Flutterby™! : Of maps and earthquakes

Scientific American: What happens to Google maps when tectonic plates move? I don't think there's much here that y'all don't already know, but I did find this quote a good reminder:

... “We’re fast approaching the day when people will expect accuracies of centimeters in real time out of their handheld devices and then we’ll see a lot of head scratching as things no longer line up,” says Dru Smith of the National Geodetic Survey in Silver Spring, Md., the nation’s civilian chief geodesist—the go-to guy for the precise shape and size of our planet.

I remember talking recently with someone bemoaning the lack of positional accuracy for some sort of San Francisco Bay mapping autonomous vehicle. First off, he was ignorant of actual commercial solutions that were deployed and available, especially for someone as far along with his project as he was, but second, he didn't really know anything about mapping if he thought that knowing "exactly" where his measurement device was in any of these coordinate spaces would solve the problem of stitching all of the measurements he was hoping to take back together into a map.