Consider this scenario. I am merging right to make a right turn.

1. Indicate right
2. Wait for a car to give way
3. Merge one lane to the right

This doesn't work with automatic cars because they don't understand hand signals. Instead I just have to merge and hope the overtaking cars are going to give way. If this behaviour becomes common, people will start merging without indicating in the expectation that automatic systems will take care of the resulting conflict.

I ride a bike to work and I indicate for right and left turns as well as stopping under some conditions. I doubt that the systems on a (semi) automatic car will understand that.

More fun statistics, from Wikipedia:

• - Canada has 67% Christians and the United States has 73%
• - 24% of Canadians and 20% of Americans declare no religious affiliation.
• - Only 7% of Canadians are Evangelicals compared to the US's 30-35%.

...I was going somewhere with the Evangelicals stat, since they're generally the most fervent, but then I realised that there are plenty of insufferably stolid palaeoconservative Anglicans in the UK and it wasn't really a point worth making.

It really comes down to the fundamental collectivist-vs-individualist difference between the Canadian and American cultures, I think; despite Stephen Harper's best efforts to destroy the country, our charter of rights and freedoms was still a missive about how we were free from harassment by peers (thus sending the message "we are all siblings"), as contrasted with the American declaration of independence's emphasis on being free from harassment by authority (thus sending the message "you are free to do as you please"). Interestingly, a hundred years ago you would not really find this; Canada was just as much of a racist hellhole as the US at the time, although as there were practically no black people we could only complain about other European ethnicities. It was only as our population and economy fell behind, and we started accepting in huge numbers of immigrants following World War II, that this really started to take shape.

I'm sure the relatively weak levels of religious conviction help too (only 25% of Christians attend church regularly in Canada; above the rates of Northern Europe but far below the rate in the US) and that is doubtlessly a function of what flavour (can we call them 'distros' yet?) of Christianity is in question, too, since many Anglican ministers now preach actual biblical scholarship (my favourite quote, heavily paraphrased, is "Hell (as a threat) was invented in the Middle Ages") rather than what most think of as the typical naive system of "swallow-and-enjoy-your-life-textbook-with-no-critical-thinking" morality. Whatever the exact impact of each component is, it doesn't really jive with the idea of excluding us poor little minority atheists.

...except maybe in profoundly Catholic areas. I bet they care more in Newfoundland and Quebec. British Columbia is barely half Christian (54.9%) so you can bet they sure don't.

Could that body have been... The Earth? The same thing happens whenever I try to look at Paris from Australia.

Its clearly a trap.

I was purely playing devil's advocate; honestly, I agree, it seems that there are plenty of safeguards against this sort of thing. Usually the topic comes up in the context of entire corrupt departments, IIRC.

Everyone likes accountability when they have control over it. The cops would have control over the tapes, right? So they get to choose which parts to show and which parts to "inconveniently lose." Every other time this topic has come up on Slashdot, there's been quite a cynical kerfuffle about precisely this.

I wonder if it has any Earth sized moons. Maybe one close in could be kept warm(ish) by tidal heating.

Not to be confused with the furniture, which has far more shrubberies in it.

I liked Scottie

Maybe she will pop up elsewhere.

Lets hope it doesn't start by attacking rubber seals.

Plenty of biological material was left on the surface in jettison bags during the apollo missions. Its going to be interesting when those bags get retrieved. In fact I wonder if it justifies a sample return mission right now.

Yeah, given that launch sites tend to be on coastal areas.

But the wheels aren't failing. The skin on the wheels is failing but the wheels will work fine with structure alone.