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.

Except that hothardware being tech geeks confuse cause and effect. The estimated cost of the 8GB of GDDR5 in the PS4 is ~$100, the hardware costs are almost the same and the "extra validation" mainly involves staying a little conservative with clock speeds and code optimizations. The real reason is market differentiation and if there is none you create one like with student and senior citizen discounts even though they all take up one seat. That lets you set entirely different prices based on the willingness to pay in workstation markets as opposed to gamer markets.

Of course to make it work, you must make sure that the workstation market won't use the gaming card so you make sure those features are absent or not working or not tested/validated/supported on the consumer cards. It's the same reason Intel won't give you ECC on a consumer motherboard/CPU like AMD does, it would be beneficial and cost next to nothing but it'd encourage penny-pinchers to use them as poor man's servers. It's all about steering customers to the "right" product, the rest is implementation details.

The hyperbole tends to be pretty thick around here, I've used software interfaces that weren't just bad but simply atrocious and if Microsoft could conjure up one so bad I couldn't make it work for me and still be usable outside a mental asylum seems highly unlikely. Hitting the start button to shut down the computer doesn't even register in the top 1000 silliest shit I've had to do in order to make semi-broken, bizarre and buggy applications work. So "broken and useless" is probably more like "temporarily a damper on productivity while my Google-fu figures it out".

I guess a lot of people here have Win8 forced upon them by external circumstances, which tends to put everyone in a sour mood. Particularly end users that hate change and tend to make life even more miserable for IT. Personally the forecast is that Win7 is good until 2020, so in five year's time I should figure out if Microsoft has made anything decent, jump to OS X or take another shot at YotLD. If work pushes it on me, I'll cope. Around here it sounds like they should be awarding war medals like "Survived the 2010 ribbon transition".

I guess there's a whole bunch of people where the OS doesn't really matter and it's just "Which [device/OS] lets me update Facebook and Twitter the easiest?" but personally I'm fairly stuck with Windows and so is my work. They could duct tape a Kinect to all copies of Windows 9 and insist all commands be done Minority Report style and we'd probably still upgrade eventually, as long as the applications don't have to buy into "Metro" or anything like that. I'd just have to learn a few Kung Fu moves to open the most used apps and I'd probably still hit 95% relative efficiency overall.

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".