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VoIP Booming in Africa
securitas writes "The NY Times reports on the rapid growth of voice-over-IP telephony (VoIP) in sub-Saharan Africa and the battles it is waging with the government monopolies/ILECs. VoIP upstarts are taking market share from the government telcos, making it vastly more affordable to make a phone call since they don't charge the usual exorbitant tariffs and excessive user fees. Governments have responded by shutting down these operations, seizing equipment and cutting off service to lines they suspect of using Internet telephony. Part of the boom is related to the wait times for getting a phone line (Ghana Telecom has a backlog of 300,000 line requests), poor quality of service (50% of time you get a busy signal instead of a dial-tone) plus the willingness to trade voice quality for basic service. Foreign companies are now setting up VoIP call centers and multinationals like gold giant Newmont Mining plan to use VoIP for communications in and out of Africa. Some observers call Accra the next Bangalore, predicting a boom for the region that may make sub-Saharan Africa a major technology hub. This fits nicely with Kofi Annan's drive to use the Internet and wireless networks to change the lives of the poor."
So how long until we start outsourcing jobs there?
ah well - i've got karma to burn anyways :-P
Our offshore call center uses VoIP. Quality is shakey, it is difficult to hear, and calls get dropped or crossed with other service providers out of that facility. If Ghana has no other option (the 300,000 waiting list makes it sound like they don't) then I guess anything is beter than nothing, but as a professional business tool I don't think VoIP is there yet for rock solid stability and clear communciation.
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
...this will be the start of the demise of telephone networks - at least over in Africa, anyway. VoIP is getting more and more refined, along with more and more applications, such as the GPL'd Asterisk software PABX system. Most of the larger PABX systems I've seen around give the capability for VoIP links to other offices and if suitable gateways become more widely available, the move to VoIP will slowly but surely become more widespread as the larger companies that deal with the countries that have widespread VoIP penetration start to use those links to reduce the cost of making phone calls.
Can't come soon enough for my liking.This is but one more great example of how monopolies can be good for markets; Put enough pressure on a resource, and people will find alternatives.
It would be great if this could help uplift the entire continent, but I still have my doubts. Corporations bring in the money, and no corporation is going to set up shop in a country with no stable government... which seems to be a real theme on that continent.
Blah blah blah. Blaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Oh good, they can start using a more logical radix. All that logic will certainly cut the aggression and wars there.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
VoIP Booming in Africa
A good highpass filter will take care of that booming which is usually caused by microphone handling. Set your rolloff at about 50Hz.
*RIMSHOT*
But this is /. , so we will mark this as off-topic.
It isn't until you see an article like this that you realize exactly how much you take for granted when you make a simple phone call. Can you imagine if the Government in your country forced you to use their own crappy telephone service? It's kind of surprising that some people complain about the breaking up of AT&T but the end result is better, cheaper phone service.
*twitch*
I am Neal, Boy of Cow, and I please to have your assistance! My father was the operator of a VoIP service until the government of Ghana have responded by shutting down the VoIP operation, seizing his equipment and cutting off service to lines it suspect of using Internet telephony. I have an OC-48 of bandwidth available for all ur spamming need, but 1st u must deposit me the IP addresses of 256 open proxies of stupid lusers with open proxies on verizon.net, attbi.com, rr.com, charter.com, or cogentco.com! PLS HELP, U HELP ME, I CAN HELP U! GOD BLESS U!!!1!
I don't really get the hype around VoIP nowdays. In the last few years my local+long distance phone bill went from $30 per month to $20 per month. And I call a lot, especially from California to my family in The Netherlands. My Internet bill on the other hand went from $9.95 (modem days) to $49.50 for fairly standard DSL (1.5M/768K). So in the time they got us VoIP, the costs have shifted enough that it becomes rather insignificant.
I am not sure it is ironic. On the contrary, it may be expected. Since they do not have the same existing infrastructure, and investment in and desire to depreciate same, it is easier for them to start over from scratch. They may not have to worry to the same extent about obsoleting existing equipment and infrastructure overnight, bankrupting companies and people, and threatening the powers that be.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
"...predicting a boom for the region that may make sub-Saharan Africa a major technology hub."
Yep, companies love to move to areas with high levels of corruption and where people murder each other because they put a curse on them.
but as a professional business tool I don't think VoIP is there yet for rock solid stability and clear communciation
As a professional business tool, as it's discussed in the article, companies like Newmont (the second largest gold producer in the world) will most likely use dedicated or leased lines (and probably VPN for security) to get to the Internet backbone, at which point VoIP's QoS has a much higher likelihood of being stable and clear.
A company like Newmont will not allow critical corporate communications to be transmitted with a technology that can't perform to the high levels that it is accustomed to. Newmont can afford the best, so this seems to be an indication that whatever VoIP solution Newmont is using is more than capable of handling the task.
I hope you are not serious... It would be a shame for anyone that has taken the time to learn as much about computers and technology as the kids in the slashdot crowd to condescend to the level of trailer park intellect. Maybe you should get out of your house once in a while, talk to a black that isn't holding a forty or 'smoking crack' and maybe your viewpoints will change a little. ...better yet, just keep believing what your dad/uncle/brother taught you and live life lonely bitter and ignorant. you are probably not joking and are probably too intelligent to change your viewpoints
Make it so friggin expensive that no one can afford more than 1 call a month.
It's not ironic at all and it shouldn't be surprising either.
Historically Africa has had a whole series of problems that we aren't going to get deep into here, including the legacy of colonialism, wars (part of the legacy), famine and disease. These problems have prevented African nations from reaching their full potential and resulted in an underdeveloped telecom infrastructure (among other things, but that's for another discussion).
In the West, which has had relative stability for the last 60 years, the conditions were right to put ito place a vast and sophisticated telecom infrastructure.
We, as users, now can't conceive of picking up the phone and NOT hearing a dial tone. Think: when was the last time you DIDN'T get a dial tone?
We are also used to superior voice quality and in most cases we won't settle for less. That is one reason why we don't have widespread VoIP deployment in the West.
The traditional metric in telecom for the last few years is an 80/20 split. That means 80% of network traffic is data and 20% is voice traffic. Now invert that to get the revenue numbers. That means 80% of your revenues come from the 20% of voice traffic. That is the main reason why we don't have widespread VoIP deployment in the West.
The numbers are now probably closer to a 90/10 split, or at least moving towards that ratio. This is the reason that carriers are now moving (or planning to move) to an all-IP network. The catch is that you can't jeopardize that 80%+ revenue stream due to voice traffic. We won't see widespread VoIP in the West until the QoS is sufficiently high enough that we can't distinguish between a regular voice call and a VoIP call.
Try doing THIS Dance Dance Revolution song!
It's ashamed this was marked a troll, it's actually a good idea. Have those kid's parents held responsible and they'll stop having 15 children. There really *is* plenty of food there, but the overpopulation is the bigger problem.
Lucky you. You weren't born in the Congo. They can't go to the local 7-Eleven and buy 'ribbed for her fucking pleasure' condoms like you can. Then again, you probably don't need them anyways because what kind of moron girl is gonna put up with that sort of idiocy.
Somebody introduce McDonalds over there so they can get fat and sue McDonalds and then be rich.
1. INTRODUCE MCDONALDS TO AFRICA
2. AFRICANS GET FAT
3. ????? THE ANSWER, IS TO SUE MCDONALDS!
4. PROFIT!!!!!1
See! I've fixed the world's problems! Praise me!
asswipe michael went on a mod-bombing spree with this thread. oh well, the idiot will never learn.
Vonage (http://www.vonage.com) offers unlimited VOIP for $40/mo.
As someone in the UK who occasionally has to phone information lines, as well as a most being either French or Indian, it normally sounds like a bad mobile connection - (I know VOIP can be nice but) does that suggest VOIP is taking off with bigger European companies under circumstances?
...this will be the start of the demise of telephone networks - at least over in Africa, anyway. VoIP is getting more and more refined, along with more and more applications, such as the GPL'd Asterisk [asterisk.org] software PABX system. Most of the larger PABX systems I've seen around give the capability for VoIP links to other offices and if suitable gateways become more widely available, the move to VoIP will slowly but surely become more widespread as the larger companies that deal with the countries that have widespread VoIP penetration start to use those links to reduce the cost of making phone calls.
I was in Ghana a few months ago for twelve weeks.
VOIP is illegal, aside from strictly personal use as it represents potential for competition with the phone company. Ghana Telecom only wants to implement VOIP such that it may save them more money to increase their bottom line.
In fact, as I understand it, they have implemented it to a rather large degree, and have yet to pass any savings to their extremely poor customer base. Internet cafes outside of the capital, Accra, often pay somewhere in the vacinity of $1000 per month[1] simply in long distance charges, as no ISPs exist outside of the two major cities. Despite the fact that the infrastructure exists to extend leased lines and add pops in many locations throughout the country, Ghana Telecom has no interest.
USAID, in an ill-advised attempt to help has set up and fully funded telco charges for some remote internet cafes but left behind no administration, allowing the established companies to severely undercut their competition.
[1]: 8,400 Ghanaian cedis equal one US dollar. Many people outside of the two major cities (Accra, Kumasi) often make under 100,000 per month. While this is often sufficient for housing and food, twenty cents per minute long distance charges are simply outrageous.
A: NIGGERS don't like any kind of job.
Just like you. You appear to have way too much time on your hands
When one country can leapfrog another because of their reduced infrastructure, they can boom on the second or third generation technology. This is exactly what happened in Germany in the late 1800's when England was stuck with the first generation steel mills. Germany could make the smaller more efficient ones while England was stuck paying off the bigger ones.
IGNORANT FUCK
In the old Soviet Russia, one of the first signs that there is an attempted coup in progress was that the Moscow TV stations were invaded by supporters of whomever is trying to take power. The reason was simple, if you controled the TV signals you controled the easiest means of communications with the people, and one of their few sources of news. You could tell your story uninterfered with, and block the other side's ability to tell theirs.
This is why governments want to control their phone systems, and why they don't really want it to work that well. They don't want it to be too easy for their subjects to communicate with each other, particularlly they're scared somebody's going to discuss the overthrow of those in power. The ability to freely communicate and have at least something that resembles a fair election of leaders is taken for granted in most of North America and Europe, but in other places it's not so easy.
So, by creating a telephone monopoly that makes a half-hearted effort, they've been able to say that they have telephone service for business purposes, while still limiting their people's ability to talk to each other over distance. But, the Internet snuck up on these regimes from behind, and just now they're realizing they forgot to regulate and monopolize it. VoIP isn't that good or reliable compared to well-maintained phone systems, but it's pretty good compared to intentionally mismanaged ones. Competition is usually welecomed because it forces the old monopoly to either perform to the best of its abilities or get out of the game, but this time the monopoly is just crying to the rulers and the rulers see the need to solve this problem the same way they solve any other threat to their ability to stay in power...
VoIP is an idea that looks interesting on the chalkboard but there's no reason for Americans to convert to it when they have an ultra-reliable phone network and pretty good cell phone coverage in populated areas. It's the places that don't have those things that really need VoIP.
yea and how expensive is decent DSL here in NZ?
oh god its insane!
That's perhaps the single best thing about VoIP... You really can't shut it down. If you stop all the VoIP providers in your own country, you are just forcing the providers to operate from another country. TCP/IP packets _can_ get through, no matter what.
What are they going to do to stop international VoIP? A house-by-house search of everyone that has a computer? Checking all in-comming and out-going mail to be sure it isn't going to/from a VoIP company?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hmm. I think I had a good point in that previous post. Mod it up. Why are people pro robot and industrial automation, but get pissed if another person takes away their "right to have a job" ?
Nobody, no government, has a right to force a business owner to pay people they dont want to work for them. When you go shopping don't you look for the best deal? The maker of the best deal deserves your money not someobody asking for an higher price. Better to ask the state for welfare.
Disagree?
Its amazing how open source voip is unknown. Unfortunately not many people know this even exists. What a shame !
Considering what I've heard about African phone service from a professor I had who lived in Africa for a number of years, I would venture to say that VoIP would be an improvement on what they have now. In many parts of Africa, the phone lines are in such bad condition (poorly spliced together, full of dirt and the like), that you're lucky if you can have a conversation through all the static. If they were able to implement Wi-Fi so that it was available to a broad enough segment of the country that people in remote villages could have internet access, VoIP could revolutionize the lives of the average African villager.
Remember, we aren't talking just about business, we are talking about empowering the little guy to have access to the outside world. The more access to means of communication, the less they can be controlled and oppressed by others.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
With the proliferation of mobile phones, the bar has been lowered for call quality, people are used to poor connections, dropped calls, etc. VoIP, even on a poor connection is often preferable to a mobile call.
I use VoIP all day (I have a nice commercial Quintum gateway at home, and at each of our offices). I will get calls from co-workers on my cell, and if I get frustrated (often) I will call them back over VoIP with MUCH better performance. All of our inter-office voice traffic is VoIP.
Your problem with your call center sounds like one of poor IP connectivity, not a problem with VoIP itself. With decent IP connectivity, VoIP call quality, even with compressed codecs, ranges from near-toll quality to far better than your average cell phone call.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
"Remember, we aren't talking just about business, we are talking about empowering the little guy to have access to the outside world. The more access to means of communication, the less they can be controlled and oppressed by others."
Unless those who oppress and control, own the networks in question.
"You really can't shut it down. If you stop all the VoIP providers in your own country, you are just forcing the providers to operate from another country. TCP/IP packets _can_ get through, no matter what."
You know I hope your not that naive? "No matter what" is a rather big range. From "Literacy? What's that?" all the way to "Yum! That last carrier pigeon was good". No matter what is as much a function of "how badly do we want to stop this?" than anything else.
Africa has the Internet? Since when? I thought, like, 40% of the population in Africa haven't never seen or used a telephone.
Along with the 11-meter antenna, all the equipment was housed in a small building full of racks and UPS, and a generator outside. The generator (and fuel storage, fuel delivery services, etc.) had to be rated to be able to deliver hours of power, on a routine basis (daily), because that's how often the power would fail.
Now, that was just the gateway to allow the public phone network to interface to the rest of the world. I also built a pan-African voice and data satellite network for a corporate customer (hint: Exxploit) that simply wanted to bypass all the local telco nonsense and just have a system (albeit and expensive one) that would work regardless. Calls went from city to city (e.g. Libreville to Accra) over the private satellite network and went to the rest of the world via a direct hop to London.
A critical factor in all of this is the ability to get the equipment LEGAL in the country (look up "homologation") -- it's really just an elaborate national shakedown system (as is the european CE mark). The key for us getting the contract was that we had our foot in the door in most of the countries already and could get the equipment in and on the air by riding our existing paperwork.
Anyway, all this is to illustrate that the tariff issue is of critical importance, and solving the technical issues are really secondary -- you've got to find a way to make it legal or the local jackboots will shut you down.
- Chris
P.S. And to illustrate a sadder side of the business, the guy who built the Accra gateway with me, Peter Kennedy, later took a contract job building telecom infrastructure in Chechnya, was taken hostage by Chechen rebels for ransom, and was found decapitated a few weeks later. Not a peep out of the U.S. State Department. Peter was a really nice guy.
One simple rule for its versus it's
HAHAHA! That is just a repost of something I fucking stole from a reply up top which got a 4! And it got a 1, Informative! You should do a better job of actually reading this whole message board instead of slapping points on!
Stupid assholes!
Which is saddest:
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What if you just have a country "full of people who need to be taught not to shoot eachother" ?
You know which country I'm talking about, I bet.
Gotta mention... GnomeMeeting. VoIP for Linux.
Long before Bangalore hosted call centres it had grown into a software development hub...throughout the last decade. I realize there are many kids in here ...so I thought I would just clear that up.
>> I also built a pan-African voice and data satellite network
_You_ have built it or helped build it? Because if you've built it yourself, you must be really close to God Almighty.
Haha, this reminds me of my childhood in smalltown Zambia. The cool thing was to make wire cars. The were made entirely out of heavy wire and you could steer them and everything. Pretty cool. Anyway, my friend and I would go to this big telecom switch in the ground and pull out all the bright colourful wires to adorn our cars. I knew it wasn't the nicest thing to do but it wasn't until later when I looked back that I realized just how evil that was. Ironically enough, my friend ended up working for the telecom company.
On another note, we were one of the few people in town who actually had a phone line. 80% of the time it didn't work though (hmm I wonder why) and when my dad would complain, they would simply unplug someone else's working phone and plug his in, until someone else complained and our phone got unplugged again. Aaah, the good old days.
www.clarke.ca
If you are looking for a nice Open Source VoIP client that works on Windows, Linux, and OS/X, try Speakfreely. For linux/osx track down the Tcl/Tk GUI.
encryption, multiple codecs, NAT, the works.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/
The original author and once-again maintainer is John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. (!!!)
note: the debian package is criminally out of date and www.speakfreely.org is depreciated, out of date, and morphed into a commercial site.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Now it should be easier for me to contact the Nigerian Prince who needs me to transfer his money.
[alk]
Yes I would be pissed off if my job was taken over by a robot. I dont like the new automated self healing server technology, that makes me and all my knowledge and certifications useless.
Do you think I have the time and money to not only compete with 6 billion people, but machines too?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Robots are good for labor based jobs, robots are bad if they learn to think.
Self healing PCs, or PCs which can physically repair themselves would be a nightmare, self programming computers would basically end capitalism as we know it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I dont think programmers would be happy if computers programmed themselves.
I dont think repairmen would be happy if robots repaired computers.
people who get layed off arent happy period, it doesnt matter if you got layed off because someone else took your job or because a computer did it.
The difference is this, when a computer in the USA takes your job, at least the USA is making money off of it, when your job is shipped overseas now some other country is making money off of it, no taxes are paid, no benefits to the US economy.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Then you should also mention the GNU Gatekeeper to manage VOIP networks with Gnomemeeting and other H.323 clients and gateways. Its GPL and runs on Unix and Windows.
One of the worlds largest Voice of IP rollouts is almost complete at the Australian National University (ANU), with over 1500 handsets already installed. For more info see here.
The Quality of Service (QoS) issues (lag, jitter, etc) were overcome using tagged VLANs and prioritising voice over video and other general data traffic. The Gigabit eithernet backbone is in a meshed star topology, supposedly providing five 9's (99.999%) reliability. Multiple gateways connect the internal telephone system to the outside analogue world.
Looks like Africa has some competition.
Disclaimer: The tech scene in Ghana was and is probably changing at a phenomonal pace. Anything I say below could be wrong not only because it might be completely outdated, but also because it's a complicated place both politically and technologically. But to the best of my knowledge, the information below is accurate.
I was in Ghana as a volunteer last August, and I actually worked for a Ghanaian ISP that terminated VOIP calls, in addition to consulting and helping other "ISP's" set up VOIP gateways.
The legality was murky at best. Everyone gave me conflicting answers about whether it was legal or not. From the prevalence (I'll explain later), I would say that it's certainly tolerated. Few people (if any) ever got busted for doing VOIP. Part of the reason is that corruption is so rampant, you can easily dash (bribe) your way out of any trouble if you're willing to pay up.
Most "Internet Cafe's" or ISP there (most) with their own satellite were doing VOIP. The math was easy. A 512 down/384 up connection were costing about $8,000 U.S. per month (this is before fiber became available). You can't sign up any decent amount of dialup customers because most people didn't have phonelines and GT (Ghana Telecom) would take its sweet time pulling lines.
In fact, it took something like 18 months I believe for the NGO that I was volunteering for to get two lines (and I believe they had to totally work their connections). Almost all businesses and expats resorted to cellphones (the dominate player was Spacefon, I believe it's actually a scandinavian company that worked out some sort of a sweet deal that can't be revoked). But it's almost impossible to call a cellphone from a landline or vice versa (another long story, also has to do with the fact that GT is a government owned monopoly).
Internet Cafe's were a joke. They typical charge was something like 4,000 cedis to 10,000 cedis per hour. That translates to about 40 cents to just over a dollar. Nevermind whether the typical Ghanaian can afford those prices, if you have to pay out something like $8,000 per month just for the bandwidth, you simply can't make your money back.
So instead, what you do is to set up an "ISP/Internet Cafe" and you really do sign up customers and such. But what you really do is to get GT to pull a bunch of phonelines to your premises. Then you install a VOIP gateway and negotiate with western telecomms to terminate calls to those phonelines. That was the only way that they can pay for the bandwidth. Even in the U.S., voice services are much more lucrative than data services.
The "ISP" that I worked for not only terminated calls of their own, they also helped other places set them up as well (they charged a consult fee in addition to getting some sort of kick back from the bandwidth provider). I personally help with a couple of those and helped setting up a traffic shaper/bandwidth limiter.
They were actually in negotiations with GT to help them set up a prepaid card system that used VOIP. But I don't believe it ever got anywhere. The trouble with GT is that they had a monopoly and didn't have any incentive to be competitive. And because long distance voice services profits are very high, they have almost no reason why they want to change things.
So while private companies are definitely adopting VOIP, I don't believe GT is actually taking advantage of the technology. I actually sat in on a meeting with some higher-ups at GT. They didn't seem to care that it's a good technology or it would be the right thing to do. The primary interest definitely seemed to focus on how they (personally) would benefit. It's not out in the open of course. And they would never mention it. Only how there are little things that are wrong on your applications and paperwork, and how they just haven't had to chance to pass it on to the right person yet.
Either way, it was certainly flourishing. Just about every client visit where the "ISP/Internet Cafe" that had a satellite, there were VOIP gateways terminating calls.
I spent several months working in Nigeria from 1999-2001. My client, a large business, had installed expensive VSAT links to its six or seven locations around the country - Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, etc. The satellite links provided a data channel (128kpbs, I think) and two voice channels. But what people really used the network for was VoIP, since the normal Nytel phone lines are so bad. People would find a pair of loudspeakers, a microphone, Netmeeting, and then shout at their PCs all day long. Very funny.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
VoIP booms You!
god, chill out dude lol
What's immediately overlooked here is that in sub-saharan countries, it's not always possible to accurately calculate and collect owed taxes based on income. They don't exactly have W-2s in Africa.
A man from Iran has explained to me once that the wealthy made many, many more calls as a child, especially long distance, including international calls. Using telephone tariffs has proved an extremely effective progressive tax within developing countries.
We, of course, could apply this argument with the Internet, by arguing that there are few ISPs in these sub-saharan countries and are usually tightly regulated, so the government has ample opportunity for keeping a grasp on revenue for taxation purposes.
Finally, we shouldn't forget that the Internet was originally a government sponsored project, at least in the United States, and in many ways -- via NASA and the DOD -- continues to be.
I've spent some time in Rwanda. EVERYONE has a cellphone, at least in the cities. MTN RwandaCell seems to be a very profitable business there. Normal phone service is there, but I've heard that you can wait a while to get connected. I've also heard that a "normal" phone line is cheaper. VOIP is illegal; it'd cut into Rwanda Telecom too deep. But, that attitude is changing, as even some of the government Ministries seem to be using it. Rwanda IT people are VERY chafed that some outsider owns the .rw domain and is charging them for its use! (Tuvala got $19 mil to GIVE UP its domain!)
Dogs look up to men; cats look down on men; But Pigs! Pigs can look men square in the eye. -Churchill
The US ?
PLS d0n7 53XX0r m3.
Strange that only third-world countries get named, but even in Switzerland, you can VoIP as a consumer.
See.Digitalphone for the details (click in the upper left corner for the right language). And yes, this is for people who don't even have a POTS line at home, in direct competition to our monopolist Swisscom.
Once again, typical anti-US tirade. When the US *does* intervene, we're the bad guys because our motivations are more complicated than some simple black-and-white morality.
When we *don't* intervene, we're the bad guys. I heard a tirade on CBC (Canadian) this weekend about the failure of the US in Rwanda. I'm sorry, but there was a *Canadian* in charge of the peacekeeping force and it was the fucking Francophones in Europe responsible for getting that political situation set up that way.
I've got news for everyone -- foreign policy *period* is a nasty game of complex motivations that's played for keeps by *everyone*. It never was and never will be a matter of simple nursery-school morality or politics. The US wasn't even a *player* in global foreign policy until 1898 and had no hegemonic power until after WW II. Why blame the US for all the shitty political and ethnic strife that was mostly established by the map-makers in London, Paris, Brussles and Berlin?
"Hello?"
"Hello,
I am sorry for the embarrassment this phone call might cause you as we have not had any correspondence before this phone call. I got your address through my nephew with Nigerian Military Chamber of Commerce industry and Mining during my research for a reliable and trustworthy partner who l can do business with though l did not disclose the nature of the business l intend to do with whoever he recommend for me... "
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
What about feeding the homeless to the hungry? That better?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Here we go again... another gun rights debate... I disagree with your view that gun-owners protect liberties in countries like USA. The fact of the matter is that they don't! At one time, they may have--but that isn't the case anymore. Allow me to explain. A long time ago, governments were very weak. They didn't have strong militaries, their power was limited, etc. During that time, gun ownership probably DID protect liberties of citizens. However that isn't the case anymore. Nowadays, governments are very big and powerful. Their power is immense. For example, governments can carry out mass propaganda campaigns like never before. The police forces are much larger and better armed. The military is far more powerful. And so forth. Consider the power of the government (I'm speaking in general and not necessarily about USA). Where does the govt get its power? It comes from the military and police. If the military and the police were weak, the government would be very weak. In practically every country the military is far more powerful than a gun-toting civilian. A civilian with a gun CANNOT protect their rights anymore. Back in the old days, a gun owner WAS able to protect their rights because the militaries were weak. In fact, the difference between a conscript or soldier and a typical gun owner was very slim. The guns the soldiers used was similar to the civilian, the training wasn't that much better, etc. This all changed in the early 1900's. In particular, the emergence of mechanized armour (like tanks, APCs, etc) essentially meant that a civilian with a gun was next to useless. Civilians either don't have access to tanks or can't afford them! It doesn't matter how many guns and bullets you own. There is no way you are going to take down the US military. You could empty your gun while a soldier in an APC smokes some weed ;) The point is... the discrepancy in power between a civilian gun-owner and a government gun-owner (eg. police, military, etc) is so great that guns are next to useless.
There are many examples which pretty much illustrate what I'm saying. Consider something like Waco. If I'm not mistaken, the US governemnt deployed tanks. Do you really think Koresh and his gang could have defeated the US govt? NO WAY!*
(* NOTE: I'm on the far left and do not support Koresh in any manner. If anything, he is an opponent of mine).
Another example would be Afghanistan. Believe it or not, Afghans are one of the most heavily armed populace in the world--far more than Americans. Yet, they couldn't do anything when the Taliban rose, and when US govt invaded. Guns were next to useless. Why? Because the Taliban (for example) were heavily armed and could put down ANYONE. Also don't forget that the Afghans had light weapons too (like RPGs, grenades, etc--things that Americans can't own).
The days of thinking that gun rights will protect the citizens is long over. Guns give a fake sense of protection--just like courts. Neither guns, nor the justice system, can protect citizens anymore!!!
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
New poster to slashdot (long time reader though)... sorry about the paragraph screw-up... I guess I need to include the paragraph tags :(... next time...
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
considering that about 75% of all of my calls
are out-to or in-from a crappy cellphone, voip
can't hurt my average call line quality much if
any.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-