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Holy shit snacks, does that mean that one day I might be able to use Korean government or online banking website with Firefox???

Probably not, the country's extremely monocultural when it comes to computing tech. ("Not Invented Here" was one of the problems in the first place.) For example, nearly all the PCs there are Windows/Intel/nVidia combos... you really need to jump though hoops and/or be really specific when ordering computers to get anything else. And, only people at Daum and KAIST seem to even have any idea about Linux. Anything outside the Windows (IE6+)/Intel/nVidia mindset is not going to work.

Well, you can start off by looking through the following Israeli documentary that is in four parts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Here's a report of some of the riots that happened in Sweden last summer:

Fifth night of youth rioting rocks Stockholm

It has been reported the following facts:
"Islam in Europe. In Spain: Muslims make up 70% of the prison population, but are only 2.3% of the country France - 66% of the prisons, but only 7.5% of the country Switzerland - 58% of the prisons, but only 5.7% country Norway - 30% of the prisons, but only 3% country Netherlands - 26% of the prisons, but only 5.5% country Belgium - 20% of the prison, but only 6% country Italy - 18% of the prisons, but only 2.6% country UK - 12.6% of the prisons, but only 4.6% country. "

The rape statistics in Sweden is the second highest in the world and a number of cases involving these rapes have drawn quite a bit of attention:

Elin Krantz
Muslim rape wave Sweden
Murder Vasteras

I just found these doing a random googling. There are a lot more cases but I think this is enough to get the point through. There are a number of cases were rapists didn't get any punishment from court among other violence related verdicts. A lot of people say that the judges behave that way out of fear of being accused with ... racism. I'd like to encourage someone else to find sources for this. Only basic google skills are required.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but in looking the answer up to my question I did find an interesting link.

It may strain your definition of PDA a bit, but the history of these machines is neat.

You make a pretty good point. Couple that with that some websites are really poorly designed/implemented and there is a possible disaster. I mean, tech savy people will be fine, but I'm more worried about those who are not.

Example, when my partner finishes some web browsing, I can hear the fan in my current machine going flatout ... watch your cpu usage when you visit this site. There are many other sites out there but this one sticks in mind.

I'm pretty sure the title of "Wi-Fi Point Capital" would be given to some other city if the survey was extended to other cities.

I'm actually thinking of Seoul. South Korea's KT (formerly Korea Telecom) has a well-known Wi-Fi service that covers 'nationwide' called Nespot. According to this article, there were 27,000 Nespot APs back in early 2007. The figure was around 17,000 in 2006 according to this (in Korean), so the number's been growing pretty fast.

Now, while this number is 'nationwide', the coverage is concentrated on major metropolitan cities only. Considering that Seoul has 1/4 the population of the entire nation (1/2 if you cover its satellite cities), there should be around 10,000 APs solely run by KT. Then there's the VoIP phone service that's made popular by LG Powercomm. It already has more than a million subscribers nationwide, and most of the phones are 'wireless' via Wi-Fi AP to communicate between the phone and the network. I can detect one of these APs from my house. These two companies alone probably put out several tens of thousands of APs in Seoul already. If you consider all other private and corporate APs that normally lurks around in buildings and apartments, the numbers would be mind-boggling.

Being Korean and known as somebody who's good with computers, a lot of my friends and family members ask me to look at their computer because "it's running too slow". At first I was more than happy to, but now I dread looking at a Korean computer because:

1. it's running Windows with IE and at least 3 extraneous toolbars

2. it hasn't been defragmented since the computer was first built

3. EVERY website HAS to install software to make it run properly

4. EVERY website the user has bookmarked has at least 5 megabytes of flash (and they're all advertisements)

Everybody in Korea signs up for everything, not knowing how useless the service is, how dangerous it is on their computer, and how much traffic it eats up. Just go to www.daum.net or www.naver.co.kr, the two most popular media portals in Korea. What's worse is that Koreans prefer that kind of interface over Google.

I'm not trying to bash Koreans, Windows, or Internet Explorer at all. It's just that when you put the three together, bad things are bound to happen.

As far as I know google is also far from #1 in Korea. I believe http://daum.net/ is #1 there.

Speaking of ripped off, why does the design of Daum's logo look strangely familiar?

I got mine with 2 packs of 4 2300mAh batteries for about 30$ (sorry, I could be off, I don't usually use $).

I thought I'd mention it because mine came with a 12V wall-wart charger and a car adapter as see here.

Just like with cars, cameras, cellphone technology, etc. They won't be satisfied with playing third fiddle to the Japanese and Chinese, they'll make their own distro, just to be different. Of course, like Kia cars are built locally from Mazda/Ford specs, and like Daewoos are built from GM plans, this will be built from a common base (probably Asianux) and touted as an all-Korean project. What interests me, though, is that this is even being considered as an option. Honestly, I haven't met a single Korean in my 114 months here who has even heard of linux, let alone one who'd actually consider using it. This country is completely hooked on windows, internet explorer and ActiveX. Check out a few typical korean websites for more flash, javascript, popups and other assorted evilness than you can probably bear...

L

According to Alexa.com's traffic ratings, heres the breakdown of the top 5

1. Yahoo.com
2. MSN.com
3. daum.net (Korean)
4. Naver.com
5. Google.com

And dont forget everyone's favorite portal Pajonet.com, whick ranks in at 82,915th place in the world!

Daily dose of news and views and chics at Pajonet.com!