Odds are, if it comes from Clevo, it contains very nearly the internals of a high end gaming desktop. That is pretty much their niche.
At one point, they(or one of their very similar close competitors) were actually shipping a laptop whose charging brick had a cooling fan. That was the price you paid if you wanted the fastest-available desktop CPU and top of range mobile GPUs, in SLI, in a mobile(or at least man-portable) package...
My bigger concern would not be firesheep users as such, as they are likely to be pranksters, kiddies, and the assorted merely curious. Not harmless; but hardly evil masterminds. Nor, for its part, is firesheep a terribly refined tool for doing real damage. Too manual, too slow, GUI oriented. A lot of harassment and petty pranksterism will likely occur; but that is about it.
My concern would be exploitation of the vector that firesheep draws attention to. If your machine is 0wned and part of a botnet, this is one more thing it could be doing silently in the background, especially now that more and more machines are laptops. The user wouldn't have to be malicious, or even aware, just infected. Walk into a coffee shop, and suddenly half the patrons in the place are tweeting url-shortened links to attack sites and penis pill peddlers and so forth...
Nobody, me included. My point was simply that to "fail miserably" one really has to do something horribly expensive, horribly deleterious to one's future options, or something like that. Since doing what Rockmelt is doing is relatively easy and relatively cheap, it is virtually impossible to "fail miserably".
That's actually a virtue of their venture. Since the majority of their work is done for them, they can give it a shot on a shoestring.
Now, if we can just wait a few billion years, a suitably intelligent species should evolve inside the newly created universe and build a Very Very Very Small Hadron Collider(VVVSHC) in order to investigate the conditions of their early universe....
One also wonders why they switched from the previous use... Where the expected higher oil prices and/or some sort of biofuel subsidy good enough to make it cost effective, or did feeding animals their own ground up con-specifics break some new health and sanitary regulation?
I suppose they could also have just taken advantage of some improvement in refining technology to change the point of combustion. I'd suspect that a coal-fired plant wouldn't even notice some chicken fat mixed in with the coal; but that the price per ton paid for the fat would be unexciting; while, with the right refining technology, you could turn those same lipids into a vehicle fuel, which is rather more valuable per ton....
Given that the origins of conventional oil aren't exactly vegetarian safe(coal is good and vegetarian, though), and they seem to deal with current petro-fuels as well as anybody else, it will only be the whiny "Cry, cry, the smell of your burning animal flesh disgusts me!" purity fetishist vegetarians who have any trouble with it. Given how annoying those ones are, I'm not too concerned.
Hmm, I certainly can't think of any other browsers capable of synchronizing a set of data and preferences tied to login credentials... And definitely not one also tied to a best-of-breed email service, online document editor/collaboration environment, and rapidly ascending smartphone OS.
I also can't think of one from a company whose user experience and marketing chops are so good that people actually pay for that synchronization service, along with the highest ASP in the business for x86 hardware, and the smartphone platform to beat...
If you mean Yahoo, actually still pretty well. Yahoo search is basically dead; but they have a significant stable of non-search properties with huge pageview. Said stable seems increasingly likely to become a vassal of either Bing or Google, dependent on them for search and advertising monetization; but it will be a vassal who brings a large number of eyeballs to the table...
I agree that he has the Huddled Masses approximately accurately characterized; but I think that his major problem will be the fact that you can deliver the vast majority of what his browser promises in the form of a webpage that will work with pretty much any current browser(perhaps not quite as elegantly, since you won't be able to interface with the drop-down menus and things; but webmail isn't as elegant as client-based mail, and that is all the rage, on convenience lines...)
You've been able to embed multiple sites and information sources in a single page since IFrames, which I'm fairly sure were a feature of one of unfinished portions of Babbage's Difference Engine. Web-based RSS? Similarly old news. Google search boxes? I'm pretty sure that Google's site has one of those... With all the Web 2.0 stuff the kids are going on about these days, you could probably even make such a shambling composite of a site look and feel fairly elegant.
There is probably that last 10% or so which cannot be done as a simple web page; but the pace of development and the rate of "creative inspiration" in the browser market is huge. If they come up with anything genuinely cool, it'll be a Firefox plugin in two days, a Chrome plugin just after that, a native Opera feature in the next point release(available in the beta version in three weeks, for the Opera die-hards) and being hailed as Steve Jobs' latest brilliant breakthrough in UI perfection in the release of Safari accompanying OSX 10.N+1...
The problem is not so much that he is wrong; but that being right on that point is going to be a very hard distinction to sell...
Given that "creating a new browser" is, when the changes are basically UI layer, pretty damn simple and cheap(and this isn't really a new thing, any VB n00b has been able to drag and drop the IE's rendering engine into their application since forever, Firefox's UI is very nearly just a specially shaped web page wrapped around the web page(yo dog, I herd you like web pages...), and now webkit is the new hotness for basing browsers around).
I'd be very surprised if it does too much supplanting of the main players, or otherwise sets the world on fire(especially since he is basically just moving the classic 90's "portal" concept out of the webpage and into the browser, which means that any web player with a "portal" style site can offer 90% or so of what he does; but without the download/install) but assuming it has anything resembling a revenue model, either present or plausible future, he should be able to keep the venture going more or less indefinitely at very low cost.
When you have something that can survive essentially forever on very slim resources it is hard to "fail miserably". Even if you fold, the losses are reasonably constrained, and you don't have to make that much money, or create some plausible promise of future profits, in order to be self sustaining or better. I would be seriously shocked if this "Rockmelt" ends up contributing a single technological innovation to browsers; but having a few UI guys reinventing a combination of IFrames and RSS feeds on top of some FOSS browser base isn't hugely expensive or rocket-surgical.
People like you make two crucial assumptions; both wrong:
1. Attacks are laborious: As spam demonstrates, evil can be automated. Thanks to automation, the effort required is so low that the number of rationally viable targets balloons enormously. Further, because security people and mail admins are constantly working against automated evil, the value of genuine "civilian" hosts/accounts/etc. from which to disguise hostile action is higher than it would otherwise be(a single mailserver on a 1Gb line can send more p3n1s p1llz spam, and is much easier to administer, than a huge number of home computers or hijacked hotmail accounts; but costs more and is easier to block).
2. Humans are not, in a substantial number of cases, motivated purely by curiosity, voyeurism, or malice: People break into stuff merely because they can, or because they are hoping to access some of those private pictures from the blond across the coffee shop's account, or because they think that it would be hilarious to have you post "L0L shittingniggerdicks!!!!" to the facebook walls of all your friends and then leave you to explain that one to the dean.
Tools for detecting malicious actors certainly have their place(even if you are cryptographically protected from them, it's always nice to know what sort of neighborhood you are currently in); but the idea of playing cat-and-mouse when you could be playing cat and enciphered-such-that-it-will-be-inedible-long-after-the-sun-has-devoured-the-inner-planets-mouse is seriously head -> desk...
I find the fact that it is being asked commendable: if TFS is to be trusted, an elected official is attempting to learn more about security to make sure he can oversee a project properly. That sounds just ducky to me, and well above the status quo.
Now, the fact that said official appears to have strong reason to distrust his engineers, and no ready internal supply of expertise, suggests that any script-kiddie with a copy of Telnet and 10 minutes will be able to quite literally put some poor town up shit creek without a paddle once the project goes live; but the fact that an elected official has forseen that possibility and is asking questions down at the geek club to see if there is a way to head it off seems like a good thing...
I suspect, that with the exception of tourism dollars and military/clandestine adventurism, most of the money to be made with location-assisted advertising is made from transactions that occur fairly close to home and/or on the basis of consumer metrics that are gathered about consumers fairly close to home.
Obviously, poor Caribbean islands with nice climates and coastlines are probably over-surveyed compared to their GDP per capita for the first reason, and dusty middle eastern hellholes for the second; but I suspect that the bulk of Google's efforts correlate pretty strongly with the value of the local consumers in an area.(aside from any hush-hush contracts they may or may not have to supply some sort of Google Search Appliance on steroids to the spooks to help them sort through their giant pile o' badly sorted leads, which isn't going to show up in Google maps)
Oh, given that OSX server represents a relatively small engineering cost over straight OSX, I wouldn't expect its demise.
It should hang on just fine doing directory and CMS work in small Mac shops, or doing centralized policy control and AD authentication passthrough in little Mac niches of larger entities.
Aside from that, though, they would be appear to be conceding that they don't have the chops to go up against the remaining vertically integrated UNIX guys(IBM, Oracle, parts of HP), and that the margins in trying to outperform legions of homogeneous Linux boxes running exactly the same intel silicon and wearing cheaper cases since nobody ever looks anyway are nearly nonexistent.
Back when they were G5 based, there were at least some modestly exotic problems for which they were much faster than intel/AMD and much cheaper than IBM's full POWER stuff; but today's Xserves are just classy looking 1u intel servers. Other than the classy looking, that is about the most commodified segment outside of crappy cube-drone boxes.
It makes you wonder what they are running at their own datacenters... I'm assuming that they aren't exactly a windows shop; but the idea of an actual datacenter made of Mac Pros sitting on 2 to a 12U shelf is hilarious in the extreme...
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.
Odds are they do have their own territorial mapping system(it may still be some clunky paper nightmare, possibly even inherited from their avaricious ex-colonial-masters; but it is probably there). I'm guessing that this is a case of ease-of-use and perceived authority winning the day.
Google maps, and Google Earth, are trivial to use(unless you get into serious Google Earth Fu, which is still easier than serious ArcGIS Fu), produce good looking results, and are available from nearly any internet connected device. I'm guesing that even a fully functional territorial mapping system cannot say the same. Its accuracy may be better, and it may actually have much more relevant detail of things like infrastructure, hydrology, etc; but it probably has some horrible interface, rather esoteric usability, and is thus avoided...
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.
The differences are far smaller than one would like(ie. the US will be a more or less imperialistic oligarchy with an alarming degree of disregard for human rights, massive domestic incarceration, and increasing concentrations of executive power in either case); but the differences are there.
I know, for instance, which administration I would rather be homosexual under. Corporate money(albeit slightly different types between the parties) is a constant; but the relative influence of religiosity is a pretty significant variable. Democrats tend to be snivelling cowards(cough, getting rid of don't ask, don't tell, cough); but most of the genuine theocrats hang out on the right, either Republican or "Constitution" party.
This specific model may have extraordinary limitations, for efficiency reasons or something; but, under typical circumstances, electric motors are capable of delivering torque that falls somewhere between "surprising"(in the case of hobby motors) and "downright dangerous"(in the case of larger ones). And, the closer you are to stall, the greater the torque.
In 2 or 4 motor direct-drive designs, where there is minimal gearing to worry about stripping, electric models are largely limited by the fact that burning rubber is inefficient, and setting your wiring/battery on fire is dangerous.
I would expect, in practice, any mass-production electric vehicle to be governed down fairly aggressively to keep people with internal combustion reflexes from killing themselves or others.
They probably won't sell gas; but I'd be fairly surprised to see the "arrangement of roads allowing safe stopping by multiple vehicles around a set of fueling points, along with ancillary rest areas and/or vending services" model die out.
The ability to just clip an AC-DC converter to the nearest pylon, connected to a cell-network or powerline networked POS terminal, will make putting low traffic/emergency fueling points in the ass end of nowhere a good deal easier(especially since, the further you are from competition and civilization, the less choosy customers get to be about their charge rate. Something that can dump a 100kw of DC power from an AC line isn't cheap. Something that can do 1 or 2 kw is.)
I'm assuming that the "when charged from a direct current source" is a polite way of either cutting AC rectification losses out of the equation or saying that you won't be charging this sucker at home without quite specialized equipment and a fairly obliging utility company. I'm fairly sure that not only is my house wiring not up to it, even if you don't throw in a few percent extra for the AC-DC converter; but neither is the utility wiring for a fair distance from my house.
I'd assume, beyond simple dick waving, that the "6 minute charge" scenario is something you'd do at a specialized facility. Nobody wants to twiddle their thumbs for an hour at the gas station, so a fast charge is highly desirable, even if it requires some sort of scary automated conductor tentacle and a direct substation connection.
If you are just hanging out at home, trickle-charging at much easier rates becomes more viable.
Given that transmissions from both the AP and the client are in the clear, and generally coming from a reasonably omnidirectional antenna, AP isolation on an open AP doesn't buy you very much.
It does slightly inconvenience the attacker(since they need a NIC that will let them listen in promiscuous mode, and probably something closer to Wireshark than Firesheep, for all frames being transmitted about, rather than just connecting to the network and getting them for free, unswitched network style); but all the data are still flying around in the clear, subnet isolation or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Odds are, if it comes from Clevo, it contains very nearly the internals of a high end gaming desktop. That is pretty much their niche.
At one point, they(or one of their very similar close competitors) were actually shipping a laptop whose charging brick had a cooling fan. That was the price you paid if you wanted the fastest-available desktop CPU and top of range mobile GPUs, in SLI, in a mobile(or at least man-portable) package...
My bigger concern would not be firesheep users as such, as they are likely to be pranksters, kiddies, and the assorted merely curious. Not harmless; but hardly evil masterminds. Nor, for its part, is firesheep a terribly refined tool for doing real damage. Too manual, too slow, GUI oriented. A lot of harassment and petty pranksterism will likely occur; but that is about it.
My concern would be exploitation of the vector that firesheep draws attention to. If your machine is 0wned and part of a botnet, this is one more thing it could be doing silently in the background, especially now that more and more machines are laptops. The user wouldn't have to be malicious, or even aware, just infected. Walk into a coffee shop, and suddenly half the patrons in the place are tweeting url-shortened links to attack sites and penis pill peddlers and so forth...
Nobody, me included. My point was simply that to "fail miserably" one really has to do something horribly expensive, horribly deleterious to one's future options, or something like that. Since doing what Rockmelt is doing is relatively easy and relatively cheap, it is virtually impossible to "fail miserably".
That's actually a virtue of their venture. Since the majority of their work is done for them, they can give it a shot on a shoestring.
Now, if we can just wait a few billion years, a suitably intelligent species should evolve inside the newly created universe and build a Very Very Very Small Hadron Collider(VVVSHC) in order to investigate the conditions of their early universe....
One also wonders why they switched from the previous use... Where the expected higher oil prices and/or some sort of biofuel subsidy good enough to make it cost effective, or did feeding animals their own ground up con-specifics break some new health and sanitary regulation?
I suppose they could also have just taken advantage of some improvement in refining technology to change the point of combustion. I'd suspect that a coal-fired plant wouldn't even notice some chicken fat mixed in with the coal; but that the price per ton paid for the fat would be unexciting; while, with the right refining technology, you could turn those same lipids into a vehicle fuel, which is rather more valuable per ton....
Given that the origins of conventional oil aren't exactly vegetarian safe(coal is good and vegetarian, though), and they seem to deal with current petro-fuels as well as anybody else, it will only be the whiny "Cry, cry, the smell of your burning animal flesh disgusts me!" purity fetishist vegetarians who have any trouble with it. Given how annoying those ones are, I'm not too concerned.
Hmm, I certainly can't think of any other browsers capable of synchronizing a set of data and preferences tied to login credentials... And definitely not one also tied to a best-of-breed email service, online document editor/collaboration environment, and rapidly ascending smartphone OS.
I also can't think of one from a company whose user experience and marketing chops are so good that people actually pay for that synchronization service, along with the highest ASP in the business for x86 hardware, and the smartphone platform to beat...
This should go perfectly. Nothing could go wrong.
If you mean Yahoo, actually still pretty well. Yahoo search is basically dead; but they have a significant stable of non-search properties with huge pageview. Said stable seems increasingly likely to become a vassal of either Bing or Google, dependent on them for search and advertising monetization; but it will be a vassal who brings a large number of eyeballs to the table...
I agree that he has the Huddled Masses approximately accurately characterized; but I think that his major problem will be the fact that you can deliver the vast majority of what his browser promises in the form of a webpage that will work with pretty much any current browser(perhaps not quite as elegantly, since you won't be able to interface with the drop-down menus and things; but webmail isn't as elegant as client-based mail, and that is all the rage, on convenience lines...)
You've been able to embed multiple sites and information sources in a single page since IFrames, which I'm fairly sure were a feature of one of unfinished portions of Babbage's Difference Engine. Web-based RSS? Similarly old news. Google search boxes? I'm pretty sure that Google's site has one of those... With all the Web 2.0 stuff the kids are going on about these days, you could probably even make such a shambling composite of a site look and feel fairly elegant.
There is probably that last 10% or so which cannot be done as a simple web page; but the pace of development and the rate of "creative inspiration" in the browser market is huge. If they come up with anything genuinely cool, it'll be a Firefox plugin in two days, a Chrome plugin just after that, a native Opera feature in the next point release(available in the beta version in three weeks, for the Opera die-hards) and being hailed as Steve Jobs' latest brilliant breakthrough in UI perfection in the release of Safari accompanying OSX 10.N+1...
The problem is not so much that he is wrong; but that being right on that point is going to be a very hard distinction to sell...
Given that "creating a new browser" is, when the changes are basically UI layer, pretty damn simple and cheap(and this isn't really a new thing, any VB n00b has been able to drag and drop the IE's rendering engine into their application since forever, Firefox's UI is very nearly just a specially shaped web page wrapped around the web page(yo dog, I herd you like web pages...), and now webkit is the new hotness for basing browsers around).
I'd be very surprised if it does too much supplanting of the main players, or otherwise sets the world on fire(especially since he is basically just moving the classic 90's "portal" concept out of the webpage and into the browser, which means that any web player with a "portal" style site can offer 90% or so of what he does; but without the download/install) but assuming it has anything resembling a revenue model, either present or plausible future, he should be able to keep the venture going more or less indefinitely at very low cost.
When you have something that can survive essentially forever on very slim resources it is hard to "fail miserably". Even if you fold, the losses are reasonably constrained, and you don't have to make that much money, or create some plausible promise of future profits, in order to be self sustaining or better. I would be seriously shocked if this "Rockmelt" ends up contributing a single technological innovation to browsers; but having a few UI guys reinventing a combination of IFrames and RSS feeds on top of some FOSS browser base isn't hugely expensive or rocket-surgical.
People like you make two crucial assumptions; both wrong:
1. Attacks are laborious: As spam demonstrates, evil can be automated. Thanks to automation, the effort required is so low that the number of rationally viable targets balloons enormously. Further, because security people and mail admins are constantly working against automated evil, the value of genuine "civilian" hosts/accounts/etc. from which to disguise hostile action is higher than it would otherwise be(a single mailserver on a 1Gb line can send more p3n1s p1llz spam, and is much easier to administer, than a huge number of home computers or hijacked hotmail accounts; but costs more and is easier to block).
2. Humans are not, in a substantial number of cases, motivated purely by curiosity, voyeurism, or malice: People break into stuff merely because they can, or because they are hoping to access some of those private pictures from the blond across the coffee shop's account, or because they think that it would be hilarious to have you post "L0L shittingniggerdicks!!!!" to the facebook walls of all your friends and then leave you to explain that one to the dean.
Tools for detecting malicious actors certainly have their place(even if you are cryptographically protected from them, it's always nice to know what sort of neighborhood you are currently in); but the idea of playing cat-and-mouse when you could be playing cat and enciphered-such-that-it-will-be-inedible-long-after-the-sun-has-devoured-the-inner-planets-mouse is seriously head -> desk...
I find the fact that it is being asked commendable: if TFS is to be trusted, an elected official is attempting to learn more about security to make sure he can oversee a project properly. That sounds just ducky to me, and well above the status quo.
Now, the fact that said official appears to have strong reason to distrust his engineers, and no ready internal supply of expertise, suggests that any script-kiddie with a copy of Telnet and 10 minutes will be able to quite literally put some poor town up shit creek without a paddle once the project goes live; but the fact that an elected official has forseen that possibility and is asking questions down at the geek club to see if there is a way to head it off seems like a good thing...
I suspect, that with the exception of tourism dollars and military/clandestine adventurism, most of the money to be made with location-assisted advertising is made from transactions that occur fairly close to home and/or on the basis of consumer metrics that are gathered about consumers fairly close to home.
Obviously, poor Caribbean islands with nice climates and coastlines are probably over-surveyed compared to their GDP per capita for the first reason, and dusty middle eastern hellholes for the second; but I suspect that the bulk of Google's efforts correlate pretty strongly with the value of the local consumers in an area.(aside from any hush-hush contracts they may or may not have to supply some sort of Google Search Appliance on steroids to the spooks to help them sort through their giant pile o' badly sorted leads, which isn't going to show up in Google maps)
Oh, given that OSX server represents a relatively small engineering cost over straight OSX, I wouldn't expect its demise.
It should hang on just fine doing directory and CMS work in small Mac shops, or doing centralized policy control and AD authentication passthrough in little Mac niches of larger entities.
Aside from that, though, they would be appear to be conceding that they don't have the chops to go up against the remaining vertically integrated UNIX guys(IBM, Oracle, parts of HP), and that the margins in trying to outperform legions of homogeneous Linux boxes running exactly the same intel silicon and wearing cheaper cases since nobody ever looks anyway are nearly nonexistent.
Back when they were G5 based, there were at least some modestly exotic problems for which they were much faster than intel/AMD and much cheaper than IBM's full POWER stuff; but today's Xserves are just classy looking 1u intel servers. Other than the classy looking, that is about the most commodified segment outside of crappy cube-drone boxes.
It makes you wonder what they are running at their own datacenters... I'm assuming that they aren't exactly a windows shop; but the idea of an actual datacenter made of Mac Pros sitting on 2 to a 12U shelf is hilarious in the extreme...
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.
Odds are they do have their own territorial mapping system(it may still be some clunky paper nightmare, possibly even inherited from their avaricious ex-colonial-masters; but it is probably there). I'm guessing that this is a case of ease-of-use and perceived authority winning the day.
Google maps, and Google Earth, are trivial to use(unless you get into serious Google Earth Fu, which is still easier than serious ArcGIS Fu), produce good looking results, and are available from nearly any internet connected device. I'm guesing that even a fully functional territorial mapping system cannot say the same. Its accuracy may be better, and it may actually have much more relevant detail of things like infrastructure, hydrology, etc; but it probably has some horrible interface, rather esoteric usability, and is thus avoided...
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.
The differences are far smaller than one would like(ie. the US will be a more or less imperialistic oligarchy with an alarming degree of disregard for human rights, massive domestic incarceration, and increasing concentrations of executive power in either case); but the differences are there.
I know, for instance, which administration I would rather be homosexual under. Corporate money(albeit slightly different types between the parties) is a constant; but the relative influence of religiosity is a pretty significant variable. Democrats tend to be snivelling cowards(cough, getting rid of don't ask, don't tell, cough); but most of the genuine theocrats hang out on the right, either Republican or "Constitution" party.
Zero Cool/Acid Burn 2012!!!
So you've essentially been avoiding democracy since classical Athens?
This specific model may have extraordinary limitations, for efficiency reasons or something; but, under typical circumstances, electric motors are capable of delivering torque that falls somewhere between "surprising"(in the case of hobby motors) and "downright dangerous"(in the case of larger ones). And, the closer you are to stall, the greater the torque.
In 2 or 4 motor direct-drive designs, where there is minimal gearing to worry about stripping, electric models are largely limited by the fact that burning rubber is inefficient, and setting your wiring/battery on fire is dangerous.
I would expect, in practice, any mass-production electric vehicle to be governed down fairly aggressively to keep people with internal combustion reflexes from killing themselves or others.
They probably won't sell gas; but I'd be fairly surprised to see the "arrangement of roads allowing safe stopping by multiple vehicles around a set of fueling points, along with ancillary rest areas and/or vending services" model die out.
The ability to just clip an AC-DC converter to the nearest pylon, connected to a cell-network or powerline networked POS terminal, will make putting low traffic/emergency fueling points in the ass end of nowhere a good deal easier(especially since, the further you are from competition and civilization, the less choosy customers get to be about their charge rate. Something that can dump a 100kw of DC power from an AC line isn't cheap. Something that can do 1 or 2 kw is.)
I'm assuming that the "when charged from a direct current source" is a polite way of either cutting AC rectification losses out of the equation or saying that you won't be charging this sucker at home without quite specialized equipment and a fairly obliging utility company. I'm fairly sure that not only is my house wiring not up to it, even if you don't throw in a few percent extra for the AC-DC converter; but neither is the utility wiring for a fair distance from my house.
I'd assume, beyond simple dick waving, that the "6 minute charge" scenario is something you'd do at a specialized facility. Nobody wants to twiddle their thumbs for an hour at the gas station, so a fast charge is highly desirable, even if it requires some sort of scary automated conductor tentacle and a direct substation connection.
If you are just hanging out at home, trickle-charging at much easier rates becomes more viable.
Given that transmissions from both the AP and the client are in the clear, and generally coming from a reasonably omnidirectional antenna, AP isolation on an open AP doesn't buy you very much.
It does slightly inconvenience the attacker(since they need a NIC that will let them listen in promiscuous mode, and probably something closer to Wireshark than Firesheep, for all frames being transmitted about, rather than just connecting to the network and getting them for free, unswitched network style); but all the data are still flying around in the clear, subnet isolation or not.