My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town .. a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.
The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.
How true, this last paragraph. And how brilliant a statement, not because of its content, but because of who said it, Sir Gerald Kaufman, a British-Jew, raised as an Orthodox Jew and Zionist, a British MP from Manchester.
It's about time to disassociate criticism against the Israeli military action in Gaza as an example of anti-semitism, bigotry, hatred or racism. Sure, those exist, but criticising a totally disproportional, non-discriminating military operation that targets civilians and Hamas militants alike with white phosphorus and bombards hospitals has nothing to do with it.
Today is the birthday of the Mac. And while Steve Jobs may not care about the past, a quarter of a century after its introduction, the paradigms made popular by the original Macintosh (and, arguably, the Lisa before it) are still very much relevant in the present and there's very little proof that they won't be in the near future.
The original Mac suffered from the same deficiencies so many Macintosh computers suffered over these 25 years since its introduction: low specification hardware (viz. 128KB of RAM), few upgradeability options, a closed ecosystem. Yet it also kickstarted an era of intense innovation and competition, perhaps the golden era of personal computing and marked the beginnings of the Mac's role in personal computing. While Apple's focus has drifted away from the Mac as its sole strategic product in recent years, the platform is today as important as healthy as ever. Happy Birthday Macintosh!
Image used under the GFDL licence. Originally by Wikipedia user Grm_Wnr.