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."

Comments

Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants to look at porn in public? (Unless of course, that's your thing...)

My vision:

[phyrestang]

I imagine seeing children in tattered clothing, sitting reading /. complaining about "that damn microsoft"

Right....

[Esion Modnar]

And what better way to help them read but to give them the Internet?

... they could practice up on their grammar by hitting the chatrooms, you know, where the intelligentsia gather, d00d.

Until ...

[torpor]

... they start getting spam for dick extenders, realise just how pitiful the rest of the world is, and go back to beating the shit out of each other over which goat pissed where.

Well, maybe Microsoft can save them.

for a secong there

[geekoid]

I thought someone was trying to wire seagulls.