And by "Verizon disables the GPS capabilities of the MiFi" you mean "Verizon doesn't use it", since the hardware is still there, and can still be activated to retrieve the location of any Verizon MiFi.

You have clearly never been to defcon, and/or miss the point of the con altogether. Sure, there are great speakers giving talks about important and relevant topics. Some of them are even useful...

But the larger part of con the for a lot of the attendees is to get together with like-minded individuals and...wait for it...hack.

Here are some examples of the hacking that went on at this year's defcon. The Lost@con Mystersy Challenge results aren't there, and as a participant I can tell you that it required breaking crypto, circumventing physical security measures, debugging code, hardware hacking skills, and trick-or-treating, among other things. I don't know what your definition of "hacking" is, but it should probably include a few of those.

This also doesn't mention some of the cool things going on in the lock-picking village, the hardware hacking village, the wi-fi village, etc...

Most people I know wipe and reimage their machines after spending any time at all on the defcon network. They call it the most hostile network environment on the planet for good reasons. That being said, the Wall of Sheep has absolutely nothing to do with being "hacked", it simply displays usernames and (partial) passwords for people who are too stupid or lazy to use encrypted protocols. If you show up at a hacker convention and can't be bothered to use TLS or SSL for your email, you deserve to be shamed.