Untrue. Wikipedia says:

>By 20 November, Gaza health officials said that 113 Palestinians had been killed since the operation began, of which: 53 were civilians, 49 militants and 1 a policeman

Note that is an estimate from a Palestinian source.

Carpet-bombing, or anything close to it, would have resulted in a far higher number of Palestinian deaths. Any loss of innocent life is tragic but these numbers show a commitment to minimizing civilian casualties on the part of the IDF. Unlike Hamas which intentionally targets civilians with their rocket strikes.

Might have something to do with the fact that the population of the USA is far less dense overall than places like Western Europe (map). In dense population centers like New York City, utilities are required by law to bury the power lines. Utility companies have a captive market - where else are you going to buy your power, so in the absence of legislation, they don't have an incentive to spend the huge upfront costs of burying power lines in exchange for higher reliability.

Once I started using Downcast, I've ignored Apple's substandard podcast features completely. Only shame is that Downcast can't integrate with the builtin Podcasts category, so when I play via my car head unit, I have to put the head unit into "iPod hands on" mode and manually navigate to the podcast on the iPod touch.

We did this for all 3 of our kids. Here in New York it is free to donate and store, if you or someone else needs them, the cells are available. I have no desire to enrich the private banks.

No.

Google Translate is now crowdsourcing corrections to its translations. You can see how this would help particularly for idiomatic expressions. With enough crowdsourced input, I don't see why it'd take more than 5 years to get to human-quality translations of most prose texts.

Actually, those centrifuges were never on the public Internet. Stuxnet was cleverly designed to infect the workstations running Step 7 PLC programming software, hijack the communications with the PLC to install its payload on the PLC. I don't know if the Step 7 workstations were on the Internet either; they may have been infected by sneakernet - USB keys, CDROMs, and the like.

Sorry, the ipod connector could not have been mini/micro USB. Unless you have some way to pass analog audio and composite video via USB without an additional set of a/d/d/a. Now, it could have been mini/micro USB PLUS analog line out/ composite out, but that's something else entirely.

New Yorkers are not suckers, and those of us who have lived here a while know roughly how much a cab ride from Point A to Point B will cost. But the taximeter labels on fare schedules ("fare 1" versus "fare 4") are subtle and easily missed. I'm sure the hacks knew to cheat people who are either (a) tourists, (b) people in a REAL hurry (c) drunks. Plenty of those to go around.

Not true. In NYC, Taximeters are installed in individual cabs and are controlled by the driver. All the GPS/credit card/entertainment systems with two way radio communication were installed very recently. Before now it would have been impossible to prove fraud other than by hand matching receipts and rates charged to driver logbook to/from/time entries.

The problem is that those BS detectors are tuned to be so sensitive that they tend to register false positives. I.e., 9/11 "truthers", the people who believe Obama's birth certificate is a fraud, etc. The question I ask these people is "what amount of evidence would cause you to change your views?" They'll toss off a few impossible to satisfy conditions or just crank up the crazy. Bottom line is, you're never going to convince these folks that their view is wrong, evidence be damned. Same for the global warming "skeptics". Exactly what amount of evidence will be required to convince the board of Exxon that global warming is a fact?

"Voluntary patch" ...And what happens if one does not choose to accept this "voluntary patch"? Do I lose access to other system updates, am I locked out of other Microsoft services? ... And is this "voluntary patch" going to be included in the next Windows 7 Service Pack as a mandatory component for non-corporate installs?

If your Tivo has lifetime service then the best use of it is to sell it (working or not) on eBay and recoup your lifetime service cost.
Otherwise, you're looking at a doorstop. The Tivo (series 1 and 2) are woefully underpowered by today's standards. You're better off buying any reasonably expandable PC made in the past 4 years, add on MythTV and some video capture cards with hardware acceleration.