I wouldn't say GPS was "required" that long ago, but the market pressured were making it so. I was building control plane assisted GPS software for the e-911 mandate in 2004, a time when Moto had iDEN. Those phones had a chip that you could "turn off" in the UI except, of course, I could still query it via the network and pull a location.

When I was writing locative software in Africa a big issue was that the burner phones didn't have GPS chips in them since they were so cheap. No worries, we just trilateral end their position and kept historical records of their movements so as to predict their patterns. Several drug dealers could attest to that but you'll have to go ask them in the afterlife.

We also had a Stinger. In 2009, and were listening to encrypted cellular conversations based on the ESN in 2006. Anyone who thinks they have privacy with a cell phone needs to buy some oceanfront property in Arizona.

No, because Netflix is paying beaucoup dollars to content providers. Follow the money, as they say.

A reason to consider when pondering the question of why Americans have so much more gun violence when Canadians own more guns is this: countries with low instances of violence are generally more culturally homogonized than the U.S. For example, Canada has a very low proportion of people of non-European descent when compared to the U.S. Unfortunately, this is a cause for racial tension between many groups, and therefore leads to violence. Add to that the fact that the black populace in the U.S. are committing genocide against themselves (black males are the most frequent victims of gun violence, and a staggering percentage of the perpetrators are other black males) and you begin to see why the gun violence rate in the U.S. is so high.

I'm reminded constantly when I visit friends in Germany why their crime rate is so low - everyone is the same culture! The U.S. is such a melting pot of different cultures that there is bound to be tension - why do you think that in New York alone you have so many sections of the city that are pretty much inhabited by people of the same culture (Jewish, Chinese, Italian, etc.)?

Alkaloid