the ones with longer tenures being the most effective. And I've had co-workers ranging in talent from "So, wet paper bag, you've thwarted me once again, but next time I shall escape!" to "Rock Star!" (seriously, he's a wicked fine coder AND he plays guitar in a metal band.)
So why do I stay? I *choose* to enjoy it. If I chose to hate it, I would hate it, and it would suck, and I'd leave. Instead, I have a very positive attitude about it. Life is too short to work at a job I hate, and if I didn't have an income the rest of life would be pretty damn hard. So if I have something I like to do, something I'm good at doing, something I choose to find rewarding, and I get paid to do it, well that's a winning hand. I'm deliberately going to appreciate it.
Sure, not every day is great, and there are corporate tragedies and comedies, and sometimes the penthouse office gets a bee in their bonnet and hands down their stupid ideas that if we just had one more re-org, everything would be all better; but that's all noise I simply choose to ignore. Let the managers run around all panicky about how many people they will or won't have after their re-org. I don't care. At the end of the day, I'm still doing basically the same thing; maybe for a different boss, but that's almost an inconsequential detail.
Soul exists only when you put it there yourself. And sure, I know it'd be damn hard to remain positive if I worked under a smothering micromanager, or a screaming executive director. But if you report to someone who's fairly reasonable, the only reason you can't thrive is your own choice.
What I said is that there is huge risk. You can make a great game that pleases a million gamers and still fail miserably.
And for every game you sell, you might have started on 10 or even 100 that you axed early in the process.
Dzubin P-1 CUR ALLOC 20193 . . .5804M
rodtsasdt llllllreport*
Jenny, I got your number
I'm gonna make you mine
Jenny, I got your number
86.75.30.9
because video games should not be about pleasing shareholders, but pleasing gamers. If you please the gamers, you will mechanically make money.
That's not necessarily true at all. It's way more complicated than that. A complex game with all the development, artwork, mechanics, music, actors, promotion and packaging can easily cost over $50,000,000 to produce. At those costs you have to please a million gamers before you make your first dime.
That's a huge risk. You don't know it in advance, and there are no guarantees. When some guy comes in and says "I've got this great idea for a game. We'll have these soldiers who ..." you have no way of knowing if he's pitching the next WoW or the next Daikatana until you build it.
It's risk all along. Anything can kill the game's appeal. Unrealistic mechanics, incomprehensible controls, too easy, too hard, ugly scenery, short levels, long levels, inappropriate music, bugs, etc. The whole time you're pumping tons of money into production, hoping that when it comes out the other side that you can sell at least a million copies to cover expenses. And for every problem you encounter in its production, you have to decide "do I trash it or fix it?" Smart companies have learned to do the smallest investments up front, saving the big costs of things like artwork for the very end. That way if they kill it they've wasted less money.
Once it leaves the factory, it's in the hands of some barely rational people who are not in your employ. Games sell based on their reviews -- nobody will buy a one star game. A bad review by a well respected reviewer can wreck your $50,000,000 investment with the click of a mouse.
Even assuming Wall Street was behaving rationally and not just playing some derivatives market, your company takes a hell of a risk every time they do anything, or nothing. It's impossible to say that games based on "fun" are simply automatic money makers.
When Ballmer said he was going to "f*ck!ng kill Google," you all just laughed (and dodged the occasional chair.)
But who's laughing now, Sergei? Who's laughing now?
Some known IE bugs go patched for a long time,
I think you meant "unpatched".
No, I'm pretty sure he was talking about IE.
Good question. This will really affect low income people, as corn and other grains are cheap and filling. In lots of cases processed corn cereals such as breakfast cereals serve as whole meals, and make up a sizable fraction of a person's diet. Many snack foods are corn based, and there are many people who will eat this kind of "junk food" for one of their meals.
Some of the states' low income food programs try to provide some balance to their clients. Texas WIC is computerized, and you can redeem only so much of your benefit for certain foods. You can't spend 100% of it on Fritos, for example. But other states simply provide a fixed amount of benefit, and you can choose to spend all of it on tortillas if that's what you desire.
Monsanto did the research in 2000 and 2001, and obviously knew the outcome. So how did they manage to suppress the data and results for 8 years?
The Colossal Cave Adventure had an elaborate game ending and it was written in 1972, years before the Atari 2600 was even created. Old school indeed.
(Of course prior to that we had Hunt the Wumpus and Blackjack, neither of which had a classic story ending.)
I think you're right regarding the story nature of games being the type that delivered entertaining endings, but I think it took a combination of time, technology and imagination to come up with the idea of a story based game. Craps or Blackjack were easy ports of traditional "games". Creating interactive fiction as a game took a lot longer, required a lot more resources (or careful reuse of the resources you had), and a whole lot more work.
The only people with anti-sat missiles are the same people who are operating the GPS satellites (the USAF); and the Chinese. (I suppose we can presume the Russians or Japanese could come up with something if they needed to, also.) And in both cases, the anti-sat missiles demonstrated were able to strike low earth orbit targets, in the range of a few hundred kilometers in altitude. GPS satellites are in medium earth orbits, which at 20,000km are considerably further away than any anti-sat missile ever tested has struck. Consider that the highest private rocket ever flown hasn't even reached orbit yet.
Detonating a nuke in space to disrupt communication is a video game plot device, not an actual strategy. It could theoretically disrupt or destroy nearby earthbound electronic chips, (taking out both GPS and LORAN-C receivers at the same time,) but at those distances even a big nuke would deliver little more energy to the satellites than a flashbulb. The birds themselves are separated from each other by distances of over 30,000 km, so even if your nuke got close enough to damage one it's safely distant from all of the others.
Space is really, really big. Mind-bogglingly big. These satellites are very, very safe right where they are. Not even James Bond could take out enough of them to be disruptive, but I'd suggest keeping a close eye on Chuck Norris.
I'm disappointed in all the geeks on this site misusing the term "bandwidth." Bandwidth is a measure of rate, not of volume.
I can understand a Comcast marketing droid calling it a "bandwidth meter" because it's a non-geek selling it to non-geeks. But we shouldn't use the word improperly just because some stupid people do.
Earning my karma today, that's for sure.
Google claimed all along that they were hoping their **CENSORED AT THE REQUEST OF THE PRC** results were pressuring Chinese citizens to demand the government tear down the Great Firewall. They hoped they were doing more good than harm, (and they planned to make sh!tloads of money while doing it.)
Now that the ROI isn't there any more, they can take the even higher road by not censoring their results.
Damn. Google is always swinging back and forth between "good and evil" on my corporate-o-meter, and I don't really want to like them, but I have to say this is a very good step.
The sun affects communication with the satellites most often when the satellite is in a direct line between the receiver and the sun. Since the GPS constellation has coverage that provides for six satellites at almost all times, the temporary loss of one means a temporary reduction in accuracy, but not a total loss of location. The sunspot cycle can impact overall reception, but again this primarily results in a momentary loss of signal, not a permanent or extended loss.
Unlike a television uplink (a typical Ku band user), GPS doesn't require a continual high-reliability feed sending megabytes per second to be of use. Periodic reception of a few small packets is adequate for all but the highest precision uses. And RAIM technology can be used to detect when a signal is inadequate for a precision approach, for example, and to warn the pilot not to trust the GPS nav unit at this time.
Submarines can't receive LORAN-C when submerged. ELF is the only way to communicate with them, and we dismantled our only ELF transmitter five years ago.
And EMP pulses are like any other energy source - they fall off as the distance cubed grows. GPS satellites are in a 20,000 km orbit, so for an EMP to affect them it would have to be literally earth-shattering. At that point the GPS satellites would simply be among the last of the man-made objects to care.
New Jersey? ;)
Like I said ...
Anyway, I was thinking of the Baudette, Minnesota tower. It is truly in a deservedly ignored corner of the planet. It is located at the northern end of one of the largest peat bog swamps in America. Here's a look at the tower itself: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=48.7125,-94.595&ie=UTF8&ll=48.613853,-94.55497&spn=0.006157,0.01222&z=17 From Wikipedia: "The "Big Bog" is composed mostly of wetlands and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. It is also almost entirely unpopulated, except for the town of Waskish along Highway 72. Waskish consists of about a hundred people who live entirely off pulp-wood sales, a gas station and a bar.
If they take down the tower I will definitely miss the light at the top, as I can see it almost immediately after I leave Waskish, and it stays with me for the next 20 miles. At 2AM that blinking red light is pretty much the only companion on that road, apart from the occasional deer, bear, fox, or the snores of the spouse.
So technically, I suppose I use LORAN-C more than most drivers. :-)
LORAN-C towers are a hell of a lot more vulnerable than a satellite constellation. Have you ever visited one? Some of them are located in the most god-awful corners of the planet. They're set in woods, swamps, mountains, and other remote places. Anybody who wanted to disable one badly enough could do it with a small group of people, because there's no more than a couple of token guards present. But nobody on the planet apart from a few governments or billion dollar corporations can touch the satellites, which are located in MEOs, not LEOs.
I will give you cheap: the cost of LORAN-C is a fraction of the cost of GPS. But to what end? Why continue to pour any more of my money into a technology that is NOBODY's primary navigational system? Right now it's no more than an inaccurate backup system, a job it was not built to perform. And it will never become more than that.
LORAN-C is being used and maintained only for a handful of commercial shipping concerns. Nobody in the general public uses it (if you tell me you have a LORAN-C based TomTom on your car's dashboard, I'm calling you a liar in advance.) If the shipping companies think that LORAN-C is worth it as a backup, then they can damn well pony up the money to keep it going as a private company. Otherwise, pull the plug and auction off the towers today. We don't need it.
Are you always this paranoid about the U.S. government? Seriously, the Russians have had their version of GNSS flying for 35 years, and you can buy a completely non-American GLONASS receiver that will give you the same data as an American (made in China, of course) GPS receiver. We know full well that we don't have a monopoly on global navigation.
They are shutting LORAN-C off because it's expensive to maintain a separate system, especially one that is not nearly as accurate as GPS, and is at risk of terrestrial attack (a determined terrorist group could easily destroy a critical LORAN-C tower, but the same group does not have physical access to the GPS satellites.) In addition, its consumers are not widespread, and are already using GPS for their primary navigation systems.
You should think before you make up bogus conspiracy theories. They make you look kind of crazy.