My father drove trucks here for years through Tennessee, and I don't even need to ask him whether he thinks this is a ridiculous waste of time and taxpayer dollars. Every minute they waste off the road is money from their pockets. Especially when in many cases you leave the truck running during all of this bullshit in order to pull it to the various road markers for different pointless checks.
They will likely never find a single truck carrying anything of federal importance. All they'll do is use it for catching things which the THP or other federal agencies should already be handling, like catching drugs, and add one more level of red tape to the honest hard-working people.
There isn't a single federal program which Ron Paul has ever voiced support for keeping when asked. If that's not wildly slashing everything, I don't know what you call it.
To the contrary of your own knee-jerk reaction to my statement, I've watched quite a bit of interviews and debates of Ron Paul. There were times I found him promising until I learned more and more of his strict constitutionalist positions and realized how unrealistic it is. The country may be in severe debt, but the one Paul proposes is a country which wouldn't function.
That's the thing about Ron Paul. He makes a few good points once in a while, but he's such an extremist that he just wants to wildly slash everything in government with a machete. That's not the solution to anything. Most of the organizations he wants to destroy actually do good things and serve important roles, but may need to simply be restructured to better serve those roles instead of just throwing money at them in their current form. And that's not to mention the literally thousands of jobs he would be cutting to serve his agenda.
Ron Paul's mind is still a hundred years in the past. He's regularly citing things from far back in the country's history. Things that worked back then won't work today. Society's complexities and modernizations require some degree of management or oversight. Paul doesn't see that because all he can see is the fantasy of small government he envisions of yesteryear.
The USA isn't a western. Let's stop trying to treat it like one.
I love how just because a company comes up with some convoluted piece of software, which likely doesn't even work as advertised due to its nature, that every technology-illiterate politician thinks this is naturally perfect to force onto everyone. For the children, you know. Let's just ignore the fact that even the most basic internet filters don't work properly and install a system onto everyone's machines which can automatically flag them for felonies. That can't possibly lead to false arrest lawsuits, or waste millions of taxpayer dollars implementing and "enforcing."
Actually, I just now looked up what LogBox is, and now I'm facepalming even more. It's just a corporate logging system, to make a developer or sysadmin's job easier. So what other part of his proposed system lets them detect child pornography or illegal acts? Where does this get reported to? How much storage do you honestly think you could get away with putting in such a device to contain all of the information? Who all has access to that information? Who's paying for it? What happens if I disable it, or simply buy a computer outside of the country which doesn't contain one? What if I tampered with somebody else's device or used their machine to browse child porn sites to intentionally get them in trouble?
I also guess nobody ever told him that it's impossible to detect if an image is actually child porn if it's an image that the pedo took themselves, so it's not exactly an early warning system of any child being abused. At best, it would let them detect known child porn images already in distribution, but how long did that child have to be abused, photographed, and transmitted around to other pedos before it was entered into a database for matching against?
Oh well. It's hard for me to imagine what it must be like for people with such a blissful ignorance of technology.
The great thing about programming is that you don't need a contest to set a time limit on yourself. Many years ago I did something similar, except I gave myself the whole month of September to write a game. I had (have) a bad track record of finishing the bigger projects I start, so I thought that was a good way to accomplish something. It was also an excuse to finally teach myself DirectX and improve my C++ in the process. I'd planned to make a Tetris clone, except with more of an electrical theme, and called it Electris (and holy crap I think that was 10 years ago already, now that I think about it).
Long story short, a month later, I had rendered decent 3D graphics into images for title screens, backgrounds, and game pieces, made sound effects, and even came up with two of my own music tracks. Even though I learned in the meantime that you can't really sell Tetris clones without getting sued, it didn't really matter, I had learned a lot in the process. And I was proud to have actually finished it. I've done a lot of programming in a lot of languages since then, but that one still stands out to me.
So yeah, if you've been wanting to learn a particular language or API, then set a goal of doing something fun and go for it. Otherwise, if you're anything like me, you'll just procrastinate and drag the learning process out over a much longer period. And maybe you'll want to try a real contest after that!
It's always interesting to see what people can do with an AVR, but this thing reminds me way too much of the little wallet-sized photo viewer I received recently. The screen on it was dreadful, and the resistive touchscreen was as bad or worse than I always remembered them as being. But, it served its purpose overall I guess, and I'm sure it was dirt cheap to assemble in some Chinese factory.
There's always a place for such a product, such as to developing countries, or schools as an incentive to read, etc. The problem is that the only places where it would actually be useful is not likely to be where it would end up. When there's actually somebody putting money behind them, those kinds of products usually end up as the free gifts you get for asking about signing up for some insurance company or something.
Anyway, it's neat, and I've developed with AVRs myself, but I must admit I'm still partial to the Z80. I always love finding out a particular product is still using an embedded version of one of those.
This is particularly beneficial to all the hapless people who think using open wifi is perfectly safe. And it saves Google from having to deal with stolen accounts as a result. That's why it's so popular on places like Twitter and Facebook, too.
That's not to say that SSL is perfect, and a hapless user can still be tricked or spied upon once somebody starts ARP spoofing'em or SSL stripping or what have you. But some protection is better than none.
How can this even be a controversy? One of the biggest draws of Chrome (interface-wise) is the tabs on top, and borderless interface when maximized. If you don't like how it looks, why would you have ever started using it to start with? Anyone using Chrome recognizes that changes to the UI are very limited in general. It's always been this way.
Firefox, Opera, etc, mimic this tabs-on-top method as well, which would seem to indicate that the majority of people prefer it. And those who don't, who probably should have never started using Chrome to begin with, can use one of these perfectly acceptable browsers instead and configure it how they want. Problem solved.
Back when I used to suggest Opera to people, some of them would say that they didn't like the interface, despite the fact that it was heavily configurable, and so they simply didn't use it. There was no controversy. They used something else which they liked better. This should be no different.
I checked the privacy policy on Google's DNS, and they do state that they don't use your queries to correlate who you are in relation to other Google products. To be honest I was surprised to see that, since I would have bet money that they did the opposite and hence why they offered the service to start with. Google is good at building advertising profiles, after all.
They do log data though, both temporary and permanent, but we'll have to take their word that it's just for debugging and service quality reasons.
I tend to just use 4.2.2.2. It's faster than my ISP's DNS ironically, despite being a public server. Though my ISP's DNS servers implement that recommended searches junk when a DNS request fails, and I opted out of that, so it likely takes longer while their servers realize who I am and whether I'm opted out. Which is still bullshit, since I'm paying them for service and they shouldn't have any right to be trying to push ads on me and disrupt the normal operation of the internet in the process, but what can you do.
If they want access to somebody's email without getting a warrant, all they need to do is pull the person over and search their smart phone for some bogus reason. Cause apparently that's still perfectly legal!
While I understand the point you're trying to make, since they're required to take driving courses and all, the fact remains that I know of at least two incidents of cops running into civilians in recent months, when not on calls, because they were talking on their cell phone. One of these incidents happened on the corner near my house just three days ago, and the woman in the car had to be taken to the hospital.
I think this is pretty conclusive evidence that even a trained driver is severely impaired when using a phone.
You also have no idea if your ISP is collecting information on the sites you visit, either through DNS queries or by parsing the content of pages you visit, and creating a profile about you to sell. And once that profile exists, if even one website out there is connected to that company's profile database and can associate your visit and a particular account as being you, then suddenly they've attached a name to an otherwise anonymous profile. It can only grow from there.
The point I was trying to make is that unless there are privacy laws and strict rules on what data networks and companies are allowed to take and sell about you, then it's simply never going to stop.
The other point I was making is that Facebook is far from the only company doing this, and people shouldn't be wasting their time focusing on just one of them.
Go on various people search websites, like Spokeo, and search for yourself. Go ahead, I'll wait.
You're probably already on the web. And tracking companies like DoubleClick already know all about your browsing habits. If you're paranoid about privacy, then you better stay off of the internet, don't use cellphones, credit/debit cards, shopper discount cards, etc, because profiling you is what makes companies extra money nowadays.
If you think they're going to pass up the opportunity to make money just for the sake of your privacy, when there's no law to stop it, you're sadly mistaken.
If showing a little self restraint was a viable solution to problems, then thousands of people wouldn't die every year from distracted or impaired drivers.
I suppose the idea is neat, but I personally don't have any particular applications where I need Perl to actually be the whole webserver for me. The things that do come to mind would involve a small system where there is no webserver installed, but going on port 80 would mean running the script with higher privileges and the whole mess of Perl and everything need to be jailed. Or maybe to try one of those utilities I heard about to pass privileged ports to an app, but I haven't had experience with those.
To be honest, frameworks left kind of a bad taste in my mouth when a language such as Ruby that had been around for years suddenly exploded when Ruby on Rails showed up. Everybody and their brother thought it was the new hip thing to use, until a lot of the bigger websites which had deployed it started to actually dump it due to limitations. Nobody wanted to take the time to write good code to start with, and it bit them in the butt.
Using frameworks (whether it's.NET or on the web or otherwise) usually starts out as a means to set up a new project quickly, but the problem is that they end up being an excuse to make sloppy bloated coat for the final product. Perl was always fast and efficient; people should learn to develop in it that way.
I always find it funny when governments think they can actually censor the internet. If it doesn't work despite the great cyberwall of China, what makes you think it'll work anywhere else?
America is trying as well, like with the whole recent domain name shutdowns thing. Yet people have already come up with very simple ways to get around it, from browser extensions, to their own DNS servers, to simply editing your hosts file.
Governments, like corporations, don't understand technology; they simply screw it up for all the average people by trying to.
Most people accept that texting and cellphones cause accidents. But, most people also think they're better drivers than everyone else, and therefore it's okay for them to do it. Even cops do it. I see them all the time.
The only solution is making it illegal internationally. But considering the U.S. alone only bans it in a handful of states, we have a long way to go of convincing people that their ego doesn't make it okay.
Sorry, but based on Mozilla's track record of resource-intensive products, and how long they've struggled to compact Firefox down onto a mobile device, I can't see how there's a lot of advantage to using this on one. One of the biggest advantages would be preventing Javascript execution to conserve battery life, but when you're doing this inside Firefox itself you're not really getting ahead. And you're still using more resources just having the add-on, because Firefox add-ons are in fact Javascript themselves, and it's going to be active even for pages which have no Javascript in them. This should be a hard-coded feature in the browser, not an add-on.
The idea is neat, and yes there are security/privacy advantages, but the available browsers for Android already offer similar protections if you dig through the options. Dolphin and Opera are pretty nice alternatives to the default. People should check them out if they haven't.
That's the problem. How exactly are customers going to push these companies into doing anything, when customers rely on these services and can't just cut them off? And there's far fewer people who actually care about these things than there are people who will haplessly continue to pay anyway, so even if all of us who care canceled service, it wouldn't make much difference to them. They'd just find new ways to screw the people who are left to make up the difference.
And I won't pay an extra fee for my privacy, because I'm already paying them a fee for the service. This isn't Facebook, where they need that revenue to run the service itself. What right do they have to extort people into paying for their privacy, knowing the customer probably has no other option than to use them? That's ridiculous. Especially when you factor in early termination fees, which a simple privacy policy change wouldn't be a valid excuse to break the contract since there's no actual fee change.
Cellphones and data networks are services the average public needs in this modern age, and they should be regulated the same way the phone companies used to be to prevent people from being taken advantage of. Because history shows, when a company feels it's in the solidified position in a market to do so, they're going to do it. Your only option in that situation is to go along with it, or to live in the stone age in protest.
This kind of stuff is ridiculous when you're already paying a lot of money for service. But lots of companies are taking advantage of digital consumers in lots of ways already. ISPs, like Charter for example, default to giving you a search page when DNS requests fail. This page is not only full of sponsored ads, but it breaks how the internet is supposed to work when a domain doesn't exist. Fortunately, Charter finally implemented a way to fully opt out (after a long time of a useless method), but the default is still the search page which most people will never change. And we all know the stories of ISPs replacing ads in pages with your own, or inserting new ads altogether, or creating profiles of sites you visit and selling it to advertisers. Who cares about the user when there's money to be made.
We need privacy laws to stop it, because if you're counting on the free market/capitalism/blah blah to "work things out on its own" (as I've been told by people before when discussing privacy issues), then you're incredibly naive. Greed runs these companies' decisions, and when nearly every company is doing it, or there's no other company in your area to service you, then you're stuck. Time for more of those government regulations that people love to hate.
I'll never understand why there are people out there with some degree of technical skill who are still willing to pay such a high markup for Apple products, which are effectively low-quality Foxconn hardware in a shiny box, just to use OSX.
Seriously, look on Google. You can have OSX running on an excellent set of PC hardware, for literally half the price or less, with a minor amount of effort required. And you'll probably learn something in the process. The hardware will be higher quality, and you can easily dual or triple boot Windows and Linux on it for compatibility with other software or games. For a person capable of doing it, you simply can't lose.
At the end of the day, I think many of these people just don't want to admit that they buy into the whole Apple lifestyle intentionally, because they want a pretty machine which says something about them to others. And that's fine. But if that's the case, stop complaining about what you're buying and how much you're paying for it, because it certainly isn't Apple's fault that you gave them your money.
Whether they could still get their GPS location via a fallback method would be irrelevant for the test though, they would simply need to determine if they blocked out the band they were targeting. It should be easy for them to determine that from the units. But, chances are, for the test, they're also using specific equipment to monitor/plot reception and signal strength over time, which wouldn't rely on any standard GPS unit to do it. This would be especially necessary for testing the range of their jammer, to see when it begins to fall off.
There are other bands too which are less important, and theoretically even those could have been used at sea for testing purposes without impacting any civilian or military equipment. All you really need to know from the test is if you can adequately block signals from the GPS satellites.
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My father drove trucks here for years through Tennessee, and I don't even need to ask him whether he thinks this is a ridiculous waste of time and taxpayer dollars. Every minute they waste off the road is money from their pockets. Especially when in many cases you leave the truck running during all of this bullshit in order to pull it to the various road markers for different pointless checks.
They will likely never find a single truck carrying anything of federal importance. All they'll do is use it for catching things which the THP or other federal agencies should already be handling, like catching drugs, and add one more level of red tape to the honest hard-working people.
There isn't a single federal program which Ron Paul has ever voiced support for keeping when asked. If that's not wildly slashing everything, I don't know what you call it.
To the contrary of your own knee-jerk reaction to my statement, I've watched quite a bit of interviews and debates of Ron Paul. There were times I found him promising until I learned more and more of his strict constitutionalist positions and realized how unrealistic it is. The country may be in severe debt, but the one Paul proposes is a country which wouldn't function.
That's the thing about Ron Paul. He makes a few good points once in a while, but he's such an extremist that he just wants to wildly slash everything in government with a machete. That's not the solution to anything. Most of the organizations he wants to destroy actually do good things and serve important roles, but may need to simply be restructured to better serve those roles instead of just throwing money at them in their current form. And that's not to mention the literally thousands of jobs he would be cutting to serve his agenda.
Ron Paul's mind is still a hundred years in the past. He's regularly citing things from far back in the country's history. Things that worked back then won't work today. Society's complexities and modernizations require some degree of management or oversight. Paul doesn't see that because all he can see is the fantasy of small government he envisions of yesteryear.
The USA isn't a western. Let's stop trying to treat it like one.
I love how just because a company comes up with some convoluted piece of software, which likely doesn't even work as advertised due to its nature, that every technology-illiterate politician thinks this is naturally perfect to force onto everyone. For the children, you know. Let's just ignore the fact that even the most basic internet filters don't work properly and install a system onto everyone's machines which can automatically flag them for felonies. That can't possibly lead to false arrest lawsuits, or waste millions of taxpayer dollars implementing and "enforcing."
Actually, I just now looked up what LogBox is, and now I'm facepalming even more. It's just a corporate logging system, to make a developer or sysadmin's job easier. So what other part of his proposed system lets them detect child pornography or illegal acts? Where does this get reported to? How much storage do you honestly think you could get away with putting in such a device to contain all of the information? Who all has access to that information? Who's paying for it? What happens if I disable it, or simply buy a computer outside of the country which doesn't contain one? What if I tampered with somebody else's device or used their machine to browse child porn sites to intentionally get them in trouble?
I also guess nobody ever told him that it's impossible to detect if an image is actually child porn if it's an image that the pedo took themselves, so it's not exactly an early warning system of any child being abused. At best, it would let them detect known child porn images already in distribution, but how long did that child have to be abused, photographed, and transmitted around to other pedos before it was entered into a database for matching against?
Oh well. It's hard for me to imagine what it must be like for people with such a blissful ignorance of technology.
The great thing about programming is that you don't need a contest to set a time limit on yourself. Many years ago I did something similar, except I gave myself the whole month of September to write a game. I had (have) a bad track record of finishing the bigger projects I start, so I thought that was a good way to accomplish something. It was also an excuse to finally teach myself DirectX and improve my C++ in the process. I'd planned to make a Tetris clone, except with more of an electrical theme, and called it Electris (and holy crap I think that was 10 years ago already, now that I think about it).
Long story short, a month later, I had rendered decent 3D graphics into images for title screens, backgrounds, and game pieces, made sound effects, and even came up with two of my own music tracks. Even though I learned in the meantime that you can't really sell Tetris clones without getting sued, it didn't really matter, I had learned a lot in the process. And I was proud to have actually finished it. I've done a lot of programming in a lot of languages since then, but that one still stands out to me.
So yeah, if you've been wanting to learn a particular language or API, then set a goal of doing something fun and go for it. Otherwise, if you're anything like me, you'll just procrastinate and drag the learning process out over a much longer period. And maybe you'll want to try a real contest after that!
It's always interesting to see what people can do with an AVR, but this thing reminds me way too much of the little wallet-sized photo viewer I received recently. The screen on it was dreadful, and the resistive touchscreen was as bad or worse than I always remembered them as being. But, it served its purpose overall I guess, and I'm sure it was dirt cheap to assemble in some Chinese factory.
There's always a place for such a product, such as to developing countries, or schools as an incentive to read, etc. The problem is that the only places where it would actually be useful is not likely to be where it would end up. When there's actually somebody putting money behind them, those kinds of products usually end up as the free gifts you get for asking about signing up for some insurance company or something.
Anyway, it's neat, and I've developed with AVRs myself, but I must admit I'm still partial to the Z80. I always love finding out a particular product is still using an embedded version of one of those.
This is particularly beneficial to all the hapless people who think using open wifi is perfectly safe. And it saves Google from having to deal with stolen accounts as a result. That's why it's so popular on places like Twitter and Facebook, too.
That's not to say that SSL is perfect, and a hapless user can still be tricked or spied upon once somebody starts ARP spoofing'em or SSL stripping or what have you. But some protection is better than none.
How can this even be a controversy? One of the biggest draws of Chrome (interface-wise) is the tabs on top, and borderless interface when maximized. If you don't like how it looks, why would you have ever started using it to start with? Anyone using Chrome recognizes that changes to the UI are very limited in general. It's always been this way.
Firefox, Opera, etc, mimic this tabs-on-top method as well, which would seem to indicate that the majority of people prefer it. And those who don't, who probably should have never started using Chrome to begin with, can use one of these perfectly acceptable browsers instead and configure it how they want. Problem solved.
Back when I used to suggest Opera to people, some of them would say that they didn't like the interface, despite the fact that it was heavily configurable, and so they simply didn't use it. There was no controversy. They used something else which they liked better. This should be no different.
I checked the privacy policy on Google's DNS, and they do state that they don't use your queries to correlate who you are in relation to other Google products. To be honest I was surprised to see that, since I would have bet money that they did the opposite and hence why they offered the service to start with. Google is good at building advertising profiles, after all.
They do log data though, both temporary and permanent, but we'll have to take their word that it's just for debugging and service quality reasons.
I tend to just use 4.2.2.2. It's faster than my ISP's DNS ironically, despite being a public server. Though my ISP's DNS servers implement that recommended searches junk when a DNS request fails, and I opted out of that, so it likely takes longer while their servers realize who I am and whether I'm opted out. Which is still bullshit, since I'm paying them for service and they shouldn't have any right to be trying to push ads on me and disrupt the normal operation of the internet in the process, but what can you do.
If they want access to somebody's email without getting a warrant, all they need to do is pull the person over and search their smart phone for some bogus reason. Cause apparently that's still perfectly legal!
While I understand the point you're trying to make, since they're required to take driving courses and all, the fact remains that I know of at least two incidents of cops running into civilians in recent months, when not on calls, because they were talking on their cell phone. One of these incidents happened on the corner near my house just three days ago, and the woman in the car had to be taken to the hospital.
I think this is pretty conclusive evidence that even a trained driver is severely impaired when using a phone.
You also have no idea if your ISP is collecting information on the sites you visit, either through DNS queries or by parsing the content of pages you visit, and creating a profile about you to sell. And once that profile exists, if even one website out there is connected to that company's profile database and can associate your visit and a particular account as being you, then suddenly they've attached a name to an otherwise anonymous profile. It can only grow from there.
The point I was trying to make is that unless there are privacy laws and strict rules on what data networks and companies are allowed to take and sell about you, then it's simply never going to stop.
The other point I was making is that Facebook is far from the only company doing this, and people shouldn't be wasting their time focusing on just one of them.
Go on various people search websites, like Spokeo, and search for yourself. Go ahead, I'll wait.
You're probably already on the web. And tracking companies like DoubleClick already know all about your browsing habits. If you're paranoid about privacy, then you better stay off of the internet, don't use cellphones, credit/debit cards, shopper discount cards, etc, because profiling you is what makes companies extra money nowadays.
If you think they're going to pass up the opportunity to make money just for the sake of your privacy, when there's no law to stop it, you're sadly mistaken.
If showing a little self restraint was a viable solution to problems, then thousands of people wouldn't die every year from distracted or impaired drivers.
I suppose the idea is neat, but I personally don't have any particular applications where I need Perl to actually be the whole webserver for me. The things that do come to mind would involve a small system where there is no webserver installed, but going on port 80 would mean running the script with higher privileges and the whole mess of Perl and everything need to be jailed. Or maybe to try one of those utilities I heard about to pass privileged ports to an app, but I haven't had experience with those.
To be honest, frameworks left kind of a bad taste in my mouth when a language such as Ruby that had been around for years suddenly exploded when Ruby on Rails showed up. Everybody and their brother thought it was the new hip thing to use, until a lot of the bigger websites which had deployed it started to actually dump it due to limitations. Nobody wanted to take the time to write good code to start with, and it bit them in the butt.
Using frameworks (whether it's .NET or on the web or otherwise) usually starts out as a means to set up a new project quickly, but the problem is that they end up being an excuse to make sloppy bloated coat for the final product. Perl was always fast and efficient; people should learn to develop in it that way.
Aww, it doesn't look like they analyzed how many of them actually typed in proper English.
I always find it funny when governments think they can actually censor the internet. If it doesn't work despite the great cyberwall of China, what makes you think it'll work anywhere else?
America is trying as well, like with the whole recent domain name shutdowns thing. Yet people have already come up with very simple ways to get around it, from browser extensions, to their own DNS servers, to simply editing your hosts file.
Governments, like corporations, don't understand technology; they simply screw it up for all the average people by trying to.
Most people accept that texting and cellphones cause accidents. But, most people also think they're better drivers than everyone else, and therefore it's okay for them to do it. Even cops do it. I see them all the time.
The only solution is making it illegal internationally. But considering the U.S. alone only bans it in a handful of states, we have a long way to go of convincing people that their ego doesn't make it okay.
Sorry, but based on Mozilla's track record of resource-intensive products, and how long they've struggled to compact Firefox down onto a mobile device, I can't see how there's a lot of advantage to using this on one. One of the biggest advantages would be preventing Javascript execution to conserve battery life, but when you're doing this inside Firefox itself you're not really getting ahead. And you're still using more resources just having the add-on, because Firefox add-ons are in fact Javascript themselves, and it's going to be active even for pages which have no Javascript in them. This should be a hard-coded feature in the browser, not an add-on.
The idea is neat, and yes there are security/privacy advantages, but the available browsers for Android already offer similar protections if you dig through the options. Dolphin and Opera are pretty nice alternatives to the default. People should check them out if they haven't.
That's the problem. How exactly are customers going to push these companies into doing anything, when customers rely on these services and can't just cut them off? And there's far fewer people who actually care about these things than there are people who will haplessly continue to pay anyway, so even if all of us who care canceled service, it wouldn't make much difference to them. They'd just find new ways to screw the people who are left to make up the difference.
And I won't pay an extra fee for my privacy, because I'm already paying them a fee for the service. This isn't Facebook, where they need that revenue to run the service itself. What right do they have to extort people into paying for their privacy, knowing the customer probably has no other option than to use them? That's ridiculous. Especially when you factor in early termination fees, which a simple privacy policy change wouldn't be a valid excuse to break the contract since there's no actual fee change.
Cellphones and data networks are services the average public needs in this modern age, and they should be regulated the same way the phone companies used to be to prevent people from being taken advantage of. Because history shows, when a company feels it's in the solidified position in a market to do so, they're going to do it. Your only option in that situation is to go along with it, or to live in the stone age in protest.
This kind of stuff is ridiculous when you're already paying a lot of money for service. But lots of companies are taking advantage of digital consumers in lots of ways already. ISPs, like Charter for example, default to giving you a search page when DNS requests fail. This page is not only full of sponsored ads, but it breaks how the internet is supposed to work when a domain doesn't exist. Fortunately, Charter finally implemented a way to fully opt out (after a long time of a useless method), but the default is still the search page which most people will never change. And we all know the stories of ISPs replacing ads in pages with your own, or inserting new ads altogether, or creating profiles of sites you visit and selling it to advertisers. Who cares about the user when there's money to be made.
We need privacy laws to stop it, because if you're counting on the free market/capitalism/blah blah to "work things out on its own" (as I've been told by people before when discussing privacy issues), then you're incredibly naive. Greed runs these companies' decisions, and when nearly every company is doing it, or there's no other company in your area to service you, then you're stuck. Time for more of those government regulations that people love to hate.
I'll never understand why there are people out there with some degree of technical skill who are still willing to pay such a high markup for Apple products, which are effectively low-quality Foxconn hardware in a shiny box, just to use OSX.
Seriously, look on Google. You can have OSX running on an excellent set of PC hardware, for literally half the price or less, with a minor amount of effort required. And you'll probably learn something in the process. The hardware will be higher quality, and you can easily dual or triple boot Windows and Linux on it for compatibility with other software or games. For a person capable of doing it, you simply can't lose.
At the end of the day, I think many of these people just don't want to admit that they buy into the whole Apple lifestyle intentionally, because they want a pretty machine which says something about them to others. And that's fine. But if that's the case, stop complaining about what you're buying and how much you're paying for it, because it certainly isn't Apple's fault that you gave them your money.
Apply cameras generously to vehicle with duct tape. Then you have Google Street View, circa 2004.
"Oh thank you sir for finding my wallet! Now please let me search your house to make sure you didn't take anything of mine."
Whether they could still get their GPS location via a fallback method would be irrelevant for the test though, they would simply need to determine if they blocked out the band they were targeting. It should be easy for them to determine that from the units. But, chances are, for the test, they're also using specific equipment to monitor/plot reception and signal strength over time, which wouldn't rely on any standard GPS unit to do it. This would be especially necessary for testing the range of their jammer, to see when it begins to fall off.
There are other bands too which are less important, and theoretically even those could have been used at sea for testing purposes without impacting any civilian or military equipment. All you really need to know from the test is if you can adequately block signals from the GPS satellites.