Slashdot Mirror
Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps
Garabito writes "An error on Google Maps has caused an international conflict in Central America. A Nicaraguan military commander, relying on Google Maps, moved troops into an area near San Juan Lake along the border between his country and Costa Rica (Google translation of Spanish original). The troops are accused of setting up camp there, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag, doing work to clean up a nearby river, and dumping the sediment in Costa Rican territory."
This is how google takes over the world! Soon there will be a very small dot somewhere in google maps called "googleland", and then over time the borders will expand. But nobody will question it, because it must be right.
A classic case of misinformation being worse than no information. However, Google does have a disclaimer on the service about possible errors.
It shouldn't, but it amazes me how a military force from one country can take action based on information from a free service offered by a company in another country. It boggles the mind.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Indeed. I almost rode my bike to a seemingly nearby park I had never explored. Then I double-checked it on the park authority's site and found it was over 100 miles away from where the Google map showed it.
So I 100% feel what this Nicaraguan commander felt. I mean; out situations were basically identical.
we can't have nice things.
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag ? "What? We don't need a flag, this is our home, you bastards" "No flag, No Country, You can't have one! Those are the rules... that I just made up!...and I'm backing it up with this gun, that was lent to me from the National Rifle Association." --Eddie Izzard
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
"(Google translation of Spanish original)."
How can I trust it now?
My understanding is that minor-but-with-alarming-possibilities-of-escalation operational cartography fuckups have been occurring since approximately the invention of boundary stones, well back in the BCs...
The main amusement here is that A)Google gets mentioned by name and B)the ease of use of a mass-market civilian product leads a military user(who presumably has access to better information, from some sort of national mapping/geospatial intelligence/GIS wonk service; but probably with a lousier interface) to rely on it.
So that's why the Google EULA says "Not responsible for inadvertent war." I never understood that before...
See, it's stuff like this that's going to give South American military juntas a bad name.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"taking down a Costa Rican flag", should have been another big clue
Who is commanding this chicken-shit outfit? Simons? How could they not know something was wrong when they find the wrong flag on the flagpole? "Hey! Those bastards snuck over and put up their flag on our land! This land here...that we never had before..." This sounds like a land grab, and if someone notices, blame Google for a "map error."
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The clueless summary gets it wrong. I live in Costa Rica - the problem isn't dredging the river, it's that Nicaragua is dumping all the gunk on the Costa Rican side of the river and destroying protected forests.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No, the stupidity is in not recognizing that this google maps story is just BS and they have every intention of seizing this island.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For instance, in 2002, the UK Royal Marines accidentally invaded Spain, because of a map reading error.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1827554.stm
Hence the old joke: "What's the most dangerous thing in the British Army? -- An officer with a map."
Since I found the "must not be used for running nuclear facillities" in the WinNT Eula, I'm definitly not sure if you're joking or not....
bickerdyke
The first incident was apparently due to the local Indonesian authorities persisting in the use of 1933 Dutch maps and the Australians using more recent Indonesian maps. The Dutch map indicated that the Mota Bicu river formed the border. However, the 1992 Indonesian map used by the Australians showed the border as being 500 metres to the west of that position. Apparently, the Indonesian map reflects a post-1975 decision to make the border a fixed provincial border not dependent on the river as a landmark, with the result that as the river changed course over time and as the villagers moved with it, the village of Motaain would shift its location from East to West Timor and vice versa....
http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/57JQZ2
Given that Maps/Earth is a free service, and Google isn't exactly a charity, it would actually not at all surprise me if the quality of Google's offerings for a given area is strongly correlated to that area's level of wealth, IT development, and existing national mapping services and/or 3rd party information providers.
Consider, most of what Google does, it does either as an experiment/long term investment, or as part of its core ad-selling business. Now, their mapping services have been around for a while, and don't seem to be an experiment(and the concept of geographically localized advertising is obviously attractive), so it seems very likely that they are ancillary to the core business.
Consider: Where are ads most valuable, per impression, and consumer data/metrics most valuable? In wealthy, populous, areas with good internet penetration and lots of electronic commerce.
Where is good mapping data cheapest: Where some existing national, regional, and/or local mapping/planning authority exists, and has already collected decent records in a standardish format, at public expense and available for no or nominal money.
Therefore, you would strongly expect Google to have the best starting data in relatively wealthy, stable, well-governed areas, and have the greatest incentive to do the labor-intensive data cleaning process of sending out GPS-carrying surveyors and streetview cars and things in dense, wealthy areas. The further from either of those you go, the more likely it is that Google's "data" are whatever satellite or aerial photos they managed to pick up cheaply and georectify well enough that there aren't visually obvious gaps and tears. Because modern sensors are good, such data are actually likely to be perfectly OK for things like physical geography lessons; but there isn't actually a big black line painted along most national borders, satellites aren't going to see that. And, given that this incident occurred in what sounds like a relatively sparsely populated Latin American border region, I'm guessing that the place isn't crawling with streetview cars...
If what you care about are things like national borders, military installations/posts, and geographic features where some kind of army engineering corps is doing work, the national mapping service is probably actually the place to go. Unfortunately, they are probably not set up with a very nice user interface. Paper maps or some ghastly 80's GIS frontend, usable after a few months of specialized training, are a definite possibility. Google, on the other hand, has virtually no incentive to care about such things(at least in their free civilian offering, I don't know if they have a government/intelligence version); but has a decent interface, and produces results with a lovely air of apparent accuracy most of the time.
Consider some history: During British colonial rule(first via East India company, later direct) The Great Trigonometric Survey (1802-early 20th century) produced some quite accurate maps of the entire subcontinent, and some pretty hostile terrain, using nothing more than hand tools, dead trees, and pre-computer math. Surveying, like civil engineering, is nontrivial; but you can actually do an excellent job with quite primitive tools. Satellites and GPS enabled everything sure makes the job easier, and computers sure make the interface nicer; but there is nothing except disorganization stopping even a country with early 19th century technology from producing excellent maps.
Why do you typically vote Republican then?
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". - Albert Einstein
Which suggests that the "Google Maps" explanation is probably a BS excuse for accidentally-on-purpose dumping stuff in Costa Rica.
I am officially gone from
Spending cuts from wherever it's not absolutely necessary (and I hate to say this, but defense has a significant bit of fat to trim -- I'm not saying anything extreme and ridiculous like that we don't need a military, or our troops don't need body armor or something, just that we go to excess in the name of funneling money into defense contractors currently).
Make all the "welfare" programs into "workfare" -- there's always some public work somewhere we can throw people at, and if all else fails let smaller governments (as in local) as well as nonpolitical nonprofits (churches, charities, and the like) request laborers from the pool; the whole point being to make them work for their living, even if their on the government dole. Specifically we don't want it to be nice work (we want people to prefer having a "legitimate" job), we want it to be a "I have no other choice, but at least picking litter off the interstate is better than going hungry."
No tax cuts, at least not for a while. Cutting expenses doesn't help reduce debt if you also cut revenue. Devise a specific plan for debt reduction, and do not reduce taxes until we've got it back under control.
Require a budget be balanced on average. Running a deficit during a recession helps recovery, but it's only a good endeavor if you then pay down the deficit once the economy has recovered. Persistent debt is not desirable in any way.
Every president, regardless of party, gets their war. It is in the contract I think.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I concur. This wasn't a mistake. Map & compass has worked well for a long, long time. Soldiers were able to navigate the jungles long before the arrival of GPS, Google Maps, and checkin apps. In a country like Nicaragua that has a small military budget, land navigation training has to be part of the core training, at least for NCOs, and certainly for officers. I can't think of a single nation that has done away with land nav training; doing so would be like forgoing marksmanship training.
The only other explanation is that the guy in charge of the mission was a complete incompetent, and his subordinates either weren't paying attention or didn't have the balls to tell him he was fucking up.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
When we go to war, one overriding and fundamental change should occur:
All industrial production, all natural resource extraction and development, and all labor in this country shall be devoted 100% to the war effort for its duration.
I'm not saying that the government should take over all means of production, but I am saying that no military contractor should be allowed to take any kind of profit beyond operating costs for the duration. They can be paid in bonds that are redeemable at the end of the war, but they certainly should not profit. Anyone who is engaged in any endeavor that is not directly part of the war effort should find themselves very unpopular for doing so.
If this sounds extreme, that's because it is. It should be the barrier that the government faces when it chooses to go to war, and it would provide the motivation for the entire country to end that war, and no profit motive for anyone at all for there to be any interest in artificially prolonging the war.
I find it disgusting that there is a "defense industry" that is based on greed, instead of a reluctant one that is based on desperate need.
From the instant we go to war, no person should be engaged in *anything* except the war effort, until that war is over. All commodities should be rationed. All industrial profits should be bonded for the war effort. And every able bodied man and woman should make it his or her personal duty to contribute.
If we have an issue that doesn't persuade the whole country to be willing to make that sacrifice, we don't have an issue worth going to war over.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.