Andy; I shouldn't have used the word dumb, I know many intelligent
people who do use AOL, it does what they want in a convenient way.
By a large they don't spend near the hours on line or surf
even a fraction of what someone like myself does.
So the suk part sort of depends on what you want out of it.
AOL could never meet the demands a heavy netsurfer would put on her
( liken to the old days of DOS power users ) who never ran DOS in
it's original form.
AS for RE > P.S. No other service can offer Instant Messaging for
ME or my 13 year old. You haven't lived until you've
seen a 13-year old girl with 5 IM's going at once.
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Once again people who enjoy that are not dumb, but they may not be
aware that it's only a copy of what has been available on the
internet ( for free ) for years , it seems MSN, YHOO, ICQ , LOTUS
AOL & all have their own version now, ( but heavy users still sign
onto a free IRC server ) and are not limited by the borders that
all IRC type server specific with their privet software have.
This is sort of like in the old days , do you want the clone computer
that you can change or swap parts in and soup up,? or do you want the
IBM that you have to go back to them to get most anything.
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AOL is to proprietary for someone like me.
Not trying to be a wise guy but IRC has 10000+ times the
users on it than any of the IMs , and it can do all the same
stuff, in most cases better. ( but it's a tad more complex to use
and a new person to it might be intimidated by the huge numbers
of options available. Also getting on a free server can at times
be tricky , and I'm sure AOL as well as the other IMs that have
come into play make that a lot easier, even I use ICQ as it's
so damm easy, ( and free ).
ALSO I'm not sure I'd recommend IRC to a teenager it's a real
nomans land when it comes ( to the rooms they can be attracted
to ) which often are not what they seem to be. However they all
have that problem to some extent and it's hard to say percentage
wise what they will run into per internet adventures.
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I do believe AOL spends a lot of money on a damage control team
that plays down and covers up a lot of the risk to young
kids getting sucked into bad stuff; which mostly seems to move around
to fast to make a case against.
Jim
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