Fascism is corporatism. Corporatism is not the same as rule of financial corporations.

US may be an oligarchy and a plutocracy, but it's not fascist.

But does it actually have control? What happens if the Irish subsidiary who has physical possession of the servers flatly refuses to hand over the data (because doing otherwise would be in violation of EU law, to which they are subject), and block all network access to the same?

I actually can't help but wonder how many US politicians keep money in UK bank accounts.

They don't need to have US offices to be blackmailed over this. They just need to have some interaction with US banks (like, say, Visa/MasterCard). The blackmail then becomes "do what we tell, or you won't do business with anyone we have a shred of control over".

Except that size is user-controlled, and "liveliness" can also be disabled.

Can you give the number of a Win8.1 build (leaked, preview, whatever) that could have Start Menu enabled via reg key?

Early leaked builds of Win8 had that, yes. It was actually the other way around - it came with Start Menu and everything else on by default, and a reg key was necessary to force it to go Metro. Then, eventually, Metro was made the default, and the reg key was ripped out. It was not there in consumer preview of Win8, nor in any build that followed.

Well, if they are indeed meant to be so calculated, then, apparently, Israelis are very shitty mathematicians.

$5 seems a lot. I pay Amazon £7.28/month for DVD rentals. This gives me 3 disks at home at a time and unlimited rentals. I can usually return them at the weekend and midweek if I'm feeling lazy and watching a lot, or just once a week if I'm a bit more busy. Going with the second, that's 12 films a month for £7.28, or 60p (a bit under $1) per movie. TV shows typically come 2-4 episodes on a disk, so divide by 2 or 4 for episodes.

I'd happily pay £10-15 per month for a service that had the same range as a DVD rental service, provided DRM-free streams in a standard format, and had a reasonable download cap (maybe 30 hours per month for £10, 60 for £15, something on that order).

I don't want to pay for a movie, I want to pay for access to a large library of movies that I can watch however I want, on any device I want.

We are told so by Hamas program documents. The question is to which extent those claims are up to date. On one hand, Hamas did suggest something akin to a two-state solution (in 1967 borders), but the problem is that their offer used words like "truce" instead of "peace" to describe what they would be signing up for. That, combined with their seeming lack of desire to amend the written documents of the party, cast the honesty of their intentions in doubt. There is even more doubt given their radical Islamist ideology that seems to have strong Salafi influence - if you've read Qutb, you know that for those guys, the existence of Israel in any shape or form is plainly unacceptable, and its destruction, on the other hand, is a divine prophecy.

That is true, but does it really matter for any purpose other than assigning blame (mind you, it's a useful purpose and it would be nice to see it carried through all the way - but it's orthogonal to the peace process)? Either way, Hamas is now running things, and their propaganda is effected on new generations of Palestinian kids... which doesn't bode well at all for any sort of compromise to be achievable in the foreseeable future. I just don't see how they could "reboot" the whole thing and get people who can be negotiated with back in charge, even if they wanted to.

Way dig it.

It depends on your definition of "ethnic cleansing". I don't think that "people who launch shrapnel-loaded rockets" is a race or ethnicity per se, so killing them doesn't count as such. If it so happens that they all belong to a single ethnicity in practice, that is an unfortunate coincidence, but it's not the reason why they were targeted.

If you mean that "stealing land" amounts to ethnic cleansing (some people do believe that), then I suppose your formula is valid. Pretty much all land in Israel is claimed by either side, and which one gets to actually hold it is determined solely by "might is right". There doesn't seem to be any solution that would change that at this point - a compromise was possible with PLO of old, but Israel did not pursue it; Hamas, on the other hand, is not willing to compromise, and is now in charge because PLO got nowhere.

With the risk of this being "Scotlands" space port ..

Lots of mentioning of scotland in the text.

I'm not well aware of the positiong issue you mention, though I do understand that part =P
Was is the advantage of the opposite such as the Esrange (Kiruna) base here in Sweden?
http://www.sscspace.com/esrang...
The amount of space available?
They mention " investigation of the aurora borealis" here so maybe that's it? http://digilander.libero.it/lo...

There's no real reason to use Tor to avoid getting on these lists, just create an account and then your IP is hidden.

Well, in the UK, tipping the pizza guy is pretty rare - you're paying for the service already (and delivery drivers are covered by the same minimum wage laws so they get a salary that you can live on). Credit card terminals in restaurants typically provide a tip field so that you can add a tip on at the end.

Most of the people I'd want to send cash to are people I know and are already in my phone's contact list. If you live in a culture that is fundamentally opposed to paying people a reasonable wage or stating up-front how much things cost, then the solution would be to have a QR code on the box with a note saying 'Did you get good service? Send a tip here' and the details required to receive the payment. Rather than having to find the $2, you'd just wave the card in front of your phone, select the amount, and hit send. The driver wouldn't need to carry cash.