[conspire] Google and Georgia

[Nick Moffitt]

Rick Moen:
> Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):
> > It so happened though that last week, just prior to the war, I was
> > looking at Google Maps at Georgia with my boss who is from there and it
> > was mapped.  
[...]
> > I have a feeling they removed the data on purpose.
> 
> Curiouser and curiouser!

A possible explanation is that google was happy to leave the somewhat
poor data in place when Georgia was of little general public interest in
the West.  Once it became a topic of intense news coverage, someone
realized that the bogus maps would inevitably be used by uninformed
journalists and armchair foreign events buffs and in the end it was less
embarrassing to Google to just have it dropped entirely.

That, or they realized that the street view photos showed the crashed
UFO that the Russian Army is so keen to collect.

-- 
Support your droogs!                        Nick Moffitt
                                           nick at zork.net