A sextant can find longitude through the lunar distance method, comparing the moon's position to that of a reference star and looking up that position in a Nautical Almanac to find Greenwich Time. This method was actually discovered a few years after the marine chronometer was invented, but was the dominant method during the 18th century because of the insane cost of chronometers at the time.

A sextant is also needed to find the local time at your current location regardless of whether you use a chronometer or the moon to find GMT, so it's at the least half of the process in finding longitude either way.

Oh, PS:

Even though you have a book about dealing with being flamed, but it would be way more enjoyable for Slashdot readers if they could just enjoy the "Slashdot experience" and just write trash about you without having to worry about you reading it.

I'm not really familiar enough with you to be able to libel you, but I'm sure there are at least some folks who would be enjoying themselves far more if they hadn't seen your name in the comments section. It has a chilling effect on discussion.

"People didn't like my original piece and had points of view that disagreed with my own. Therefore they're wrong. Now I'll just double-down by calling my critics idiots whose ideas are based of science fiction stereotypes. Then I'll just wait for my critics to admit they were wrong and finally get around to praising my obvious genius."

New York City's crackdown on turnstile jumping was part of the Giuliani Administrations implementation of broken window policing. But reducing low level disorder and misdemeanor crime, broken windows policing makes the law abiding residents of neighborhoods feel safer.

"A government’s inability to control even a minor crime like graffiti signaled to citizens that it certainly couldn’t handle more serious ones."

Stopping and arresting turnstile jumpers in particular frequently turned up wanted felons, parole violators, and gangbangers with illegal guns. Arresting them not only took criminal predators, off the streets, it encouraged other criminals to leave their guns at home for fear of having them confiscated. This further reduced their abilities to commit criminal acts in places like subways, and reduced criminal gun incidents when members of rival gangs would bump into each other.

Actually running your own fab can give you tremendous economies of scale if you know you'll be running you part (or its die shrink successors) 24/7/365. The per chip costs are going to be lower.

But to build a state-of-the-art, 300mm, 14-nm fab with all the latest process technology can run you $10 billion. AMD doesn't have enough mnoney to make those bets anymore, and few companies do.

Going with a foundry means you earn less profit per chip sold, but it also let's you avoid that $10 billion up-front investment.

...for who can cram the most acronyms into a single headline!

Microsoft Access is designed for people with good intuition in computing but little technical knowhow to be able to build simple databases and database related applications by themself. This is not to say that the systems built are easier to use than something built using a competing system or the databases are easier to maintain, but simply that it takes less learning to build them.

So, if you already know how to use Django/MySQL, then why not? Take the time you didn't spend learning a different platform and spend it designing a better User Experience for your end users, really make it easy to use for the people who use it day to day.

And honestly, whatever tool that you are just hearing about today is probably too obscure and poorly supported to be handed off to a new maintainer in future. Access is well known and well supported with plenty of people familiar with its operation, yet so is MySQL, and MySQL also has ample information online as well as Worbench and other tools to make its operation easier for whatever less technically adept person this is thrust upon when you're no longer there. There may well be more intuitive systems out there, but they do not have the benefit of having 10,000 relavent google results for any question typed in.

The median age in the Ukraine is 40, meaning half of people were born during or after 1974 and thus have no home on the Russian side of the border. So you would have them pack up and find a new city for the convenience of certain people (Crimean Tatars I think you mean) that have been living outside the area for 60 years? I can't think of how that could possibly make you any better than Josef Stalin that kicked the Tatars out of their homes in WWII, maybe worse, since he at least had the excuse of alleged Nazi collaboration.

Among the first instances of swatting I was aware of were conservative bloggers like Aaron Walker, Erick Erickson and Patrick Frey, all of whom were working to expose convicted felon and "Speedway Bomber" Brett Kimberlin.

There may have been earlier instances, but those are the first I'm aware of.