For all the people comparing Russian corruption to other countries, particularly the US... We all have to realize it's present everywhere but there's also full spectrum of colors and subcolors that could describe types and severities. Certain types of corruption are far more rampant in some countries while negligible in another, and vice versa. Anyone who thinks there's a country that does not have any corruption is a devoted blind fool. Overall however, I would definitely put most "developing" countries (like Russia) on the upper echelons of said spectrum. I do always find it somewhat odd that Russia is considered a developing country by many economists though.

I just want to point out the data source from the link indicates it's counting pregnancy-occurrences not people. So saying something like "three in 10 by age 45" is not just misleading but outright false. The same is also often true for the infamous reported divorce rates. It's far more challenging to track individuals than it is to track events. For example when I was much younger I worked with a woman who had 11 abortions by the time she was 19. Yes, it was a fast foot restaurant. If you've ever worked at one, you already know you meet very interesting people. Now I'm sure she's an outlier but she'd clearly be skewing the numbers. All that being said, it's really not hard to avoid pregnancy folks! You have 2 people that can control and prevent the natural result that happens there. It's sad to see people using abortion as a contraceptive.

If you think about it, the abortion debate really boils down to one questions. Do you consider the baby inside a woman to be a "person". If you say "yes" it becomes awfully difficult to rationalize. If you say "no" it becomes extraordinarily easy to rationalize. Both sides of the debate are well meaning people but they happen to believe something different on that single point which makes all the difference.

I'd be curious to see if the population of disillusioned independents is growing faster as well. I'd speculate most of them would be categorized as "moderates" which is a species rapidly disappearing, sadly from both political factions. I for one count myself among them, both parties have developed fundamental show stoppers that make it impossible for me to vote for either candidate in presidential elections. I don't at all consider my vote "thrown away". A vote for a 3rd party is a vote against both, it still counts and enough of them should garner attention for more moderates eventually.

Sort of ironic the current botters were only banned for 6 months, I was perma banned for botting in WoW circa 2006. I didn't do it for gold, in fact I probably had more gold than 99% of the players on that server at the time from cornering the AH market on many items better than most could on my server. I was quite upset at the time since I had been hoping to sell my account as a just-graduated-student at some point for $3-4K... which was an enormous amount of dough for me at the time. My account was worth a lot not just for the characters I had, but the crafting skills and rare recipes I had collected. Foolish thing about it all was I only botted because I wanted a 5th and 6th lvl 60 and no longer had time to play as much as I wanted to spend more time with my then-gf-now-wife. In hindsight, getting banned was probably the best thing that could have happened to me! Minus the loss of money of course lol

Really? I fully admit computers can be dumb but for this to work they're not going to be that dumb. If self driving cars are to ever become mainstream everything will have to be integrated. In other words, on a highway of 1000's of vehicles, each vehicle will know the status, location, and conditions of the other vehicles present. Information could be relayed regarding any accidents or problems and traffic, communications to all other vehicles and likely will be instantly sent out in real time. Possibly even notifying service vehicles for clean up and municipal authorities to the problem to alter traffic light patterns to accommodate the situation. Yeah, that's right, we're talking about Borg collective sh**. This kind of tech may already exist in some theoretical shape or form today but it's not implemented anywhere in the real world today. Doing that part is a lot harder and expensive than anyone can imagine.

That being all said, we're still very far away from this today... but that's where we are headed. Maybe 25+ years.

A day is coming where people will trust autonomous driving ability more than human but that's not anywhere near close to being a reality today. More likely 30+ years from now. I imagine one day there will tracks of road that doesn't support self driving and instead those will become pee-your-pants moments for regular folks. Adrenaline junkies will still be doing their off road tracks for their kicks just like they do today!

If everyone did this 24/7 the only accidents would be occurring because of mechanical failures and we wouldn't even be having a discussion about this post lol.

Well the ice would only be a problem for optical sensors right? Not radar or GPS. Definitely need a solution for ice, water, and frost covering optic sensors unless they can find an alternative. The latter might be better. But I'm not sure it would ever become government restricted though. It's possible but I highly doubt it would ever come to something that extreme. I don't think it would need to be? I think the more likely set of possibilities may be something like:

1. A) Pay significantly more premium on a standard automobile policy, maybe by several orders of magnitude, of course after it's proven via underwriting they're significantly safer
2. B) Harsher penalties for causing accidents caused by non-self-driving vehicles
3. C) All vehicles must have the feature equipped but can be turned off, with exceptions
4. D) Densely populated cities banning non-self-driving cars within city limits where you'll then be guided to park in a designated area and then ride in on public transportation if your car does not have the feature available

I'm sure many others...

Yep, I think they still have quite a few hurdles to overcome. Last I've heard I don't think they've even mastered "driving in the rain" much less snow and icy road conditions! All of these conditions have to be mastered far in advance and allowed to mature before self driving cars ever hope to become widely adopted. For some folks oo say it's never going to happen though is a little backwards though.

Sure, of course, they're on an entirely new level of terrible driving. I've been to all of those places minus Shanghai, I've never been to Asia. The denser the city, the worse it gets. That's usually how it rolls. Hopefully you understood my point because what you said seemingly reinforces my point however your tone implies that you did not.

Amen, as long as avoiding risking behavior is a mandatory feature in autonomous driving software. I'd speculate a majority of accidents and road fatalities are nearly all avoidable, brought on by either poor choices, risky behavior, or bad driving habits. Case in point just today on my way to work I narrowly avoided two accidents. The first, the driver did not scrape his windows from ice and could not see any of the drivers around him - nearly plowing into me and others around him as he was changing lanes. The second, another driver decided to use the right lane as a passing lane in a 4 lane road, driving 55 while everyone else is going 35, denying anyone in the left lanes the ability to change lanes and make a right turn. Let me repeat, that was just today. Stuff like this happens everyday to millions of people. For myself, getting tail gated while I'm already going 10 above the limit is a regular *daily* occurrence. I'm barely even going to bring up the young, inexperienced, risk-loving drivers because all of the problems there should be understood without even saying.

I for one am eagerly looking forward to autonomous cars purely because of the minor few that make the roads dangerous for everyone else. But like the poster above, it's probably going to be awhile before they're reliable enough for use. But it will happen because technology will be improved over time. Changing, people's attitudes and driving habits? Yeah, far more difficult and expensive than technology with diminishing returns. Good luck on that!

Isn't that like saying modern car manufacturers don't have to thank Henry Ford for paving the way? Little bit of an understatement. I'm not even going to dive into the details in differences in resources between those groups, a small team vs. 1000's of code breakers. Anyway, they all relied on mistakes made by German operators, even the British bombe. They were just different in nature and complexity.

Hell yeah, and the only difference between modern computers and the cryptological bombas used during WW2 is just electronics miniaturization! Stupid elementary stuff my friends! Yeah, it's not so simple my friend. There's a reason it takes *decades* and thousands of brilliant minds to advance technology step by step. The Saturn V is not simply a bigger, better version of "fireworks". You've been playing too much Kerbal space program.

Yeah I lol'd too. "Oh look, we had a team of developers accidentally build out a fully functioning module into the TV's OS, tested it, worked out the bugs, published it, and it also just so happens to make our company more money. This is an outrage, how could this have possibly happened?".

Watch out everyone, software is now evolving on its own! It's beginning, machines are rising! Where is Sarah Connor!?!?

The Sarbanes-Oxley act has been on the books since 2002. Dodd-Frank bill since 2010. So are they working to keep companies in check and increase transparency? Or just costing both the government and the companies it affects a bunch of time and money? On one side you can say this activity was finally caught. On the other hand you have to ask when large banks are subject to regular audits how do they get away with it from year to year?

From my own limited personal experience, the only thing I can say for sure is that those audits are usually pretty terrible. In theory they're looking for the right stuff, but the auditors themselves are usually green accountants who often lack the hybrid blend of accounting, technical, and IT skills needed to any proper analysis. They don't understand what they're looking at and don't know what to ask for. They usually just follow a sheet of instructions line by line and check those boxes to indicate their work is done. I don't think that quite captures the spirit of those laws.