You ideally need both. A good GPS to tell you where you are, and a good map (and the sense and skill to read it) to tell you how to get somewhere else.

My father once said a GPS is just a device to remind you how lost you are.

In 2008 some friends and I went on adventurous trip through Russia and Kazakhstan. Some of it was through steppe with rough roads/tracks/drivable surfaces that are not on the maps. They were visible on satellite imagery though.

Our navigation "solution" was a laptop and Garmin GPS attached via USB. Laptop would be powered from car battery with power converter.

For software, we were going to use OziExplorer, which could display raster maps, and show current GPS location on them. Ozi maps are simply big raster images and there is limit of how big they can be.

Before the trip I found a tool that can scrape Google Maps satellite imagery and generate Ozi-compatible maps. So I ran it on the parts of Russia and Kazakhstan we expected to visit and got many gigabytes of cached satellite imagery.

During the trip as we moved along, I would use the tool to generate Ozi map for next area we were visiting. I got pretty handy at doing latitude and longitude bounding box calculations "in head" :-) To give idea of working conditions:

http://i.imgur.com/0k7AEE5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/X01vuNZ.jpg

There were various "oh shit" moments along the trip, one of which was when the power converter stopped working (and laptop's battery was empty because its charging circuit got fried earlier, guess because of the unstable power or overheating). GPS was still running on its internal battery so we did know our latitude and longitude and bearing. But our paper maps were not much use. The population density in steppe was so low, we could just drive until we'd run out of gas and water, and not meet anybody. I think we were shorter on water, as we had to use some of it to top up leaky radiators. Anyway, all ended well when our mechanic-guy found and fixed a simple wiring issue with the power converter, and we got the laptop back on!

So yes, you need GPS and maps.

To be fair to the point I was making, you had used the GPS and maps to get lost in the first place.

(Which is your group's choice to make; I don't mean to moralize and lecturify, my earlier point was just to push back on the idea that a GPS and thermoelectric stove are safety equipment)

There were either walls on either side of the trench, or the planet was a barren rock to begin with.

Correction: FOBS put warheads in low earth polar orbit.

Out of interest - what part of what I said are you correcting? :-)

At least in the UK, Jack is a fairly common shortening of Jacqueline. The only way of determining a users gender is asking them directly, and if a person wishes to enter different values into different systems, all the more power to them.

Unless you're really, really bad at drinking, having a beer is not physically forcing others around you to drink. If you start smoking, then everyone else around you has to deal with the smoke. I'm told that using vaporisers removes the smoke aspect, but now you've got a cloud of THC laden steam which, whilst not as bad as a cloud of THC laden smoke, is still a pretty selfish thing to inflict on other people.

That example would surely be better as:

    something = myfunc(d['x']) if 'x' in d else None

In this form you perform the lookup twice: once to test 'x' in d and then again to actually get the value d['x']. Try clauses in Python are very inexpensive if they pass (don't raise an exception), so often the try..except version would be preferable.

In any event don't optimize prematurely and use a profiler rather than guessing if performance is an issue. ;-)

Doesn't this go against the Pythonic notion of handling exceptions rather than "looking before you leap"?

That looks like perl.

The facebook app has its own camera app, if memory serves, that has some facebook specific features.

Pretty sure if all the miners stopped mining, bitcoin would be dead in the water, unless there is a secondary transaction mechanism that doesn't rely on miners.

Pretty sure if all humans stopped working, the human race would be dead in the water.

Sorry, but what you said is absurd as long as bitcoin has value.

HN hides the reply button on some comments that it deems might start flame wars (or similar). If you click the link link, that will let you reply from there.

The "reply" link is also hidden on comments posted less than some (0 < n < 9) number of minutes prior to page load, but the same trick works in that case as well.

ah, thanks, i didn't know that trick.

How about when someone doesn't support treating animals well. Or values your apple more than your life? Or decides they have this million tonnes of toxic gunk and decides that instead of paying someone who knows how to deal with it he's just going to dump it all in your lake? Or when someone realises that you value organic produce more, and decides to lie and say that their produce is in fact organic?

What happens when someone realises your house is on top of a nice mineral deposit but can't give you sufficient value to vacate your property and decides to burn it down in the middle of the night?

What happens when one person pays another to kill you? It's a free and voluntary exchange. And you're dead. Everyone is better off, right? Right?

>> What happens when one person pays another to kill you? It's a free and voluntary exchange. And you're dead. Everyone is better off, right? Right?

I'm sensing a reluctance to process ideas here. Bad stuff is going to happen regardless of how our societies are organized. That doesn't mean it's alright to take someone's property by force, nor that voluntary, "market solutions" to real problems would not emerge.