Why The Hell... (random rant)

On Apr 4, 8:52 pm, Mxsmanic wrote:
Maxwell writes:
What did you have for dinner last night, Welsh Rarebit????

My point is that you have to strike a balance between assuming all equipment
will work perfectly and depending on that, and assuming that all equipment
will fail and trying to plan for that. In reality, chances are that all
equipment will work; and the chances of equipment failing diminish rapidly as
the number of simultaneous failures increases.

It's true that a compass always works--more or less, since compasses are so
finicky even when they are "working"--but I'm not sure that this is really
much of a practical help if nothing else works. All a compass can do is tell
you your direction of flight in a very approximate way. That isn't much use
for getting where you want to go. Charts help a lot, but you need more than a
compass to find out where you are on the chart, and if you don't know where
you are on a chart, a compass won't help.

Early ships navigated using a compass as one important instrument, but a
compass along was never good enough. It wasn't enough four hundred years ago,
and it's not enough now. If all you have is a compass, you're in deep
trouble.

You're actually better off with an accurate watch and a way to shoot the
stars.


oh, you know how to do that do you?

I do.


But even that is more of a theoretical method than a practical
method
these days.

No, it isn't, fjukkktard. it's still used and to good effect in quite
a few military applications.



When people talk about how this old method or that old method is reliable,
they tend to forget how many people died in the days when these "reliable"
methods were the only ones available.

You've obvioulsy never tried using a GPS anywhere near the middle est
these days.

Oh wait, you don't even fly... forgot..




Bertie


You're an idiot. It wasn't the method that killed, fjukktrd..