> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."
Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA
I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.
Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.
This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
That's not how it looks like though with the way Israel acts like the judge, jury and executioner of the region. You get the feeling that only Israeli lives count in the Middle East.
Does a reference to "...the judge, jury and executioner..." really make sense in armed conflict? Is there really a judge or a jury? There isn't really even an executioner, in the sense of a lawful delegate tasked with carrying out the result of adjudication.
One of the reasons armed conflict is bad is there is really no justice in it and no time for justice. Justice starts to be possible when security is established, and security is established through armed conflict or a strong norm not to get into it -- as we see presently in Europe, where many countries with meaningful territorial losses and weird borders (exclaves, &c) have elected to just never settle those things.
Back when decent civilization was a thing, there were rules of engagement, conduct, the pursuit of security, and strategic goals which didn't include active genocide of civilians.
Now, granted, we've witnessed horrible things in wars that don't match up to order and clarity of my previous sentence. But there were end goals that made sense.
Sorry, genocide, apartheid and the establishment of a religious-fascist state at the behest of Israeli ring-wing fascists that wouldn't put a foot wrong in Hitlers RKF, isn't an end goal I'd say justifies the means, ends or anything in between.
The establishment of security to the denial of all else, isn't the only dish on the table.
Hamas chooses to fight in urban locations. And keeps the civilians in place at gunpoint.
Consider an attack for which Israel was blamed for a large number of civilian casualties. Israel had given warning they were going to hit the building, get out. Reality: Hamas ordered all the neighbors to rush to the roof of the building to keep Israel from hitting it. Too slow, they were still inside when the bomb landed.
Even if that were true - and it's likely true in some cases - the disregard Israel has shown has been appalling. You don't get out of this by blaming Hamas. You simply don't. If you believe you do - I'll be writing you off as a disgusting apologist.
I'm not going to rehash the war crimes Israel has committed during the last two years. It's likely a waste of time as you already appear to be said apologist. A useful tool to those I don't see as any different to Nazi expansionists ...
Always based on nonsense. The number that matters is civilians per combatant--and for urban combat where there hasn't been an evacuation Israel far outperforms every other country. Every other--they make us look bad.
We have a lot of incidents frame by the press as being wrongful Israeli actions. Most of them turn out to be garbage. And even uncontested casualty numbers show Israel did better than we do.
I'm not an Israeli apologist, but I don't feel that I'm competent to tell the world's best performer that they're wrong.
> Back when decent civilization was a thing, there were rules of engagement, conduct, the pursuit of security, and strategic goals which didn't include active genocide of civilians.
What period of human history are you referring to exactly?
you could alternatively pount towards israeli expansionism, which is a bit more likely than religious extremism. demolish peoples homes and kidnap their families, and theyre gonna respond in whatever way they can.
i expect the iron beam is going to make a lot more deaths, just of people israelis dont consider human. wooo
Israeli expansionism would be easy to stop if there were some reason to. But Israel knows that it's just a pretext, the war exists because Israel exists. Thus it is not worth the effort and political capital to stop the settlers. And note that the problem is blown far out of proportion--most "settlers" live in Israeli cities. Most "settler attacks" look an awful lot like self defense.
This is hasbara. You need to learn more about Israeli history. Hamas was elected with the support of Netanyahu et al. And 50% of the people in Gaza weren’t even alive when Hamas was elected. (However many of them remain. The death toll after Oct 7 will probably be around 500,000 dead)
Israel has never been interested in a peace deal.
It is a settler colonialist project in the finest traditions of such with the aim of conquering the entire region. And the US and friends support it for racist and capitalist reasons.
Hamas was not elected with the help of Nethanyahu, the Prime Minister at the time was Ariel Sharon.
Israel supported the PA who wanted to postpone the elections due to the obvious Hamas victory yet Bush pressured to have these in order to democratize the middle east.
The end result was a Hamas victory and subsequent blockade policy which was supported by the Quartet
Zionism is an illegal, genocidal, racist ideology. It exists 100% on land stolen from the Palestinians. They have every right to resist the foreign occupation on their land.
The Zionists literally just spent two years blowing up Mosques and committing genocide against Muslims and Christians. I'm sorry, you're not arguing in good faith and we're done here.
From where I'm seated, Israel needs to be de-Nazified - let alone given Iron Dome technology. Perhaps then they wouldn't need the technology to begin with.
> violent religious fundamentalists firing ... cities because of religious hatred
Some tend to be more introspective:
Shahak's Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel picked up on the theme in explaining its pervasive, destructive influence in Israeli politics, the military and society. He noted that substituting German or Aryan for Jewish and non-Jews for Jews makes it easy to see how a superiority doctrine made an earlier genocide possible and is letting another happen now. Shahak called all forms of bigotry morally reprehensible and said: "Any form of racism, discrimination and xenophobia becomes more potent and politically influential if it is taken for granted by the society which indulges in it." For Israeli Jews, he believed, "The support of democracy and human rights is... meaningless or even harmful and deceitful when it does not begin with self-critique and with support of human rights when they are violated by one's own group. Any support of human rights for non-Jews whose rights are being violated by the 'Jewish state' is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a Stalinist..."
Kook was Israel's first chief rabbi. In his honour, and to continue his teachings, the extremist Merkaz Harav (the Rabbi's Centre) was founded in 1924 as a yeshiva or fundamentalist religious college. It teaches that, "non-Jews living under Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) must either be enslaved as water carriers and wood hewers, or banished, or exterminated."
Chief military rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, called Operation Cast Lead a "religious war" in which it was "immoral" to show mercy to an enemy of "murderers". Many others feel the same way, prominently among them graduates of Hesder Yeshivat schools that combine extremist religious indoctrination with military service to defend the Jewish state.
Others in Israel teach the extremist notion that the 10 Commandments don't apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council: "There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them... A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."
In June 2009, US Hasidic Rabbi Manis Friedman voiced a similar sentiment in calling on Israel to kill Palestinian "men, women and children". "I don't believe in Western morality, ie don't kill civilians or children, don't destroy holy sites, don't fight during the holiday seasons, don't bomb cemeteries, and don't shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)."
...
Though a minority, Israel's religious community wields considerable influence politically, in the military and society overall.
...
How the future balance of power shifts from one side to the other will greatly influence the makeup of future Israeli governments and determine whether peaceful co- existence can replace over six decades of conflict and repression. So far it hasn't, and nothing suggests it will any time soon; not while extremist Zionists run the government, serve prominently in the Israeli army, and -- according to critics -- are gaining more power incrementally.
I mean... let's not throw stones from an equally spectacular glass house.
What a remarkably misleading copypasta you have there.
Rav Kook was not Israel's first rabbi. He died in 1935 - a full 18 years before Israel's rebirth.
Nor was Kook the founder of Zionism. The belief that Jews should be able to return to our historic homeland has been a belief and conviction for religious and secular Jews for at least two millenia.
That you can find individuals, such as a R. Friedman (not even an Israeli!) with extreme views should not surprise anyone. Nutpicking is easy. Jews, like any other group, have fools and extremists in their rank. Israel is a plural democracy with 2 million Arabs, 7 million Jews, thousands of Christians and Druze, all with representation in the multiparty Knesset.
Hamas's evil, however, is not nutpicking. Hamas' founding charter in its opening paragraphs calls for the destruction of Israel and its conquest of the land in the name of Islam. It is genuinely intrinsic to the organization.
The moral argument for a modern, rights-based society is cleanly on Israel’s side. I’m glad they’ve developed this technology, so they can continue defending themselves at a lower cost to their citizens. The engineers involved have done a very good thing.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
The "backward tribesmen" are currently providing the Minister of Finance/special Minister for the West Bank (Smotrich), Minister of Police (Ben Gvir), Minister of Diaspora Affairs that happens to also manage access to aid orgs in gaza (Amichai Chikli), Minister for Cultural Heritage (Amihai Eliyahu), Minister of Settlements and National Missions (Orit "Time of Miracles" Stook) and probably others. So much for "marginal influence".
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting thousands of rockets before, during and after October 7 massacre is documented[1] by Wikipedia (that does have documented anti-israel bias[2])
When does this cease to justify any possible retribution? How many murdered palestinian children, or emergency workers, or aid workers balances this out? How much torture of prisoners?
Sorry but doesn't fly. Also Islam has nothing to do with Palestinian resistance. This theme of "Palestinians and Muslims are all Jihadists and all seek to kill Jews" is also getting really really old.
2026 will bring more enlightenment to the masses. Also, Israel loves messing with wikipedia as it has done for years.
Can you refute anything the article about thousands of rockets launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad says?
As another poster said the name of the terrorist group (that you call palestinian resistance) is Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You can take it up with them why they decided to associate Jihad with Islam and Palestine.
Hamas - an organization designated as terrorist by my country - another entity that you refer to as Palestinian resistance - is an offshoot of Muslim Brotherhood and is a fundamentalist Islamist organization that has documented history of targeting civilians since its inception, including killing hundreds of dancing kids/young adults at the Nova festival on October 7
Please dispute the facts with something more solid that this doesn’t fly
Indeed, Abu Zaydeh is well aware that for the past two years the
Hamas leadership had been talking about implementing "the
last promise" (alwaed al'akhir) – a divine promise regarding
the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam.
Sinwar and his circle ascribed an extreme and literal meaning
to the notion of "the promise, " a belief that pervaded all their
messages: in speeches, sermons, lectures in schools and
universities. The cardinal theme was the implementation of the
last promise, which included the forced conversion of all
heretics to Islam, or their killing.
Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.
Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.
Each Iron Dome interception cost many times more than the cost of the rockets. This will make it cheaper for other poorer nations to afford and operate.
I was bored so I did the math and you are not correct. Even if you don't care about the people themselves, a normal citizen in an industrialized society like Israel has about 40 years of working life. Let's assume for simplicity that some rockets would hit children but others would hit retired people, on average hitting people when they're halfway through their career and would have 20 years of productive work left.
According to Wikipedia [1], Israel has an average GDP per capita of about 60 USD per hour worked, which at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks worked per year over 20 years comes to about 40000 hours of work and ~2.4 million USD of GDP generated. At an income tax of about 30% [2], that means an income for the state of about 800k USD equivalent. If the person dies due to rocket attack, the state would miss out on that. Iron dome interceptors are quite cheap compared to that and the laser intercepts should be an order of magnitude cheaper still.
This doesn't even take into account the sunk costs that industrialized nations incur by every citizen having to attend school for about the first two decades of their lives, mostly funded by the state. That represents a tremendous investment into human capital that would be lost if you let your citizens get shot up in preventable rocket attacks.
So no, human lives are not actually cheap when viewed through the lens of a country, even when completely excluding morals and only looking at it financially. They are in fact quite valuable.
One life can cost as much as you calculated. However, if the attack will kill an unproductive (elderly, disabled or other) person then it could be a net gain instead of loss for the economy.
Perhaps but you while you can maybe predict where the rocket will fall, you cannot reliably predict who it might kill if it hits. People move around and even if you can see it will hit a house for the elderly, you cannot see how many (grand)children are currently visiting. Also the opposite is true: a rocket hitting a child care facility would cause double the economic damage. That is why I used an average in my previous post.
In any case, elderly and disabled are not as useless to the economy as you might suppose. There are many disabled who are economically productive. One of the most capable colleagues I've ever had was a blind programmer. Grandparents often provide things like babysitter services that don't show up in formal GDP measurements but are very valuable nonetheless. Don't count out the contribution of people to society just because they don't have a normal job.
Both sides are right. Life is cheap in many developing nations. My hope is that this tech could help governments in those regions to protect their citizens even when their GDP returns are significantly lower.
And Putin gives a nuke to Iranians then it's game over since Iranians don't care about MAD doctrine. Anyways the risk of the tech falling into Russia's hands is too high. Ukrainians have the smarts to develop it themselves now that it is proven as a viable tech.
Why would Russia give nukes to Iran? The Russians themselves would be harmed by an open nuclear exchange.
No, Putin's threats to Biden and Trump were more along the lines of, 'See the Houthis shooting shipping, imagine that capability spread to rebels and terrorists worldwide'
Everyone cares about the MAD doctrine, although some people with power may pretend they do not, while others may pretend they believe that those people with power don't care.
Disagree--most rockets are determined to fall into unimportant locations and are not engaged. Israel only shoots at the ones that are going to fall on something.
(Although, notably, Israel destroyed one that was going to fall on The Dome, the very location that Islam is supposedly trying to protect from the Jews.)
It resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered as it's stopping the Palestinians from being able to defend themselves. It's literally enabled genocide (along with US support).
Anytime somebody makes a claim about a drone operating a firearm, you should be extremely skeptical. There's a reason everyone uses explosive drones, not "drone with a machine gun". Small flying machines trying to fire off rounds doesn't work out.
> submarine launched drones throwing incendiary munitions at a flotilla
Per the Greek coastguard, someone left a lit joint by a fuel canister. Maybe the Greeks are in on the deep conspiracy.. or potheads are just forgetful.
whenever you see someone making the claim that a gun won't work on an aircraft, I urge you to look at our entire aviation history of vehicles with guns strapped on. Planes, helicopters, jet-packs, 'manned platforms', whatever your fancy.
we're not talking about glocks ductaped to DJIs here, and all of these mysterious engineer efforts that 'just doesn't work out' are hurdles that man has faced and conquered before.
What I would suggest is that if anyone trying to give you a technical reason that ends in "It just doesn't work" they are probably unprepared to accurately brief you on the topic.
> I urge you to look at our entire aviation history of vehicles with guns strapped on
Stabilizing moving firing platforms has a fascinating history going back to Bronze Age chariots.
As for planes and helicopters, there is a reason their big guns are mounted into the airframe, and why the biggest cannons in the air are on fixed-wing aircraft.
"An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”"
> "He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission."
The article doesn't give an exact quote from Enzor-DeMeo.
> "It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law."
This is simply not true. There are over 2 million Arab citizens in Israel, a full 21% of Israel's population. Another 4% are Bedouin.
You’re ignoring 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and 2 million in the Gaza Strip who are forced to live under Israel’s military occupation and law but do not have political representation in its government. That’s not even getting into discriminatory practices in Israel against its own Arab citizens. How about the fact that a Jew anywhere in the world can immigrate to Israel, but a Palestinian Arab whose family was forced out in the Nakba, with a valid claim to land in Israel, cannot.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005[0], evacuating every Jewish citizen and dismantling homes and synagogues. Today, there are zero Jews living in Gaza.
Gaza is run by Hamas and the West Bank by Fatah. Israel does not "control [that] territory" it does not block "other particular ethnic/cultural groups from becoming citizens", nor does it "govern [it] by military law." Israel does not govern or occupy either territory.
As for Gaza, it's ridiculous to say that Israel doesn't occupy it when even long before October 2023 the Israelis have imposed a complete blockade on the territory. They control the movement of goods, they control the water supply, the power supply, the airspace, they built a 20-foot wall around it, they destroyed the only airport, they control how far fishing boats can go out, and on and on. How is that not military control?
The West Bank is administered by the Israeli Civil Administration which is a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Even the Israeli High Court of Justice (Supreme Court) says that "Israel holds the Area in belligerent occupation" and that "a military administration... continues to apply". [0]
Not to mention how the Israeli government allows over 700,000 illegal settlers to flood the West Bank and does absolutely nothing to stop them from stealing land or attacking Palestinians. The Israeli military has ultimate authority there. Like the other commenter said, it's a fantasy to claim otherwise.
Israel does have a military presence in the West Bank due to the monthly terrorist attacks on Jewish citizens in the West Bank and Israel, currently at 57 attacks per month this year.
As for settlers, I ask readers to observe the double standard: Jews who live in Palestinian areas are "illegal settlers" and "stealing land", but Arabs who live in Israel are entitled to free education, healthcare, citizenship, voting rights, and representation in the government.
By "Arabs who live in Israel" you mean the minority of Arabs who the Israelis didn't force out at gunpoint during Plan Dalet and the Nakba. The Israelis can rectify the situation at any time by either allowing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to have a real state, not a puppet or rump state, or by incorporating them into Israel with full legal rights, political representation, and an end to military occupation.
Ah, the "Nakba", the catastrophe: the 1948 war where Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Islamic Holy War Army invaded Israel, despite being legally partitioned by the United Nations.
Yes, what a catastrophe that invasion was for Arab nations and Arab population in the land.
Perhaps if those nations had not invaded Israel, and perhaps if local Arab communities had not committed violence and massacres of local Jewish communities leading up to Jewish independence in 1948, things could have turned out better for them.
And maybe things can be different tomorrow, too, if Palestinians turn away from terrorism and seeking the destruction of the world's only Jewish homeland.
The claim that Israel doesn’t control the West Bank is utter fantasy. Yes, they allow a Palestinian civil administration to handle some of the work of governing, however it operates entirely under the ultimate authority of the Israeli military.
Btw, how many Palestinians are studying at Ari’el University in the West Bank?
Perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank if the Fatah government redirected spending its resources from terrorism to infrastructure and services for its people?
In 2023, there were 214 terrorist attacks per month. Israel instituted more security checkpoints, which has resulted in a decline to 57 attacks/month this year.
And yet, 57 attacks per month still ridiculously high. What nation would tolerate that? Is it any wonder that there are security restrictions in place?
As for Ariel University, it is within a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, so Palestinians are generally opposed to its existence. (And indeed, opposed to the existence of Jews in the West Bank, which is a true form of racism and apartheid.) And yet, Ariel University does have a minority of Arab students among the Jewish majority.
Funny how you were originally arguing that Israel doesn't control the West Bank, but now you say "perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank", correctly suggesting that there isn't self-determination now. So Israel does control it.
Fatah does rule the West Bank. That Israel has security checkpoints only reinforces the reality that Palestinian self-determination is undermined primarily not by Israel, but by its own violence against Jews.
If there weren't some 50 terror attacks per month coming out of the West Bank, Israel wouldn't have need for security checkpoints. If Hamas didn't invade Israel on October 7th 2023, Israel would have zero military presence in the strip like they did for 20 years prior.
Pro-Palestinian folks need to stop blaming the Jewish boogey man for Palestinian problems and start looking at the violence and hatred of Jews within their own camp.
OK, tell me how I can visit Ramallah without passing through Israeli checkpoints. I’m willing to go through the border with Jordan, or fly into Ramallah airport, and pass through Fatah customs. Surely that should be possible if Israel doesn’t administer the territory?
Sure. Just tell me how Israel should prevent the hundreds of terrorist attacks per month coming from the West Bank. There were 214 terrorist attacks per month in 2023, now down to 57/month today; thanks primarily to new security checkpoints.
Perhaps if Fatah would redirect its funding away from terrorism, there would be fewer security checkpoints and more self-determination for its people.
Sure, within the Green Line, the minority of Arabs who managed to avoid being expelled in 1948 are now citizens with equal legal rights, at least in theory. So it’s reasonable to argue that there is no apartheid regime there.
But that has nothing to do with the West Bank, which is where the accusation of apartheid is most credible.
This is, of course, why pro-Israel advocates always attempt to redirect the conversation to focus specifically on the Arab citizens of Israel within the Green Line when these matters are discussed.
Thank you for acknowledging that 2 million Arabs live in Israel with full citizenship and rights. That undermines the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
As for the West Bank, it's ruled by Fatah, not Israel. Israel provides for its own citizens -- regardless of ethnicity -- but it's not responsible for the citizens of foreign territories and their governments. Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
You've repeated this claim a few times in the thread, so sorry if this is repetitive, but just to recap:
1. Fatah is not allowed to build an airport in Palestinian territory -- the Israeli military controls its airspace.
2. Fatah is not able to determine who comes in and out of the territory -- Israel controls both its border with Israel (which I suppose is reasonable) and its border with Jordan (which is not).
3. Fatah does not control the population registry or decide who can receive a Palestinian ID card -- Israel does.
4. Fatah does not have a monopoly over the use of military force in the West Bank -- the Israeli military can (and does) operate wherever it wants to within the territory.
5. Fatah does not control who can move where within the West Bank -- there are many Israeli-only settlements and Israeli-only roads, with access controlled by the Israeli military and police. Even when moving between Palestinian areas, residents are often subject to Israeli checkpoints (with long lines).
Is Fatah allowed to control some civil matters, e.g. the education system? Sure.
I will let others reading this be the judge of whether this constitutes "Fatah control" or "Israeli control". To me, the answer is clear.
> Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
Obviously. Nobody is complaining, for example, that Israel doesn't provide services to Iranians or Syrians or Yemenis. Those are legitimately foreign countries that Israel doesn't control.
...
Taking a look at the rest of the thread, it seems that, having had no success justifying your ludicrous position that "Israel doesn't control the West Bank", you've instead pivoted to explaining how the fact that they control it is Palestinians' fault, or at least justifiable due to Israel's legitimate interest in preventing terrorism.
Well, which is it? Does Fatah control the West Bank, or does Israel control it but the occupation is justified?
There's a lot I could say about this topic, too, but I don't think I'll bother. Galloping from one canned talking point to the next faster than the points can be refuted is not a good-faith debating style and a waste of time to engage with.
The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated that the attack had killed a confirmed 12 civilians, while killing 30 Hezbollah members. 1 civilian death for every 2.5 combatant deaths.
For comparison, in World War II, there were an estimated 2 million civilian deaths and 5.3 million combatant deaths. 1 civilian death for every 2.6 combatant deaths.
Those are remarkably similar ratios. Take that as you will.
> The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated that the attack had killed a confirmed 12 civilians, while killing 30 Hezbollah members.
Source? AFAIU The Lebanese Ministry of Health stated 12 total were killed in operation grim beeper, this number did not appear to exclude Hezbollah members.[0] They listed 2 children which AFAIU were friends/family members of Hezbollah members. They list four of those killed as healthcare workers but don't appear to identify if those healthcare workers were also Hezbollah members. Keep in mind the attack was more designed to injure rather than kill, with nearly 3000 injured.
This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web!
One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything larger.
These all may seem pedantic, but they contribute to the feeling "this is not the real web."
This is the same problem with Java applets in the late '90s, Flash and Silverlight in the early 2000s. They are islands of richness within a web page, but those islands are, well, opaque to browsers, search engines, and virtually all web tooling.
That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web.
This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion.
But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.
It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do.
I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today.
I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.
> why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI
I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website.
The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that.
Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
This is why technology is becoming garbage. In 2025 instead of copy paste, we fire up a gpu in a datacenter. it feels like "software engineering" is just becoming a BS contest for "how much AI can we shoehorn into everything"
Not fully disagreeing, but this lack of copypaste is not an intended ai feature.
- The “magic ocr thingy” exists for things like taking a picture of the real world and grabbing text from it, or grabbing text from a video from something you saw recorded there. Think translating a foreign sign or whatever.
- interfaces have, for unrelated reasons, become more hostile to standard actions like copypaste.
As a result people end up having to ocr-scan interfaces with the tool.
Some of it is because how people interact with and use tech has changed.
Mobile users have completely outpaced laptop/desktop users, and mobile users don't think in terms of files and text, so to them copy & paste is less important. The mythical "average user" moves arbitrary text and data around using screenshots and screen recordings instead of text and files.
Yes, it's incredibly inefficient, but I think it's evolved that day because selecting text is a real pain on a small touch screen, and companies have been trying to abstract away any concept of a filesystem for a long time.
So you or I might care and be bothered that we can't copy & paste something from UI chrome or content in a "web app" but the average person won't care, they'll just take a screenshot.
"E commerce apps" are very much not the sort of traditional desktop application they were referring to. Note that they add "in badly designed mobile apps, I often do."
They're referring more to things like "you can't copy the text labeling the brush width field in Photoshop" (but you CAN copy the text out of that editable field). It's a part of app design people are extremely lazy with today, as you note.
In any sensibly designed desktop package tracking app that number would've been selectable or copy-able text, like how an email subject is in a desktop email app. (Thunderbird, say.)
(Interestingly, ctrl-f to find is one that many apps/OSes have now borrowed back, with the ability to "find" items in menus through a Help menu -> Search action.)
> I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome
Good heavens. I boggled at this.
It's not every single day, but probably at least once a week I am frustrated by this, and have been since the rise of PC GUIs -- so, coming up on 35 years now. It was often doable on DOS-era PCs, especially if you had a mouse, or a multitasking environment like DESQview, or best of all, both.
> in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome
I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog.
Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good; but it is almost trivial to also support plain text copying as a fallback when it already supports copying of other mimetypes. The problem is that some UI has no support of copying in any format at all.
If it was a standard Windows dialog box by any chance, you could just have pressed Ctrl+C with the dialog in focus to copy the message. It's one of these subtle things that go almost completely overlooked.
There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron, and I'm increasingly frustrated by it as time goes on.
on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding."
It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions.
The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.
Thanks, doesn't help me, but you're right, a good tip to know. Though I'd still prefer a similar option to start selection directly in the UI instead of finishing the job in a text editor, this would also help highlight text in a screenshot without having to do image post-processing! I'd even accept some arcane finger-breaking ctrl-alt-win-x-y-z (which I could rebind) for the privilege
All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
While I do occasionally miss it there as well, I think the main difference is that I very rarely use desktop applications for information gathering.
I never "read" a desktop application, whereas that is mostly what I use a browser for. And if I can't properly interact with text on a website, then I would likely reach for something else.
Back in ye olden days desktop applications for information gathering like Encarta let you select and copy text because they were thoughtfully designed and knew that "information you were gathering" should be different than "application chrome" - that's the distinction being made here.
Information-oriented desktop apps still do this - any good email client, for instance, should make it trivial to copy a subject line or "to"/"from" address even if it's in the UI chrome.
I've had the same thoughts as I watch YouTube slowly but steadily subsume "podcast."
We were all worried about something like Spotify killing off open RSS feeds for them, but there's a growing number of people who have no idea what a podcast is because people are using the term for YouTube channels with full video and no RSS feed (video or audio) to match it. Sometimes language drift is good, but not when it's done on purpose to get rid of a free and open technology in favor of silos.
"Wherever you get your podcasts" only works as long as it's built on top of an open method of syndication.
IMHO there's no gatekeeper of what the "real" web is or should be. It grew organically - regular people building things they liked or needed. It's certainly more of a life necessity than it used to be, but that happened organically too.
I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document.
On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!
Not using the standard web stuff usually means it's also an accessibility nightmare, tried using a screen reader on the demo and it doesn't work at all unfortunately
I wonder if at any point browsers will offer a low level accessibility API for you to manually describe components. I’ve worked in the web for years and I’m a big believer but it’s also indisputable that Canvas offers more performant UI rendering than HTML when done correctly. I don’t think it should ever be used for web “documents” but web apps already bastardize HTML and CSS to achieve their aims anyway. Accessibility remains the missing component.
It's HTML imagemaps from the 90s, when we could not style buttons and navbars where GIFs with links in the right places. Browsers still have the code to render them.
OTH, we are still failing to provide a bare minimum for accessibility. Heck, we even needed a law (in the EU, that than needed to be translated to national law), so that companies providing crucial end user services would care about accessibility.
I want every app and every web page to be 100% navigable if I do not have a pointing device attached to my computer.
And I want this enforced by law, by large rich countries. Accessibility to people with disabilities would be a good way: if your product or service is not accessible to people who can't see, can't use a mouse, or can't use their hands at all, then you can't sell it.
I'm not aware of any screen reader that works by continuously feeding screenshots of user interfaces into a remote expensive image LLM, which is an absolutely insane and impractical idea for many reasons, but I used standard TalkBack on Android
MAUI was never intended for the web. This is not what Microsoft wants you to use it for.
WASM is just one of the platforms that Avalonia supports and so, if you run MAUI on Avalonia, you can run it on WASM.
If you do that though, it is going to be like rendering any other desktop GUI toolkit in WASM. It is not a web app. I mean, it is cool you can do it and MAUI in WASM is better than no web capability at all I guess. But you would never set out to create a web app in MAUI.
MAUI on Avalonia on WASM is really a modern replacement for Silverlight. And it will likely be about as popular.
The really cool thing is being able to target the Linux desktop finally. A lot of people will love that.
And, while MAUI was meant to use native controls on each platform, many people may prefer the Avalonia approach of having your app render the same everywhere.
Blazor+MAUI has absolutely been a focus of development from the start. What Im seeing with this is that MAUI is somewhat throwing in the towel and hoping to offload to avalonia to take the torch of development. I'm sad, because I was pretty in the weeds with MAUI at the start, as I was building a greenfield app at the time. It had a ton of potential to be a reimagining of Xamarin and how it fit into the broader .net ecosystem but they just shot themselves in the foot (both MAUI team and the broader MS dev efforts).
I havent been in that space for a couple years now so maybe they have gotten better, but I doubt that. I appreciate the heroic efforts of the MAUI team, but I think its just the unfortunate reality.
I think it's the same problem that flutter web has, and probably any other canvas/wasm based backend? Those features still need to be implemented, while still missing out on accessibility?
>One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink.
That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps.
If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.
1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet.
I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).
Yeah. I think you need to render to actual DOM nodes when targeting the web if you want a first class experience.
We're betting on this over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus where we're building a cross-platform UI solution that enables you to do this by having a web-centric API (we are developing our own custom HTML/CSS renderer for native platforms).
I get the value in this and realize it's not for your polished -$500 ARPU consumer social apps, but man this is weird.
(Also if anyone who worked on it is here, it's crashing for me on OSX 26, Chrome 142.0.7444.135, if I run an animation and hit back as the animation finishes)
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