"slow" being defined as anything less than 50% above the posted speed limit.

There are a few areas I see problems with automatic cars. One is the sort of staged accidents that we see all the time on Russian dashcam videos. If a pedestrian can run in front of the car and get hit, would he not be able to legally argue that the computer in the car should have been smart enough to ignore him. Another is the situation drivers have when in densely populated places like Manhattan. There are situations where you have to drive through pedestrians to turn onto a cross street or be waiting all day. Of course the pedestrians are reasonable enough not to get themselves hit, but ignore crossing signals nonetheless. Another is with aggressive drivers, who know bounds in vehicular assholery.

What about when the jellyfish call in a giant carbon-consuming space jellyfish to consume all the terrestrial biomass?

Nonsense. Nearly all the sheet music available for solo cello is edited, containing fingerings, phrasing, dynamics, bowings, etc. And if you play in an orchestra, the principal cellist will provide those for the score part.

Ah, a product of the Russian educational system - the article specifically mentioned 65 countries in the study. Not to mention you're making assumptions on how the math was scored that cannot be inferred from the article or data. Or bringing up the favorite boogeyman in Russian media - America - to deflect blame in Russia's shortcomings. Lets face it, in Soviet times, Russia was a powerhouse of scientific innovation and scientists were treated as national heroes. Now science has gone down the shitter, anti-science runs strong and is growing daily. The government's taking over the RAS bodes ill.

BTW students do learn calculus, physics, chemistry, etc. in US schools. And you can read some of the results of the UN study - in which 470,000 students took part in - and some of the reasoning why countries like Finland and South Korea are so much better than Russia. The superior educational systems teach how to apply knowledge while Russia teaches by rote and memorization. In fact I do know people currently enrolled in Russian schools, where they literally have to memorize hundreds of poems when they are 6 or 7 years old.

Sorry if I sound bitter. I really had hope that after the Soviet Union fell, Russia would become a free country with all the legacy of Russia's rich cultural history. I was proven wrong on both cases, and every day I get more evidence that the country is going down as a neanderthal fascist state.

Sorry, I don't buy this. The Russian Federation is way below the US in math and science:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading

I would assume the risk of catastrophic failure would preclude it's use as an on-site office. However, keeping it up would yield invaluable data as to what components do fail and how, as well as what parts and systems do hold up very well.

not worth the mod point.

I could either mod you down, or stay on to say you are a major asshole. You really advocate Iran getting nuclear weapons in hopes that a nuclear war gets started? Fuck you.

Why does everyone assume that the rebels are hostile to the US? I mean the FSA, and obviously not al Qaeda or MB franchises like al Nusra.

America has already decended into Cold War-style proxy wars - such as Syria, and also Georgia - and things are just getting worse. Just look at the state-owned media in Russia. The cheerleading for the Putin adminstration and the constant state of fear maintained with the US and NATO being the no. 1 baddies in the world is pervasive. The fall of the Soviet Union was perhaps the deepest humiliation Russia faced since the Mongol invasions, but Russia is not going to get it back by either conventional or nuclear warfare. In the former, they are nowhere near what they used to be, the latter MAD would certainly apply. If the West had backed the FSA two years ago (perhaps with a "no-fly zone" a la Libya), this would put Russia in a lose-lose situation, instead of the lose-lose situation that the US is now in. Putin could have either rolled over, thus being shown as weak, and lost assets, including weapons sales and a possible gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe, breaking the monopoly on gas. The financial repercussions probably cause rioting, since ordinary Russians see little, if any, of the benefits to all the money flowing in. Or Russia could intervene militarily, but this would most likely turn out to be a repeat of Afghanistan, which Russia certainly does not want.

The porn film industry in particular.

There is a big difference between the negative portrayals of Russia in Western media and the hysterical anti-Western portrayal in Russia, where the US and NATO are regularly depicted as the biggest threats to Mother Russia since Hitler's Germany. The Fox News story was, of course widely reported in the Russian media, and milked for all it was worth as a portrayal of Western - particularly American - media bias, but I'd be more inclined to believe it was journalistic incompetence than a need to falsify reports to get an angle - there were literally tens of thousands of them - unless the Russian authorities really had the region so tightly locked down that no journalist would have had access to Georgian refugees. Which brings up the point of Russian media bias- the cheerleading for the Russian invasion of Georgia put anything Fox News did for the US invasion of Iraq to shame. Instead of bringing WMD, the Russians inflated the number of civilian casualties when Georgia moved to retake South Ossetia by orders of magnitude.

You just hit the nail on the head. They have the USA (and by extension, NATO, and the EU) depicted as the fountain head of all the world's ills. Sort of like the constant fear of "terrorism" kept alive in the USA, only it is applied to literally everything.

Exactly. Most Russians probably have never even heard of RT.