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.

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.