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(1) I was not punished, 'cause the platoon leader was asleep and you can't really hear the difference between weapons since all the grunts use Heckler&Koch AG3's.

Hehe. Well, for all the drills we had, I never learnt anything. The problem is that nothing ever goes wrong for the mistakes you make. Typical example: I was at an exercise at Kongsberg (then home of the swift reaction batalion), and I was in good camo. We were attacked, and they are coming down the hill-side in plain view. From my little nest, I could have picked out the whole platoon. And of course, I fired with blanks. Problem is, there was no way in hell they could have seen me, because of my camo (I didn't see any wargames judges around, but if they were there, they probably couldn't see me either) so they just walked on, directly towards me. They first discovered me at two meters, and then they started firing at me with blanks, allthough that was well within the safety range.

We had the same kinds of drills every few weeks. Nobody ever learnt anything. I got so tired of the mind-numbing stupidity that I wrote a proposal for the platoon. But the moronic officers simply couldn't carry it through. It was fun for me, but still not a learning experience. I managed to sneak up on a moose, I thought it were enemy soldiers, I only stopped a meter short... Whooah.

Nevertheless, I met so much fascism and so many fascists in the Norwegian military, and when I realized that they actually was right in how to build efficient military forces, I became a pacifist.

People mostly die from drowning in an avalanche since they breathe the fine snow on top of the avalanche before getting buried

Who told you this? It is not the fine snow that kills, that is, they kill very few. What kills is that you don't have the muscles to keep the chest up, so you stop breathing due to the pressure.

Hm, I took a course by Krister Kristensen, Norway's foremost research, and he is also the guy giving the courses in the military, so chances are we have got the same course.

Navigation with map and compass, navigation without compass,

Well, my experience was that most officers couldn't find their way out of a paper bag, and that was reflected in how they taught... I did some teaching, but many wore a thick layer of clue repellent...

Because not everyone who sets off on these trails has a clue.

There really is no substitution for clues when it comes to the woods, or mountaineering for that matter.

My experience is that for everything you introduce that make people rely on help from the outside, you're making people ignore that fact. That's why the death tolls in places like Mt. Blanc and Aconcagua (and Sylene in Sweden for that matter) are incredibly high. People think that they can just go up there and they'll be rescued if something goes wrong, but they can't. Instead, they die like flies.

I'm the author of Learn Orienteering, and I take the opposite the approach to everything: They key is to enable people to become more and more self-contained.

Things can still go wrong, and still search and rescue operations might be necessary. I have been involved in one too, and also received some training in it. Indeed, one could be fatally wounded, and need the help, but those risks become much more managable for the individual when they know what they are up against. It is a part of life.

In conclusion, I don't think sensors everywhere is going to make people a lot safer. Providing free training to everyone is.

Yup, and if you need to learn how to use a compass, I'll just plug my pages about it. It is a bit dated, I hope to be able to return to it soon.

Anyway, my new sites will have RDF. But it is being worked on, there's nothing to see yet... :-)

Anyway, I think you would find at least something if you start spidering at e.g. .

If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?

My How to use a compass will be available under a CC lisence (Attribute-ShareAlike) or FDL or something similar.

I got an e-mail from a guy who was about to quit is job and go into teaching outdoor skills full-time. He needed good instruction materials, and so he wondered if he could use my material professionally. I said yes, and told him about copyleft and Creative Commons. He thought it was brilliant. When I release this stuff, this means that there will be at least one professional using and contributing back to the project, a big win for everyone.

It's not about amateurs. It is about basing economy on common goods.

That being said, I'd like to elaborate on the choice of software licenses, though. Rather than thinking about the code, think about what you want to achieve with your code:

• If you want to promote Free Software, choose GPL.
• If you want to promote a specific application or technology, choose BSD/MIT/that kind of stuff.
• If you just want to contribute to mankind and don't care about fame, fortune, who gets to cash in, politics or anything, release it to the public domain.

I think that the FDL is the Free Documentation License which is most clearly formulated, so it is unlikely that one will run into trouble if using it.

However, it has it's problems too. My project is mostly about making tutorials, and one important part of it is to encourage people to make printed booklets and distribute freely.

The problem is that the FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with any copy you make. That would defeat the purpose of the booklet: You can't make a 4-page booklet if you would have to include a 4-page copy of the license.

That's the main problem with the FDL. I've been communicating with FSF on this, and apparently, it is not really a problem with FDL, but with copyright law. You have to include a license, or people would have to assume the worst (i.e. you only have fair use rights. Besides, most people don't think they have fair use rights either, because of all the propaganda, so they will not make a copy even if you tell them to...)

The FSF's best suggestion is that I, as the copyright holder, grant an individual license to everyone who wants to make a booklet. I think this is a sub-optimal solution, because the people who join me in making content needs predictability too. They need to know under what conditions the stuff they write will be distributed.

Take, as an example, the GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO. It links the FDL. When I organized a keysigning party, I handed out a paper copy of parts of the HOWTO to every participant, without a copy of the licence. In doing that, I think I broke the FDL (I plead "not guilty" your honor, I didn't understand the FDL at that time! :-) ). But, I think that is how everyone would do it, and in fact, I think it is how the author intended it to be. Actually, I don't think the author followed the instructions in the FDL either.

I guess I have made this point: The FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with every copy you make, but nobody is going to do that with simple handouts.

BTW, I'm having a bit of problem hosting this project for the next couple of months... Anybody have a web server with a little bandwidth to spare?

OTOH, commercialism is destroying a lot, the IOC is very corrupt, that's true, and then there's dope.

So, perhaps you could say that I asked for it. I get about 10 spams a day.

But, there is nothing more irritating to surf pages and there is no contact information when you need to contact the publisher if you've got comments.

I'm not going to let spammers dictate that I can't let people send me their questions, thus making the internet less useful for everyone. The spammers are not going to win.