Jose wrote:
2. A lot of places that don't have an ILS do have a GPS.


Agreed. Got to know GPS approaches.

1. I'm a computer science graduate and no computer is going to
get the best of me!


Don't bet on it. A computer is a personal servant, to whom you give the
keys to your house, your car, and your bank, who only speaks Swahili,
who takes his orders from a high school student in Pakistan, and who
invites its friends over for parties when you are out of the house.

The only way around this is to program the raw chip yourself.

No, you can always turn off the power! :-)


(and yes, I also do programming)

I did programming, but I grew out of that phase. :-)


I'm sure once learned, the GPS seem trivial, it is just taking
me a little while to get the hang of it.


With steam gauges, you depend on the laws of physics. With GPS, you
depend on the twisted logic of whoever had too much coffee the day the
design was burned in ROM.

Yes, there is some truth to that.


The laws of physics have never failed me. I've yet to encounter a
computer that didn't go belly up just for jollies.

Well, the first computer I worked on was a PDP-11/34 running RSX-llM and
that sucker never crashed once in the five years we used it as a
development host. The only downtime it saw was when we applied patches
or did a sysgen to change its configuration.


Matt