Slashdot Mirror
More Thoughts On How to Wire Senegal
An anonymous reader submits "Last month Slashdot published a story on the Peace Corps' plans to wire Senegal. Now Peace Corps Online has published an article by a volunteer who taught computers in West Africa for two years who recommends that the White House's Digital Freedom Initiative abandon the Western paradigm of 'a computer on every desk' and borrow a lesson from telephony in third-world countries. Since a residential telephone line is a luxury item in West Africa, the 'communication center' has flourished as a private business even in the smallest of towns where it generates profits while sharing the high cost of telecommunication among the whole community. This user model coupled with deregulation of VoIP can be the key to implementation of computer technology in poor countries."
And of course this type of thing begs the question - do they want to be "wired"?
However, I'm not all for this way of doing it. We all know how dirty a single user computer can get, I can't be bothered looking up the /. article ID. Now imagine the same amount of dirt and pathogens times a hundered. Then factor in that not everywhere has battled diseases like tuberculosis as effectivly as we have in the Western nations.
This isn't intended to be racist, sorry if it comes across as such, but I think such a system would be an almost ideal breeding ground for infectious disease.
yes, and the best way to do that is to keep them ill informed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on