I can’t even remember the last time I saw a dialup modem, much less used one. When was the last time you used one? Still use one?

Laugh all you want, but as of the end of September, AOL still had 3.5 million subscribers to its dialup Internet access service — a lot more than the number of people who pay for, say, Spotify. And the decline from last year — about 630,000 subs — was AOL’s smallest Q3 shrinkage yet. (AOL credits a “price rationalization program” last quarter that helped them convert 200,000 people to an AOL access subscription.) This time in 2006 and 2007, AOL was losing 5 million customers a year.

For you young’uns who have never experienced a modem, click pic to see and hear what dialing with a modem is like.

As many of you know I wrote a newspaper column in 1984 with a review of the Macintosh computer which was picked up on by Mac fan boys twenty years later and used to condemn me for not immediately falling in the love with the mouse in 1984 and questioning its future. Some people have gone so far as to misquote my commentary which was simply that it – the mouse – was experimental. The primary made-up attribution was that I didn’t want one of these “newfangled” devices. I never said any such thing and this sort of writing I never do. It was wishful thinking by someone hoping to make me look like an old fart, which might be true today, but was not 30 years ago! I’ve seen the misquote appear here and there and manage to get it pulled whenever possible. Anyone who uses it should be ashamed of themselves.

Curiously that 1984 column was re-addressed in 1987 when I was asked to reflect on the then old 1984 column. After the 1987 column I thought the matter was resolved and my take on the Mac corrected.

In hindsight I probably got more mileage out of this Mac Mouse topic than anything I’ve ever done, which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it. The fabled “My Dinner with IBM” comes in at number two. If anyone is interested I’ll dig up the original unedited version of that screed.

So while cleaning the closet I managed to run into an original clipping of the 1987 column for your perusal.

Fukushima… Wasn’t that a movie about… no… hmmm….

The day after the disastrous level-nine earthquake that triggered the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear crisis, March 12, an Israeli expert on air quality and poisoning, Professor Menachem Luria, told Israeli Channel 2: “From what we can gather, this disaster is even more dangerous than Chernobyl.”

At the time, his was a minority opinion in the scientific community; very few believed that a nuclear accident as bad as the 1986 meltdown in Ukraine would occur again. “I think that’s basically impossible,” said James Stubbins, an expert at the University of Illinois, and many others agreed.

Yet, as we are now slowly coming to realize, Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. In a revealing recent feature article published by al-Jazeera, Dahr Jamail conveys the comments of Arnold Gundersen, a senior former nuclear industry executive in the United States.

“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Gundersen asserts. “We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl … The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up.”

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Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomason are MIA!!!

It is the image that has come to define a pivotal point in history, capturing the moment the deadly raid on Osama Bin Laden’s lair was watched in awe by the White House elite. But it appears for one U.S. newspaper, a couple of the people sat with President Barack Obama in the Situation Room that day were not quite elite enough.

Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper Der Zeitung printed a story this week with a subtly manipulated version of the historic image – all the men in the photograph remain untouched but the two women in the picture have been Photoshopped out.
It is thought the newspaper, which is written in Yiddish and serves a small part of the area’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community, removed the women because of religious issues regarding female modesty.

While Mrs Clinton is dressed in the picture in a full jacket, wearing a top beneath that covers her almost right up to her neck, the newspaper never intentionally prints any images of women at all in case they could be considered sexually suggestive. More critical observers suggest the women have been edited by Der Zeitung, which translates as ‘The Time’, because of an ideological objection to women holding positions of power.

Subtly manipulated with scissors I presume. Start the invasion of Brooklyn!