I am in Kazakhstan right now. The Kazakh government has become quite worried about "separatism" in the northern provinces along the Russian border (especially Pavlodar and Petropavlovsk). It has concluded a military cooperation agreement with Turkey in 2022, has intensified patrols along its northern border (the longest border in the world, so quite the challenge) and is now buying Turkish military hardware such as APCs for that purpose.

Georgia got invaded in 2008, which is why they have been eager for NATO membership ever since.

Does autonomous driving have a future for cars for sale (as opposed to car sharing)?

Waymo already has Level 4, but they do not sell vehicles, but operate car sharing fleets. Therefore, they do not need a certificate for selling cars individually. The basic question: how big is the market for autonomous cars for individuals, vs fleets?

I suspect that in a few years, the lion's share of autonomous cars will be operated as fleets, which will then be operated, as Waymo does, for use in a specific region under specific conditions (e.g., weather). Commercially (and technically), that makes a lot more sense than selling the cars to private individuals or as company cars, where that control is difficult.

Certainly it is good PR to advertise being "first" at something. Practically, there are probably few people who would pay a significant premium to chug along at 60 km/h (40 mph) on the highway.

But if Mercedes is smart, they'll milk this for PR and keep working on autonomous fleets. But since Mercedes sold their German carsharing service ShareNow last year, I doubt it. The next few years will tell.

The design and the project management is by this guy. He is actually German-Swiss, born to German swiss parents working for the Russian empire, then going back to Germany where he started his career as a home tutor to Siemens family in Germany before moving to Russia before WW1. Next time do your homework before going off on a racist rant regardless of how fashionable is racism with Russians as a target.

When you actually read that article, you find in fact quote the opposite, and in particular...

• the guy not have any significant part in Soviet agricultural planning in Central Asia;
• in fact at conferences on Stalin's Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature he criticized aspects of it;
• and in 1924 he made a prognosis that agricultural use of water would lead to a drastic lowering of the Aral Sea level that, half a century later, turned out to be correct.

Makes you wonder why you put such a spin on things? Did you hope that people don't read Russian?

citation needed

Nobody here wants them.
We can drive well and pride ourselves in it.
Why would anyone skilled give up control and freedom?

German here. I would want one and quite a people I know would want one, too. It's not the 1970s anymore. Why would you want to sit with your eyes glued to the road and your hand glued to the wheel, if you can do something else during that time?

For many Germans the car is a status symbol, essentially a way to show off that they have the bigger dick. A bit like guns for Americans and guns. That's why speed limit debates in Germany are so similar to gun control debates to the US. Those are the people typically also opposed to self-driving cars.

If German car makers want to stay relevant they need to sell self-driving cars. In 20 years the vast majority of new cars in the world will be self-driving and whether some of them will be made in Germany is decided NOW.

Also, I think you are overestimating German drivers. Many of them drive quite badly.

Helium is not a greenhouse gas - it conducts heat very well, almost as good as hydrogen, six times better than air and nine times better than CO2, and it's monatomic and does not react with other gases.

Helium also does not sit in the atmosphere forever - it's so light that it regularly escapes the atmosphere by floating to the top, and then being carried away by the solar wind.

Conservative people in America support community cohesion, think crime is a bad thing, want all parts of their society to have the chance to work for a living and try to raise their children to be respectful and well educated.

I know plenty of non-conservatives who also support community cohesion, think crime is a bad thing, want all parts of their society to have the chance to work for a living and try to raise their children to be respectful and well-educated. Every decent human being wants all of that. As opposed to community disintegration, thinking crime is a good thing, wanting some parts of society NOT to have the chance to work for a living, and trying to raise their children to know no respect and to be badly educated.

So none of these things are specific to conservatives. I know card-carrying Communists who want all of these things (the real thing, not the bogeyman kind who are just ordinarey decent people whom conservatives label communist because they support outrageous things such as universal healthcare).

What makes many conservatives - not all, mind you, maybe you are one of the exceptions - so appalling a conservative is usually in the details, such as who does and who does not get to be included in "equal chances for all", or on an unhealthy focus focus on their own bottom line and absence of solidarity for the fellow human beings outside their immediate peer group.

Because your numbers don't reflect that you're comparing a dynamic situation (US, strong growth) with an essentially static one (Europe). For that you have to look at the daily new case figures:

New COVID-19 cases, 2020-07-24 (source: Johns Hopkins):
Belgium: 352
Germany: 742
UK: 769
France: 1.1k
US: 73.7k

So the US has got 70 times as many new diagnosed cases per day as the next contender on your list. And this is with local testing capacity maxed out, so the actual case numbers are higher, only we don't know them. In Europe, on the other hand, they're already quite concerned by the still relatively low growth they have; some countries are reintroducing lockdowns.

That also means that in terms of deaths per million population, the US will overtake France next week, the UK the week after, and Belgium the week after. Only the US population is several times larger, so the absolute number of deaths will be staggering.

The actual article gives a resolution of 0.13 arcseconds (enough to not just resolve the car, but resolve its two headlights).

A technical user who actually bothers to read the article will find there the sentence "This corresponds to an angular resolution of the Gemini infrared “lucky imaging” observations down to 0.13 arc-seconds."

Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shwa era that preceded him

Actually it's not the Shwa era, but the Showa era, with a bar on top of the o. The character in question (U+014D) is used in transliterating Japanese in Latin script to indicate pronunciation. It has been part of Unicode since 1991.

It's interesting to see in the summary a discussion of Unicode 12.1 vs. 12.0, when Slashdot itself doesn't support the Unicode 1.0 characters necessary to write the summary :)