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One Million AOL discs to be returned to AOL
nicedream writes "Two guys from California are trying to give AOL a taste of its own medicine. They're asking people to send them AOL discs, and they're going to drop them off at the company's doorstep once they collect 1 million discs. My favorite quote: "We're going to AOL and say, 'You've got mail"." seems like a better taste would be to dial out and use all 1000 free hours. A million people do *that* and I bet they'd stop filling our mailboxes with the landfill of tomorrow.
Any by doing this, you help keep down the cost of future postage as you just gave the US Post Office $370,000.
Look, they are asking 1 million people to spend upwards of 40 cents each to send a useless CD to them, then they are going to spend how much to deliver the truckload to AOL?
Think about it, that's at least $400,000 dollars down the drain! Why not ask people to contribute $0.40 towards infrastructure costs in their area for public 802.11b hotspots. Tell them to mark any and all AOL mail "RETURN TO SENDER" and AOL will bear even greater costs, at no cost to the consumer.
Egad, people, use your brains.
Besides, AOL is going down the toilet anyway. Their shiny discs aren't going to be very useful to them after a few years as dialup dwindles, especially since broadband doesn't net them nearly as much profit as dialup once did. They're going to change their business model significantly over the next few years - it'll be interesting.
But seriously, put your effort into providing free net access for everyone.
-Adam
Thats BS.
Mail was never much more expensive *before* AOL CDs started soming in. If anything it causes more overhead. An increase in volume through the mail system with mail that very vey few people would actually want.
There would be less overhead if AOL would stop sending out so many CDs. The post office would have that much less to worry about.
You know what I do everytime I go to the mailbox and there is spam mail in my slot - I stick it in the Outgoing mail slot.
One time I walked up to the mailbox when the mailman was busy stuffing it full of crap. I asked him if he would please just not put that stuff in my mail box. He said that there is only one way for him to stop putting such mail that is addressed to "So & So OR Current Resident" and other spammings such as the coupon newspapers and pizza offers - get a P.O. Box.
PMBs are apparently the only thing where there is regulation limiting the unsolicited mailings that are allowed.
Yeah... you wouldn't want to pay a few cents more for your mail to get rid of all this garbage.
After all, there's probably a spot somewhere that isnt a landfill yet.
How long does it take for a cd to dissolve anyway?
I'll wager AOL gives up the CD campaign before they reach their mark, leaving these guys with a really big pile of CDs, and no campaign to protest.
Don't get me wrong, I do think it's a neat idea, I just think they set their sights a couple orders of magnitude higher than is practical.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
I don't know if this is still true (the last time I used AOL was about '94), but once you started using the free hours, AOL needed a credit card number. Just in case you, uh, go over the limit. What they didn't tell you is that if you did go over the limit, you wouldn't be notified; they just quietly started billing you.
Ah, gees, I feel so sorry for you. C'mon! This company is giving you free internet access and now you expect/demand them to send you a curtousy message when you're approaching the magic 1000 hours? I don't see why they are under any obligation to provide this warning service to you. Sure, it would be awfully sweet of them to do so. But, seriously, you should be able to determine after A FEW HOURS if you like the service or not! If you're trying to play some kind of game of getting as close to 1000 hours without going over then I would argue you're really taking advantage of them. Go ahead and do that if you want to 'stick it to the man' but don't be upset when the company doesn't provide warning services to allow you to screw them over more effectively. Gees, how hard is it to write down a log of how many hours on a piece of paper by the computer so you can keep track of this yourself? Accept some responsibility for your actions.
Looking through the comments here I see a lot of "heh-heh, let's stick it to AOL" messages. Why do people hate AOL? Does anyone have a LEGITIMATE REASON for hating them? And I mean something more important than "I don't like getting those disks in the mail". There are lots of evil entities out there in the tech world. Does AOL really deserve to be place side by side with Microsoft et. al in the Technology Hall of Shame? AOL has been responsible for helping millions of people discover the internet.
GMD
watch this
I got my latest AOL coaster (CD) yesterday. It acually came in a metal container. Think of the tins that mints (such as penguin mints or Altoids) come in, but CD sized. I'm not an AOL user. Never have been. Why would they use such a wasteful container? It had to cost 3 times what the CD did - probably more.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody