as77

I don't think the hobby would die if GC.com packed up the tent and went away. True the current database would possibly go away, the sport would just have to start over or evlove more drastically than normal. That's what I meant by "killed". It would be catastrophic. Just think about it, all cache pages would have to be retyped, all the logs would be lost, etc. That is death, even though the hobby would be born again. The point is that the hobby currently entirely depends on one person and that is not healthy, regardless of how well-meaning and reliable that person is.

I think that ideally, there should be a publicly available, central cache database. Currently the cache database is in Jeremy's hands and he only allows limited access to it. The entire hobby depends on him. If on a whim he decides to give up this business, the hobby is immediately killed. Ideally, a nonprofit organization of geocachers would maintain a central, publicly accessible cache database. There would be protocols to access and update the database and maintain synchronized local copies of it. Then anyone could start up a website that would rely on these public services and would offer extra features. That would be real competition.

Just look at the list of threads. At least 90% percent of them (or maybe more) are easily classified as being either about a GPS unit or software. The remaining <10% could get in any one of the categories. It doesn't make sense to maintain a unified section just because 10% of the threads are not that easy to classify.

But by "software", we do not necessarily mean the firmware in the GPS device. I support the original poster's idea. Why should the threads about a case for the 60cs and about a bug in GSAK be in the same section? Let's make a "GPS Units" section and a separate "Geocaching- and GPS-related software" section.

The hardest part is not to grab the cache and sign the log. When you already know where the cache is then you are out of there in a few minutes, no problem. The real hard part is when you are still searching for the cache. How can you be not suspicious/wierd/crazy-looking when you are crawling under park benches, turning up stones, peeking in various cracks, sticking your hand into trees, looking high, looking low, etc. for 40 minutes in a city park with lots of people around?

OK, I just received a PM from a mod (I'm not sure why he doesn't post here instead) saying that moderators must comment when closing a thread. The original poster can of course close the thread any time without commenting. D & K, are you sure you didn't accidentally click the "Close Thread" button in that "Red Cross" thread? Maybe that's what happened.

I see this all the time. Once the original question is answered, a moderator appears and closes the thread without any further comments or explanation. Especially if the thread goes off-topic (off-topic threads belong to the off-topic section). Guess this thread will be closed real soon now.

On my LCD screen, I can hardly see any difference between those colors. All of them are almost white.

Check out http://www.iespell.com for a free browser extension for Internet Explorer that does spell checking for all input text boxes. It's great!

But the receiver doesn't have the information to directly know any three sides of a triangle, nor would that be sufficient since it would not specify the orientation of that triangle. Even if the receiver had a synchronized atomic clock which would let it calculate distances to the satellites directly the model would be of a pyramid rather than a single triangle. I.e. distances to three known points from an unknown location would define a pyramid shape in space that would let you determine your location (the 4th vertex of the pyramid). So instead of the single triangle used in triangulation you have a pyramid with 4 triangular sides. That's exactly my understanding of the basic principle of how GPS works.

Reading about the first post indicates that it is about the weekend slowdowns. Perhaps users should read the first post to help get this thread get back on topic. I DID read it and established that the subject of this thread is how the poster got treated in another thread where he asked a question.

Maybe because that is not the subject of this thread?

It doesn't seem to be a "different mathematical principle" to me. Whether you construct a triangle using three sides or one side and two angles is not really that different.

What GPS is that? If you have only 2 sats and nothing else, the position cannot be determined unambiguously. If a GPS does that then I would guess some dead reckoning is happening.

Not in three dimensions. GPS works by determining your distance from at least 3 satellites whose positions are known. This is the same principle as triangulation.

When he asked 'will you tell me the time?', why didn't you answer 'yes, if you ask me' and wait for the next question? The only question that should result in you telling him the time is 'what is the time?' I don't think the people on the forum need a lesson in formal logics before getting an answer to their questions. In my opinion, CO Admin didn't contribute to this site being a friendly site with his answer to krn.

There is a fundamental difference, though. Public radio is a not-for-profit organization that is supported by donations. In contrast, geocaching.com is maintained by Groundspeak, Inc, which is a company, making profit from the fees, the advertising income and from selling of geocaching-related goods. When you are paying your membership fee, you are not donating; you are paying a fee for the member-only services. The fact that the listings are free to access is not a charitable act by them; it's part of their business model.

Well, if someone wants to burn down the forest, he will bring his own matches for that. If someone "tries" the matches found in a cache and this leads to a wildfire, that's an accident. Then you might as well say: "don't allow cars on the roads! there might be an accident!"

A recent study says: "Although the mechanism of action of DEET is unknown, the main theory is that the chemical disturbs the function of receptors in the mosquito's antennae that allow it to locate humans." (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/169/3/209)

Well, the yellow Etrex is a non-mapping unit, so the lock-on-road cannot be a problem with it, it has no such feature.

When the arrow starts to dance because you stopped, you could switch to the map screen as well and look at the breadcrumb trail. That will not jump around. Or everyone is just staring at the arrow screen?

off: twinkies are great food because they exactly show how your arteries will look like when you eat them...

Actually what it does is that it returns a gpx file that only contains the caches that occur in all of the uploaded gpx files. So you have to provide gpx files that only contain the unfound caches from each participant. It's a good tool!

So how do you merge them so just the ones that are common to all the PQ's can be filtered out? RM In the latest version of GSAK, you can filter logs based on whether another cacher has or has not logged a found, not found or note. See the online version of the help file at Example 5. Select all caches in my current database that I have not found AND my friend (geocaching.com name is "Bozo") has not found Like I said, that is a very limited and imperfect solution because the PQs only contain the last 5 logs.

So how do you merge them so just the ones that are common to all the PQ's can be filtered out? RM Hmmm... you are right, I'm not sure if this is possible with GSAK, I'm not such a big GSAK user. However, there is another solution that robertlipe posted some time ago. Order a big PQ with all the caches in the area and order PQs for each person containing only their found caches. Then use gpsbabel to combine all these files and apply the duplicate filter with the option that removes all instances of duplicates. The command line to use (I quote robertlipe's post now): gpsbabel -i gpx -f thebigpqofthearea.gpx -f myfinds -f yourfinds -f hisfinds -f herfinds -x duplicate,shortname,all -o gpx -F grouphunt.gpx Then the output file grouphunt.gpx will only contain caches unfound by everyone.