Posted on 06/11/2003 12:38:19 AM PDT by Outraged
I have been paying special attention to the liberal editorial front page headlines that stain my AOL homepage…I haven't documented each and every instance of bias but this latest frontpage pushed me to the limit.
From Tuesday, June 10, 2003, they have a pop up of GW at the Presidential podium and the caption Does he rate a thumb's up? Bush linked War to Weapons, Terror. But Where's the proof?…This underlined bit brings you to the heart of the liberal bias…The title of the linked page is AOL NEWS -- The Bush Credibility Meter…The body reads "He went after Saddam for banned weapons. None have been found (this links to an AP editorial in the guise of news, by Tom Raum) so far. He argued there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaida. High-ranking captives (say it didn't exist.) Is President Bush losing credibility?
So they cite the AP and The New York Times as their sources but they intentionally omit a balancing fact…In short they are another piece of the liberal machinery bent on doing damage to truth and the Republican party.
Where is the mention of (NewsMax)or (WashingtonTimes)?…glaringly absent of course.
Ted Turner does not, nor has he ever "owned" AOL. He was the largest shareholder in AOL Time Warner, and was 4th on the chain of command and at one point became the 2nd richest employee in the world.
He has since sold most of his stock, I do not think he sold all of it. He took a bath and a half in losses. Steve Case is still with the company on the board, but is no longer actively involved.
The head of AOL Time Warner is a man named Dick Parsons, and african american republican who the GOP has been pushing for several years to run for office. As much as he is in charge, he is indifferent to CNN or AOL's media bias. The only time I have ever heard him comment, period on media bias at all was after he was co-chairman of the social security reform committee. He was the republican co-chair, Pat Moynihan was the democrat co-chair (the result was they recommended privatization and congress, or the dems, slammed them and it). His only comment was in regards to critisism that the committee was biased in favor of privatization and he curtly said something like that unlike the media they actually had an open mind and did't have preconcieved notions.
AOL had its uses, many moons ago.
I joined AOL when they only had users in the five digits. It was Version 1.0, and it came on one floppy, and you had to order it through the mail (I've kept that diskette in my desk just for old times' sake).
That was back when AOL charged per-minute for the connection. I had AOL bills in excess of $300 for some months, but I paid it gladly.
In those days, it was a far superior alternative to the BBS's that I had grown addicted to (anybody out there remember Eskimo North? I was a regular there for a long time). It wasn't connected to the WWW, because it didn't exist. The Internet was still merely a project that only the military and universities were connected to. I joined AOL because it was better than Compuserve (had an account there, too).
I was there when AOL later announced that their email system was now connected to this new "Internet" thingy and we could use our username with "@aol.com" to send and receive Internet mail.
I met three different girlfriends in AOL Christian Chat rooms, and I still correspond with two of them even now as good friends. It was a great time. AOL filled a need and did it better than anyone else (compuserve, prodigy...).
AOL has struggled for a long time to remain relevant in the age of www. The truth is, sadly, they offer services that are now better done by others. They had a pretty good global ISP thing going on, but they still try to be a content provider when they would be better if they just settled on being a global ISP. Nobody wants to pay for content, but people will pay for service, capacity and access). Like many things, they were good at what they did in the old days, but their time has passed.
I finally cancelled my AOL account just last year. But it was a moment of mixed feelings.
I mentioned this in response to one of their customer surveys...but I ultimately dumped AOL because of connection problems they kept blaming on my computer...which has happened numerous times...which in fact turned out to be problems on their end.
The worst thing was paying to have their radical leftist propaganda shoved in my face everytime I logged on.
I'm glad to hear their are losing customers left and right.
I fixed a computer yesterday that had this problem. The man had left AOL, and tried another dial-up ISP. He switched more recently to a cable modem, but still got download speeds of about 8K/sec.
After disabling AOL's proxy cache, speeds jumped to about 150K/sec. The cache appeared to route all his port 80 traffic through ie3.proxy.aol.com.
You could gather proof as well: Setup AOL on a spare machine. Use it briefly. Then add Zonealarm and see what it blocks.
"Appeared to route?" Not proof my friend. More like a technical one-off anomaly. I was just joking before when I asked for proof. Your claim is utter nonsense, but I didn't want to be so blunt about it. AOL could not, even if it wanted to, cache http addresses from former customers. You're talking tens of millions of people and serious hardware resources. Do you really think other ISPs would put up with that? Do you really think no one would notice? Perhaps you're unaware that AOL's use of cache is a major topic of discussion and debate among website owners, and among the technical gurus who support the net. All aspects of its proxy cache functions are common knowledge among those guys, and they closely monitor AOL's use of the website content AOL temporarily stores in its cache. Do you think they don't know what hops visitors make to their sites, and that somehow it skips their attention that everyone, AOL member or not, just happens to through ie3.proxy.aol.com?
C'mon. Put your thinking cap on. AOL is not secretly controlling people's computers without anyone knowing about it.
They did the same thing to me. I disconnected with them in Oct. one year(2000?) and in April(2001) I noticed they were still deducting the monthly charge on an account at that point I didn't even use very often at all. I did notice that I could still access my email but just thought that it was free, my bad, but at the time I was really computer illiterate and didn't know. I know my son uses IAM and from what I can tell it is free so I just assumed. When I called they threw that in my face that I was still accessing my email, which I was only doing once or 2 times a month. So they agreed to stop the deduction and credit me for 1 month. Well time passed and 2 months later the same thing, the deduction was still there and when I called back same thing, there was no reasoning with them, they never stopped the deduction nor did they credit my account.
It is over with now, except for a 6.00 deduction that is from AOL MARKETING and they have no record of it but I DO. They can't find anything showing I have an account with them on this but I DO. So i FAXED some info to them this past FRIDAY, like my statements showing the deductions and still haven't heard from them. I will call them tomarrow. This has been a fiasco. IF YOU INSIST ON USING AOL, AND THEN STOP THE SERVICE, KEEP TRACK OF YOUR BANK STATEMENTS CLOSELY, CALL IMMEDIATELY, GET NAMES, AND RECORD EVERYTHING. They are skanks and will play you if you let them.
AOL is designed for people who don't know anything about the Internet, and don't want to. That's why I wrote:
>>In describing the ease with which one can learn HTML, I like to use the example "even some AOL customers have learned how to write it!"<<,.
Who said anything about "secretly controlling?" The speed reduction is the big thing. The privacy issue is merely annoying.
More like a technical one-off anomaly
Sorry, but no. I seen this in five systems. Some were running older versions of the AOL client, ver 4 and 5. The other two had newer client software.
Appeared to route?"
I described how to gather evidence for yourself. This is a better way to proceed than arguing, since, frankly, you wouldn't believe any evidence I offer you.
BTW, some of your earlier comments look identical to ones found here.
The only reason I have kept my email is it's such a pain to change and communicate the new address to everyone.
The best solution to this problem is for you to purchase your own domain name. I have an uncommon last name so I purchased my last name, lets say smith.com, from yahoo (domains.yahoo.com).
These domains have unlimited email forwarding. So I tell everyone my email address is ProudGOP@smith.com and I use that to register at all the web sites. I set it up the domain to forward everything to my current email account. When I change isps, I change the forwarding to my new email address and no one knows the difference.
A great side effect is that I have mapped all my relatives emails as well. They all have their name@smith.com email and get the same benefits I do.
By the way, one of the main reasons AOL users have such a bad rep is because when they got internet access, they were all relatively inexperienced users and they tended not to follow "Netiquette" It is a bit elitist, but back then band width was at a premium and people got mad when a newbie didn't read the FAQs before starting unnecessary chat topics. AOL became synonomous with newbie.
I signed on to CompuServe in 1995 because they advertised on Rush. Then AOL bought CompuServe. Now, CompuServe is full of dropped connections, it's slower, etc.
I still use CompuServe because it's my email, and everyone knows it. But I plan (hope) to drop CompuServe and switch to DSL or cable latter this year, after I buy a new laptop.
Here's my laptop quandry: I'm torn between a Toshiba 1955-S803, which has a beautiful 16" SXGA (1280 x 102 screen), or an IBM Thinkpad G40 with a 15" SXGA+ (1400 x 1050) screen. (I've not been able to find the Thinkpad 40 in any showroom.)
I wonder, will icons and fonts be too small on a 15" 1400 x 1050 screen? The Toshiba has a great screen, but the IBM appears to have a more ergonomic keyboard.
But as soon as I get a new laptop and move all my files and programs to it, I'll look into dropped CompuServe.
But here are some laptop screen issues that concern me:
AOL users have that welded-on training wheels approach to computing, by and large. They're always the ones, five years after they bought their computer, who endlessly ask dopey questions they should have figured out four years prior.
If I have to answer one more "how do I turn on FreeRepublic?" type question again, I'm going to pop.
If not exposed to the "real" Internet, stuck with AOL, people stay ignorant of how to be not only computer-literate, but actually productive, and fall behind even the 5th-grader next door.
It's not only a lame service, it retards users' brains. In My Humble Opinion, of course.
Ted Turner doesn't own AOL-Time-Warner. He owns some 4 or 5%. He's the largest shareholder, but he doesn't even control the company anymore. He was squeezed out of control by Gerald Levin, who was later himself squeezed out.
No, but does anyone remember GEnie? I signed on to CompuServe and GEnie in 1995.
GEnie was the second largest online service in the 1980s. (600,000 at their peek). It stood for General Electric News & Information Exchange. GE sold GEnie in the late 1990s, and GEnie folded on December 27, 1999 -- mainly because they had so few subscribers by then (some 25 - 35,000) that they didn't want to upgrade for Y2K.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.