A recent article from wired.com describes John Petersen, the director of Arlington Institute. The Arlington Institute is a scenario planning outfit for uncle Sam. The wired article specifically focus on the what i's of total GPS failure. According to Perersen, “If GPS were to fail completely, the cost would be incalculable,..." The author of the article explains the various industries that would be hardest hit, such as aviation, trucking, shipping and telecommunications. Worst yet the article states that the Internet would slow to a crawl because various Internet backbones rely on “GPS time stamping” to route data.
In a single Acronym Y2K. The only industry truly reliant on GPS is the aviation industry. Internet backbones aren't managed by monkeys. If suddenly engineers were unable to receive a signal from one of the many GPS sattellites, a fix could easily be found. A quick 10 minute application written to sync data with an atomic clock or one of the thousands of time servers on the Internet would do the exact do the exact same thing. As far as trucking, most truck drivers can read maps, and if they can't maybe they shouldn't be driving quarter million dollar machines around the country. Bottom line, if you're not a pilot and you're not dropping bombs on Iraq, GPS is luxury not a neccessity.
Also see Petersens essay on GPS failure.
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