Benjammin, I have read and re-read your post and I'm sorry to say I just don't follow your thinking. If it is dark in the big woods and you can't see the night sky, how are you going to find a "couple of landmarks" to triangulate? I must confess I never hard of the "law of sines" and after a brief tutorial:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LawofSines.html

I don't think I would be any better off knowing it. While you are figuring out angles of a triangle and fussing with pencil and paper, I am going to the truck. My GPS with illuminated screen says my truck is 0.8 miles on a bearing of 285 degrees and there is a dotted line from where I am standing straight to the truck. I now consult my compass, find 285 degrees, pocket the GPS and strike out trying to generally stay on 285 degrees. Periodically, I will consult the GPS to see if I am generally on course and I will be waiting for you at the truck with a thermos of hot coffee. Essentially, what I have described is comparable to an airplane flying directly to a homing radio beacon. Now how can you argue with that?

Do I detect a bias against the Global Positioning System which after all, was designed for military navigation? I can't imagine navigating in the deserts of Iraq or anywhere else without it. A compass in that scenario would, at best, just tell you where North is. And with that knowledge in thousands of acres of sand and no landmarks, are you any better off? I think not. Unless of course there is a "sine" that says "Baghdad 397 kilometers". <img src="/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />