I believe the differences between the two is mostly to the "no nonsense" approach to the Russians, and the fact that they like re-using designs and equipment that work instead of constantly re-inventing the wheel.

Except... they don't re-use designs and equipment. The current mark of the Soyuz (capsule) has almost nothing in common with the early ones other than a reasonably similar moldline. Soyuz has been modified and updated multiple times, not the least as it evolved from a general purpose Earth orbiter into a very specialized station taxi.
 

Sure, their spacecraft may look "ugly" (or at least, "uglier") than western or American ones, but they get the job done and they are reliable workhorses.

Reliable... is a very shaky claim given the number of near failures and almost disasters suffered by Soyuz over the years. It hasn't killed anyone in a long time, but it's come uncomfortably close an uncomfortably significant percentage of it's flights.[1] And speaking of flights and workhorses... even though it started flying over a decade earlier, it won't match the number of Shuttle flights until somewhere around the end of this decade at the current flight rate. (Last time I looked, I haven't calculated in a while.) In the same vein, while Shuttle suffered two LOCV accidents, it had zero complete mission failures and only one partial mission failure due to an abort-to-orbit placing it in too low of an orbit. Meanwhile, Soyuz had one pad abort, one failure to orbit, and at least two complete mission failures due to an inability to dock with a space station. (As well as several instances of either the orbital module or the re-entry module failing to separate properly.)
 
All of which is a roundabout way of saying the comparison isn't really as black-and-white as people would like it to be once you compare the actual Shuttle against the actual Soyuz (as opposed the largely fictional Soyuz the actual Shuttle is commonly compared to) and look at the actual numbers.

[1] Here's three accounts just covering reentry and landing failures.

Nah; it's not coming at all. It's here. And we're not gonna do a thing about it, so we'll just have to adapt. And migrate inland as our coastal areas slowly flood out.

Here in New England, one of the running jokes for the past decade or so has been for one person to ask what time the robins arrived this year, and another person says "They didn't return; they never left."

Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that. They're one of the many semi-migratory birds now. Part of the population heads south when it gets too cold. But we've seen robins in our yard (in a western suburb of Boston) every month of the year for about 10 years now, while before that, they were almost never seen in December, January or February. This was never exact, though, since their normal winter range did extend to around New York (and southern Nova Scotia ;-), and they were reported around Boston occasionally during warm winters. If you look in older bird books, you can see the robins' winter range ending somewhere south of us, depending on the book, while the current books show it extending to around the New Hampshire border.

But still, they're a locally obvious sign that the climate has shifted north by a hundred miles or so. And a casual search of the topic will make it clear that the US government and most of the population have no intention of doing anything serious to change the trend. The scientists have clearly pinned the blame on human activity, and the engineers point out that this means we now know how to control the climate if we want to. But we (collectively) don't want to.

(Then there's the local joke about all the folks in New Hampshire and Maine who think global warming sounds like a fine idea. Myself, I intend to plant a palm tree in our yard as soon as they become available in the nurseries, which may happen soon. ;-)

Heh. The example I like to use is to point out that killing one cow (or steer) means around 100 meals for a human, while eating a single slice of bread means you're responsible for the death of around 100 baby wheat plants (and probably a thousand living, breathing yeasts). Or: When you eat a hamburger, the meat part is entails less than .01 deaths, while the bread part caused the death of 100 to 1000 living creatures. So it's the vegetarians that are doing the real mass killing of prey.

Of course, this is a bit disingenuous, since the animal was probably fed on grains. But you can confuse this issue a bit by pointing out that cattle actually evolved as grazers mostly on the vegetative parts of their grassy "prey", not the seeds, and the plants can quickly regrow their leaves. Our feedlots are responsible for lots of deaths of little baby grains, true, but naturally-raised beef wouldn't do this. They do ingest at least a few of the seeds, so the issue isn't quite so clear, but it's basically accurate.

For some reason, people with ethical concerns about eating animals never seem to consider that plants are also living creatures. They seem to think that killing a single animal is something horrible, while there's nothing wrong with mass murder of baby grain plants. But you can confuse them a bit by talking about the plants as living creatures. Produce the image of an animal thousands of times our size, collecting our babies and tossing them alive into large hoppers, to be ground to a paste for the next meal. That's what we do to wheat plants. Hiding it in a grain mill doesn't change the fact.

Unfortunately, we're animals, and we can't get our food from the sun, air and dirt. To live, we must kill other living things and eat them. There are marginal cases, such as fruits that were evolved as animal food (to trick animals into transporting the seeds). But we humans can't live on fruit alone; we do have to kill other species for most of our food. This slightly complicates the moral and ethical issues.

And they all stood on Newton's shoulders.

No, wait; Newton came after Euclides. So Newton must have stood on his shoulders.

The human pyramid is getting rather tall, and a bit top-heavy.

Is it really? I've always read of it being a conclusion, not a postulate. Maybe I should finally go dig up the original papers and see who's been getting it wrong all along.

(Not that doing so would likely effect much in the ongoing flame wars, uh, I mean serious scientific discussions about such things. ;-)

We know some details about the nurse that was infected in spain: She touched her face with her hands before disinfecting them.

Yes, protocol wasn't followed. But here's the point: You need to follow protocol 100% of the time to be safe. You only need to make one mistake to be infected. For a virus with such a crazy lethality rate, that's not good. Treating an ebola patient is a lot like playing russian roulette.

Very few of the people who are now dead licked it. Yes, the media loves fear stories and it's overblown, but you're underblowing it.

Who thought that bringing Ebola patients into countries not yet infected was a smart idea? Apparently, the thought of an american dying in Africa like all those niggers was too much for someone to stand, yes? Newsflash: The virus isn't racist, it doesn't give a fuck if you're a rich american or a starving african.

We have the same in Europe. At least one health care worker here has been infected and will probably die because someone thought it's smart to bring people infected with a 90% lethality virus home for treatment. Good job.

We cannot contain these viruses, and our assumption that we in the west are better than those primitives in Africa and we will certain contain it to the hospital wards has been smashed. Like basically anyone who's not an idiot could have guessed.

(and for the mentally challenged readers: Of course my use of "niggers" and "primitives" is to outline the very hubris I criticise. If you think I'm a racist, you're projecting too much of yourself into my words...)

The moment I get spam about Kickstarter projects, I'll delete my account there. Who else?

Kickstarter is a cool concept, but one of the things that made it cool is that at its core, it has this idea of presenting your idea and letting people come to you. The more you reverse it, by "reaching out" (marketing speak) aka spamming (real human speak) people with your project, the more it is simply and advertisement platform. And nobody gives a flying fuck about advertisement platforms, as we can see from the absence of the Internet equivalent of the shopping channel.

I'm from Germany. Ever since it was leaked that the NSA was spying so extensively on our government that by international standards it could reasonably be considered an act of war, I wonder what it'll take for our USA-lapdog chancellor to grow a spine and do more than giving Obama a stern talk.

It's not cheating if it's part of the strategy of the event. See also: NASCAR, speed skating, bicycle racing, etc. It just means that in addition to raw speed, the runner needs to effectively manage the interactions with other runners.

At any rate, this arbitrary milestone would have been achieved long ago if the wavelength of light emitted by exited caesium 133 atoms were only a tiny fraction of a percent longer.

And here I was watching from Europe thinking that this question had been settled years ago. Nobody else in the world is taking the polygraph seriously, it's a leftover from the time shortly after WW2 when too optimistic pseudo-scientists (mostly, some scientists as well) thought very soon now technology will solve every problem of the human race.

And if we are making generalizations a lot of the second amendment people love to use their rights to intimidate people exercising their first amendment rights.

The only thing a lot of your so-called second amendment people choose to intimidate on a regular basis are criminals and thugs, such as their representatives in Congress--and sometimes, other miscellaneous miscreants.

So how would we know? Since it's all going on in secret, with severe punishments for anyone who speaks openly and truthfully about what they've been ordered to do, the only assumption that the proverbial "reasonable man" (or woman? ;-) would make is that we have no idea what they're planning to do to us next. This story could all be just "theater" to lead us to think that things are improving.

As long as the question "How would we know" is illegal for the participants to answer, we should simply assume the worst. We have a lot of history telling us what powerful leaders are likely to be doing to their own population when they enforce secrecy about their actions.

I have often wondered if it would be worth building a new distribution. The existing ones all seem to make weird design decisions, none have conquered the desktop (I blame OSDL), they're nowhere near as high performance as they could/should be, and Linux Base is not necessarily the most secure layout. It's certainly problematic for multi-versioning.

We're not talking radio-controlled. These drones use networking technology, and if their IP address is pingable from your location is not exactly the major point.

Given that many drone victims are civilians, in a conflict that is not officially a war, the only difference left seems to be that the murderers are not civilians. That's one of the flimsiest excuses ever to call something by a different name.