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.

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.

Even if mobility rate didn't change, it's still one of the lowest among developed countries.

Why is everyone comparing the costs of the missiles themselves?

The point of Iron Dome is not to bankrupt Hamas by forcing them to make more missiles. It's to save lives. How do you measure the value of a life saved that way?

(there's also property damage, but that at least is quantifiable)

It doesn't matter. They're aimed squarely at civilians, with shrapnel-heavy warhead that is designed specifically to cause death to as many unarmored "soft" targets in the area as possible - basically, to maximize civilian casualties.

Hamas is a race now? That's funny... last I checked, they are internationally recognized as a terrorist organization.

I suppose saying "fuck Taliban" is racist too, seeing how it's mostly Pashtun?

Oh, and as for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this way... the big difference is that ANC's goal, as elaborated in their platform and preached by their leaders, was equality in South Africa, and a real democracy. The goal of Hamas, on the other hand, is the complete destruction of the State of Israel and Jews as people - basically, genocide - again, as elaborated in their official platform documents, and made clear by their preachers. So, what common ground does Israel have to even begin negotiating with these guys? What compromises can they do to make the other side agree to peace (rather than a ceasefire)?

A compromise, like the two-state solution, was possible 30 years ago. But it was not acted upon by Israel, and now Palestinians are too radicalized to accept any such. You can argue with nationalists like Arafat - in the end, what they want is for their nation to prosper, and they'll make pragmatic choices to make that happen, even conceding their ideological goals. But you can't argue with religious fanatics like Hamas - people who are willing to make children into suicide bombers clearly don't have any concern for the future of their nation; all they care about is to fight because "God told them so".

They were? Did you read the Truth & Reconciliation Commission reports on ANC activities? A lot of it reads like textbook terrorism to me. Numerous intentional massacres of civilians (in churches etc) to make a political point.

I'll grant you that the end of apartheid was a good goal, but that doesn't mean that terrorist acts committed to further it stop being terrorism.

The entire Israel is "land that has been stolen from others", depending on who you ask (e.g. Hamas believes that to be the case). So if Israel stops expanding, or even lets go of most of what it took after 1948, the rockets won't stop flying.

There were no such places, pretty much.

The idea of moving the Jews somewhere where they wouldn't be unwelcome was, in fact, floated - even before WW2. It even got Hitler's personal approval - in 1938, he said that he would let go of any Jews that would want to leave, so long as some other country would accept them. Evian Conference was convened by US for the explicit purpose of determining who that would be. And guess what? None of the states involved, including those that would later become WW2 Allies, agreed to take any additional amount beyond whatever immigration quotas that they had. They were pretty explicit about the reasons, too:

"As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one" - Australia

The only country that did accept a significant amount (in proportion to its size and population) was Dominican Republic - ironically, because the dictator in power at the time was a white racist, and considered Jews as white for his purposes (as opposed to black Haitians), and hence wanted an "infusion of white blood" for his nation.

Regarding the whole living memory thing, I think that what matters is how most of the people who are alive today remember it. Basically, if you kick Israelis out and put Palestinians back, how many people would be leaving the homes and the land they were born on and personally grew up on, vs how many would be returning into the homes and land that they were born on. That's what matters because that's the real effect that it would have on people involved, in direct rather some nebulous "historical justice" way. I suspect that such accounting would favor Israelis rather than Palestinians at this point.

I wouldn't say that Israelis are quite happy to kill civilians. At the very least, they don't see to be intentionally targeting civilian targets (I know that it still happens occasionally, and that when it does, they try to look the other way rather than put one of their own on trial; but it's not the official orders or ROE, and is frowned upon by both military brass and society at large). The ones that they kill, are either - and most often - collateral damage from strikes on military targets (exacerbated by the fact that Hamas really likes to set up missile launchers and mortars near or right on top of high profile civilian targets); or near misses that hit something that they didn't intend to hit. OTOH, Hamas is intentionally targeting civilians - the more dead, the better.

That Israel still manages to rack up a higher civilian kill count than Hamas just goes to show how severe the power disparity is. At the same time, it goes to show that Israel is not the "evil fascist regime" that it's so fashionable to identify it as - if they were, they would steamroll over Gaza decades ago, they certainly have the means.

And that matters why, exactly? You're completely ignoring the most important cost in that equation - that of lives saved (and not just direct one, but also indirect morale/propaganda boost).

What matters is that those things actually intercept missiles. Spending the same shekels on jets, tanks and bombs does not solve this problem. Well, it can, but it would basically require leveling Gaza to the ground completely and killing everyone alive. Which is something that Israelis will never do, for all the flak they get about being "fascist pigs" etc.

More like, no back-compat == millions of mad existing users and developers (for Windows) == not happy.

5-6 levels sounds about right. I'm 7 levels down from the top right now (and don't have anyone under me), but this is the most that I ever had.

Being invited to the podcasts is not necessarily based on seniority, but even if it does, a principal dev has maybe 1-2 fewer management layers above them compared to plain SDEs.

And Microsoft will be happy to sell you an IDE for that.

The corporate strategy does not revolve around MS stack top-to-bottom anymore. It hasn't been like that even in the last couple of years under Ballmer, but that has accelerated a lot under Satya.

How about ISO standard languages? Like C#...