Slay the AOL Monster (Good Article by Robert Locke)

. I hope that AOL (with the exception of Netscape) dies a financiall painful death so that Ted Turner's gift of stock and money to the United Nations becomes not worth the paper it was printed on.

Very well said. We have to be as careful of the web as we do the NYT.

i genrally agree with the sentiment that aol--timewarner is a liberal organization detrimental to society.

unfortunately, they do have a good user friendly product for the average or novice computer user. hence their popularity. as users become more knowledgeable they will go to cheaper, less sophisticated ISPs who allow you to use the software on your pc. aol's pricing strategy will soon catch up with them as well. personally, i find it ludicrous to pay $55 a month for one family account on high speed that only allows one user on the account to be on-line at a time.

it was not politics that drove me from aol -- it was price.

As a techie-nerd, AOL disgusts me

<BLUSH>Although I use Qwest broadband at the home/office, I confess to having AOL on my laptop to run when I'm on the road and have to resort to dialup.</BLUSH> Is there any other ISP that has local numbers everywhere in the US?

There are several ISP operators with local numbers everywhere. My present (Mindspring.com) is really Earthlink. Earthlink bought Mindspring a while back but left the Mindspring name intact so users would not have to change their addresses.

Significantly, Earthlink is on record as having a corporate policy of NOT restricting or controlling users activity except for the "anti-spam" software, which is at user's option. During the recent flap about the government's "Carnivore" email scanning program, Earthlink said they would not cooperate in it.

They have numbers all over the US. You can look on their support page at: http://support.earthlink.net/support/ and either look up numbers by state, or if you know the number of the phone you will be using and it will give you the nearest Earthlink server number.

I have used several providers over the years. I now have Earthlink (Mindspring) DSL. As a DSL subscriber you get unlimited DSL access from home and 20 hrs/mo free dial-up for your portable. (if you subscribe to dial-up it is of course unlimited also) It also gives you a back-up in the rare instances when DSL goes down. (In about 3 years use, it has had almost no interruptions) Also they have good support people, and usually no long wait to get them on the phone.

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.