Hasta La Gadget!

If your shelf is in need of a new miniature PC, ECS has your back. The company has introduced an update to the LIVA mini PC kit, with the upcoming model featuring double the storage capacity at 64GB. Hailing it as the “world’s smallest Windows based mini PC kit”, the maker toes the line between DIYers and everyday users who … Continue reading

For those who are not in the know, PlayOn will deliver the wonders of streaming TV right to the big screen itself, as well as on computers. In fact, PlayOn will feature apps for just about any kind of platform that a customer would want, where users are able to make use of the service in order to check out their favorite TV shows regardless of where they are, although select channels will require some sort of subscription. Windows Phone has finally caught up with other platforms, Chromecast included, having seeing the PlayOn app debut on it.

PlayOn announced “the availability of the PlayOn app for Windows Phone users and the rollout of the new, easier-to-navigate mobile interface. By downloading the new PlayOn app to a Windows Phone, customers can stream online content from PlayOn’s 100+ online channels to their smartphone.”

While PlayOn is not free, one will say that the prices are extremely reasonable, where customers will be able to select from an annual or lifetime subscription. There will also be additional costs where select channels are involved, so choose wisely. For those who are interested, you will be able to download PlayOn for Windows Phone over here. For those who have given it a go already, how do you find it so far?

PlayOn Delivers Streaming TV To Windows Phone

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My friend Candice, a Talmud Professor, recently posted her hope that the fighting ends soon in Israel and Gaza, with a note of concern for her sister in Jerusalem who plans to get married later this month. Her colleague at UCLA, Awad, a Palestinian American, responded that his sister, too, was planning an August wedding, hers in Ramallah. It turns out that both celebrations are planned for the same day, so these two friends shared blessings that they might both dance at their sisters’ weddings and meet for coffee afterward. “It turns out,” Candice told me, “we really all want the same thing.”

Look at this story as a conflict Rorschach test. Many will read it and say: this is precisely the problem. We do not all want the same thing. We want quiet, they want our destruction. We build schools, they build terror tunnels (alternatively: we want freedom, they ignore our suffering until rockets start to fall). We protect civilians, they target them. This is not a battle between two rights, it is an epic battle between life and death, good and evil.

But some will read it and say: this is the heart of the matter. At the end of the day, human beings-Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians-yearn for the chance to live and love in freedom and with dignity. Recognizing our shared humanity is the only way we’ll ever have a chance at peace.

This latest round of warfare has revealed unprecedented polarization. Decent and reasonable people are stunned to discover how hard it is to find common ground with other decent and reasonable people; everyone seems to feel that the rest of the world has gone mad. This matters now more than ever because many have argued that there is no military solution to this conflict, that when the fighting finally ends the only thing that will have been made clear is the necessity of a diplomatic solution. This means that grueling conversations about a shared future, including talk of borders, water rights and refugees, will have to emerge from a context of exacerbated contention and distrust, rooted in radically conflicting narratives. The morning after the fighting ceases, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, will have to contend with the devastating aftershocks of grief, pain and fear, which have made it so hard for us to even see one another.

That’s why all the talk about sympathy and empathy and self-reflection, even during war time, is not only spiritually essential, but also strategically critical.

I cannot speak with authority for the Palestinian community, but here’s how things look in much of the Jewish community: over the past month in Israel and abroad, many have been holding our collective breath, obsessively checking in with family and friends, anxiously waiting to be reassured they and their children are safe. We worry about the toll the sirens will take on the Israeli children who take shelter from Hamas rockets multiple times each day, rockets intended to kill, maim and wreak havoc. Another generation of children raised with fear embedded in their hearts. Last week we learned of families in the South whose children for months heard strange voices in their home at night but could never tell where they were coming from. Now they know: there was a terror tunnel being built just beneath their home.

And we see the dreaded notifications about young Israeli soldiers killed trying to upset Hamas’ military stockpile. Greenberg, a father of three, salt of the earth. Bar Rahav, who played water polo. Bar-Or, with his pregnant wife and one-year-old daughter. Shamash, married only five months ago, who went to Haiti to help rebuild after the earthquake of 2010. Steinberg, the Lone Soldier from Woodland Hills. The always optimistic Biton. Because it’s a small nation and serving in the IDF is obligatory, every family in Israel is touched.

Add to that the perilous resurfacing of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe.

This is a lot to hold, it’s true. Which is precisely why some are pained by the suggestion that the Jewish heart must nevertheless make space to hold Palestinian suffering as well. We do not want to see the twisted images of the four Bakr boys on the beach, all between nine and eleven years old: sweet boys, from a family of fisherman. We do not want to hear about the twenty-five members of the Abu Jama’e family or the shelling of a UN school in Gaza. The death toll keeps climbing: thousands of families shattered, lives and homes and dreams uprooted. It’s not easy to talk or think about it, especially when we’re worried for our own kids.

But seeing the humanity in the other is not an act of disloyalty or an abdication of Jewish values. It is the deepest manifestation of Jewish values. A false dichotomy has been set up between particularism and universalism. Do you care about your tribe or do you care about the world? But I am a Jew AND a human being. It is precisely because my people knows terror and recognizes the world’s silent complicity that my heart is awake to human suffering. So many Jews expressed shock and disgust at the murder of Palestinian teen Muhammed Abu Khdeir last month. But know this: the road from callousness to brutality is short and direct. If we abide the growing apathy toward Palestinians, Israeli society will find itself overcome not by individual incidents, but by waves of racist violence.

We are now in the beginning of the month of Av, the time in the Jewish calendar dedicated to holding the memory of the destruction of the Temple, when nearly one million Jews were killed or died of starvation and most of the rest sent into exile. Our Rabbis grappled for centuries with how a loving God could have allowed innocents to suffer so profoundly. The answer they came to: we weren’t so innocent. They draw a direct line from sinat hinam, senseless hatred among Jews, to catastrophe. Rabbi Asher Lopatin teaches in the name of the Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv): the problem is not having strong ideas, but dismissing other people’s ideas as heresy. This is so dangerous, he argues, that it led to the destruction of the Temple.

So the nine days before Tisha b’Av became days not only of national mourning but also of reflection. The mourning aligns perfectly with our people’s collective emotional state these days as the number of fallen soldiers continues to rise, each one a national tragedy. But what about the self-reflection? There are some who insist on reminding us that we must remove the protective armor from the heart, look beyond our victimization and vulnerability, consider how we got here, what could have done differently and how we might find a way out. They reflect, knowing that for even intimating a need for compassion Israeli artists have been mocked, writers marginalized and academics castigated. Even former heads of the Shin Bet have been scorned. But their introspection is born not out of self-hatred, but out of love for their country and its people. I listen carefully to those animated by core Jewish values and the founding vision of the State, those willing to be mocked and derided, those who risk being blocked out of bunkers when the sirens sound (yes, this actually happened at a recent peace rally in Tel Aviv). It may feel like a nuisance to be reminded of the humanity of your enemy’s neighbor’s child. But it is precisely those unwilling to let us forget, I am certain, who will save us from the abyss.

As for me, I will not wave someone else’s banner or shout slogans that don’t honor all the sides of my heart. I will continue to strive to recognize the painful complexity of this situation. I will take solace in the fact that for Jews, unity does not mean uniformity. I love Israel. I care deeply about the lives of my brothers, sisters and friends there, some of whom are now serving in Gaza. I want Hamas’ horror-show terror schemes to be thwarted. I also grieve the deaths of Israel’s neighbors and their children. I yearn to hear acknowledgment that Hamas’ vulgar fanaticism was able to root in part because the 47 year occupation seeded despair amongst Palestinians. I understand that the rapidly shifting realities of the Middle East make peace more challenging now than ever, but I want Israeli and Palestinian leaders to invest as much time, ingenuity, and resources in a diplomatic resolution to the conflict as they invest in the military option. I pray that all of us, left and right, Israeli and Palestinian, despite our grief, pain and fear, will be able to stretch our hearts to see one another.

I pray that shouts of joy and gladness will be heard on the streets of Jerusalem and Ramallah at the weddings of Candice and Awad’s sisters. And I pray that these two friends can sit together afterward and dream great dreams about the future. Because, at the end of the day, they both really w

The black-and-white beans danced around the screen. The heartbeats thundered through the speakers. My wife and I could not believe our eyes. We knew exactly what they were: twins.

My mind raced: We are already the proud parents of twin toddlers and a single baby. We are not planning to have more kids. We are actively working against the possibility of another pregnancy. We do not feel like the timing was right. We do not have the resources in place. We are adapting well to the three kids we have. Regardless of the thoughts on planning or preparation, we met a new reality on the screen.

Though they are strangers, I quickly fell in love with those beans on the screen. There was a deep, undeniable understanding that those two children belonged to me, and I to them. I have had my doubts that I could love any more children as much as I love the three children we already have… until I saw the screen.

Sometimes we are not ready or prepared, and yet love finds us anyway. The scenes of children crossing our borders and arriving to this country have touched me no less than the scene I experienced on the sonogram. Now we are a nation sitting next to a metaphorical sonogram machine and staring at the screen. The concerns that I had are no different from the concerns that many in this country have. We were not planning on more children immigrating. We were actively working against the possibility of any more children crossing the border. We don’t feel like the timing is right. We feel as if we do not have the resources in place for more children. We were adapting well to the immigrants who were already here. Regardless of the thoughts on planning or preparation, there is a new reality that has met us on the screen. Though they are strangers, it is hard not to fall in love with the faces of all of our human future. These children are our children, and we belong to each other.

When we realized that we were expecting twins, my wife and I could have allowed our plans and preparations to cause us to get upset and angry. We could have blamed each other. We could have blamed the failed birth preventions. We decided not to waste time on such trivial matters; there are children to love. Our nation can be angry that our plans and preparations have been met with unexpected increases in immigration, or we can open our hearts at the realization that there are children to love.

There are often more questions than answers. There certainly are for us. God meets us in those places of questions and dangerously guides us past our borders to a place of love. There are children waiting there who need our help. Will we open our hearts and follow the love we felt when we first saw them on the screen?

Today I join religious leaders and immigration activists to give my body up for arrest in an act of civil disobedience at the White House. I commit myself to this act because I know that the God who loves all children regardless of their nation of origin will be standing with me. Will you stand with us wherever you are?

Amen.

Three separate events in Washington Thursday served as reminders that America’s big banks continue to pose risks to college students, consumers, and taxpayers.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group were among lawmakers and organizations warning that college students and their families are being harmed by financial institutions that either refuse to reduce student debts, push borrowers into default, or prey on low-income students through campus-sponsored banking products that hit them with high fees when they try to access their federal student loans.

Meanwhile, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said it would explore whether new rules were needed to limit the tens of billions of dollars in overdraft fees large banks reap at the expense of households. The agency found that consumers, on average, pay higher fees than the amount by which they’ve overdrawn their accounts.

And an 18-month examination by the Government Accountability Office found that investors likely perceived the nation’s largest banks as “too big to fail” in the years immediately before and after the latest financial crisis, resulting in lower funding costs than their smaller peers simply because investors thought that taxpayers would prop up a failing big bank. Though the watchdog’s report carried “a heavy dose of caution and nuance,” its main author, Lawrance Evans, told the Senate Banking Committee, the same probably would happen in another financial crisis as investors would assume that federal authorities would use taxpayer funds to prevent a big bank from failing. Washington trade associations representing big banks and the Treasury Department cheered part of the report that noted big banks may have had to pay investors more to fund their operations last year than small banks — evidence, they said, that “too big to fail” is over.

Six years after the height of the financial crisis that triggered the most punishing economic downturn since the Great Depression, Thursday’s reports and warnings collectively suggested that the measures President Barack Obama signed into law four years ago intending to prevent another financial crisis didn’t go far enough.

“These banks are not just too big to fail,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said during an interview with Bloomberg TV. “They’re too complex to regulate. They’re too big or too complicated to manage. Look at the problems these largest banks have had.”

Since 2008, big U.S. and foreign banks have spent close to $100 billion to settle federal and state allegations of wrongdoing, including accusations that they:

1) Illegally seized borrowers’ homes.
2) Cheated towns across the country that had issued debt.
3) Ripped off troops.
4) Manipulated benchmark interest rates.
5) Misled investors when selling them home loans that had been bundled into securities.
6) Duped homeowners into taking out expensive mortgages.
7) Rigged markets to bolster their trading positions.
8) Processed payments for alleged terrorists and genocidal regimes.
9) Helped Americans evade U.S. taxes.
10) And enabled Mexican drug cartels to launder their money.

Authorities also have accused large financial institutions of misdeeds that include ignoring signs that Bernie Madoff was engaged in a massive Ponzi scheme, and tricking households into paying for worthless credit card products. In most of the settlements that ended government probes into banks’ misbehavior, the banks neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

Regulators around the world now are investigating whether big banks attempted to manipulate the foreign exchange market, where currency prices are set and more than $5 trillion is exchanged daily.

Last year, during a speech focused on banks perceived to be “too big to fail,” one of the top U.S. financial regulators said that some of America’s largest financial institutions appear to lack respect for “law, regulation and public trust.”

“There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions,” William Dudley, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in November.

Brown suggested that the litany of wrongdoing committed by big banks stems from the perception that they’re either too big or important to be allowed to fail. “Ultimately the problem is that this just encourages risky behavior,” Brown said.

Some of the behaviors that could be considered risky or wrong were detailed on Thursday.

In its report and during an accompanying call with the news media, the federal consumer bureau noted that the typical fee consumers pay when overdrawing their bank account is $34. But those fees are usually levied for transactions of $24 or less, and the majority of overdrafts are repaid to banks within three days.

“If a consumer were to get a loan on those terms, that would equate to an annual percentage rate of over 17,000 percent,” said Richard Cordray, CFPB director. “Overdraft fees should not be ‘gotchas’ when people use their debit cards.”

Cordray added: “We need to determine whether current overdraft practices are causing the kind of consumer harm that the federal consumer protection laws are designed to prevent.”

In response to the CFPB’s report, Richard Hunt, president and chief executive of the Consumer Bankers Association, a Washington trade group, said, “These debit card services are completely optional, and consumers who freely choose to utilize the service can subsequently opt-out at any time.”

Separately, during a hearing held by the Senate Banking Committee, Christine Lindstrom of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group warned lawmakers that students at colleges that have entered into partnerships with individual banks typically get a raw deal through steep and unusual fees, such as being charged for not using their debit cards.

“On a college campus where students are a captive audience and a bank is getting an exclusive deal, that deal should actually be far superior for the students who are exposed to that deal and being marketed to than is available on the open market. But, in fact, that is not the case,” Lindstrom said.

The hearing touched on a variety of bank-caused concerns bedeviling college students and recent graduates, including lenders’ reluctance to forgive education debt incurred by students who subsequently died and saddled their parents with the bills. Hunt, the financial industry representative, said he expects banks to broaden their efforts to help borrowers in distress.