According to the story, they met online when she was 15, and he was in his early 20s. Two years later, when she was 17, they arranged to meet for sex. As far as I know, the age of consent is 16, meaning that a 17 year old can legally agree to have sex with an older person. I don't see how the monitor committed a crime, unless he propositioned her before she turned 16, and that might be difficult to prove in court.
As for AOL being liable, that's a stretch too. They probably disclaim all liability in their terms of use, and unless she can prove some fraud or negligence on the part of the employee, I don't see how they can be held liable.
This whole story smacks of a frivolous lawsuit by somebody who just realised that she might be able to embarass a big company into settling rather than face publicity.

I have my satellite internet through a group called SkyCasters (http://skycasters.com), since they explicitly say they support non-windows platforms (Mac OS X in particular for me). I have a DW4020 stack - transmit unit, receive unit, and a simple cisco switch on my network. I just point my machines to it for routing. Support with them has been pretty good, even though if you're having problems with internet software (like IRC or AIM), they won't help you. I've never had more than a 5 minute wait when calling support. They're geared to supporting the business customer rather than the end-user PC rabble.

I haven't experienced any of the problems folks here have mentioned, like download throttling. I get the same download speeds at any time during the day, no matter how much I've downloaded up to that point. Connectivity tends to be pretty good. High-overcast days are the worst, since apparently that bounces around the transmit signal. Rainy days and snowy days generally aren't a problem (as long as I keep the dish swept off when it snows)

The latency sucks, of course. It's still overall faster than the dialup and ISDN I used to have (which the satellite has replaced). Once the data starts flowing, its great. Forget about online games, and ssh is hugely frustrating for more than a couple of minutes. I end up doing a lot of work locally, then uploading the results, rather than doing the work directly on the remote box.