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It also doesn't seem like it would be relevant in this case. According to Korean newspapers, the trainee pilot in command of the B777 (Lee Kang-kook) with just 43 hours on the B777 was 46 years old. The training co-pilot (Lee Jeong-min) with 3200 hours on the B777 was 49 years old. So even if the cultural age-based hierarchy were there, it would've been present as deference to the more experienced pilot.

If it was the older and more experienced pilot who screwed up and failed to note the dangerously low airspeed, pretty much any trainee pilot from any culture would've figured his trainer knew what he was doing. The Korean Ministry of Transportation has already stated that ultimate responsibility lay with Lee Jeong-Min, as he was the trainer on the flight.

You misunderstand this issue and then apply your "logic". Where is it claimed that this lawsuit was prompted by Microsoft having a monopoly on office software in Korea? It's a patent infringement lawsuit, and would apply equally to Apple had they been the offender. And there are Korean and other Asian office software that compete quite well against MS Office. Hancom Office comes to mind. See http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech/200509/kt2005 091220393512350.htm

Wonderful, so now lesbian couples can have male-free baby...mice.

So the race is on, will women replaced men with test-tubes, or will men replace women with robots?

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200605/kt200605041 7203910160.htm

After two divorces from two unfaithful wives, and 20 years of raising two children who might or might not be my genetic progeny, I say - lets just clone ourselves and convert to Stepford wives.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but how is the fact that the packets are not encrypted any different than cell phones? Are most cell phone data encrypted? If anyone knows about this, please post some information.

but before you mod this comment down, check out the facts

It would be good if they had robots to do the dirty work in Korea because as it stands, they think that is what women are for.

I'm holding out for one of these.

MS cant really shut out even one of the major PC distributors, simply because people will buy Dells or HP's regardless what os is on them.

If Korea really cares that much, why dont they just switch their government software to an alternative.

I was under the impression they only had medium to long range surface-to-surface missiles, so their main deterrent has always been the threat of attacking South Korea or Japan.

Except for the North Korean warhead they allegedly found in Alaska.

But that's only Alaska, so who gives a damn.

I blogged this, and found a good 7 more links, excerpt from post below.

"Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology). Whom the team at engadget visited early last year. Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.

mefi thread here.

Update: Meant to include a link to the KAIST homepage... Also they created synthetic skin for robots this week with a 1mm spacial resoltuion, which is the highest to date...."

They are more devolped then embryonic, which is a good and bad thing (they can't become anything at this point, but that is partially good as embryonic cells can easily become tumors). They have proven useful in blood and marrow operations, and have started to show promise in other areas.
Linky:
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200411/kt200411261 7575710440.htm

From an article on Korea and the popularity of Starcraft :
On July 22 last year, 16,251 fans gathered at a baseball stadium in Pusan for the All-star game. At the same moment, around six times more people packed Kwanganni beach in the port to see another professional competition _ the online game ``Starcraft.''

Of course online gaming will become a spectator sport. The question is when will it happen? How will producers make it compelling and fun to watch?

The games themselves will need to be modded for spectators with extra cameras, slow motion replays, avatar close-ups with specially modelled expressions.

And the players will need to be larger than life, their games will be perfomances, their interactions with teammates and other teams will become storylines on the "field" and fleshed out by what happens between games. Rivalry, comraderie, tradgedy will all be played out in this new world for the amusement of TV and online viewers.

If baseball, golf and spelling bees can be spectator events then online gaming will eventually eclipse them all. The producers just need to figure out how to make it work.

In South Korea, this might just work. They're crazy about functional ringtones out there.

Here's the link to an article: http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/biz/200512/kt20051 21220055811910.htm/.

And here's the excerpt:
In addition to the ethical misstep, more critical questions came to the fore about the authenticity of Hwang's customized stem cells after he informed Science that several of the 11 photos in the published report included duplicates.

Science downplays the doubts, confirming the original manuscript held 11 different pictures and the erroneous duplicates were sent by Hwang after the journal asked for higher-resolution photos to make supplements of the paper.

A brief story over on Finextra...

• The investment to build a safe e-banking environment may result in astronomical increases in systems costs given the insecure nature of the electronic commerce infrastructure.
  
• The biggest challenge to the banking sector would be how to make home PCs secure. Hackers are increasingly preying on the home PCs, the most susceptible online link of all. Many bank customers tap in from home, often on a computer with little or no security software.

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200508/kt200508042 0430510440.htm

Prof. Hwang Woo-suk at Seoul National University, South Korea's stem cell pioneer, is under fire for giving too much credit for his strides in cloning research to a foreign scientist. -- 8/4/05

Good old-fashioned nationalist dick-waving.

So you're saying that everyone should become a hippy because 0.001% of the students are committing suicide? Perhaps it would be more productive to just get the depressed kids some counseling and Prozac?

Then of course, Bad Things happen when kids fail even one exam (and their parents get upset) or when they are bullied (because kids don't learn how to interact with each other in a non-destructive way) or simply, when they just can't take the pressure anymore.
Tell me, Mr HappyEngineering, do you think (you're giving a professional opinion, right? and it's only 0.001% after all, right? 1 in a 1000?)... do you think, after his third attempt at slashing both his wrists, a six year old should be given Prozac or councelling? Both, maybe?

Those I found, were interesting reads (if you are indeed willing to learn more).

Pushed to the limit here

[...] While the students' performances look good on paper, the report does not show the emotional impact of high-pressured education. South Korea has the fastest-rising suicide rate in the world. Eight out of every 100,000 15- to 19-year-olds killed themselves in 2003. The stakes are high.

[...] That Korea's suicide rate took first place among OECD countries last year should make us reflect seriously on our lives and society. The National Statistical Office's 2004 mortality figures are especially embarrassing since suicide is rampant through all age groups at a time when the nation is most democratized and affluent. It may be these dizzying social changes that forced some troubled individuals to take life's final option.

• Gnome in Korea, too cool for words.
• KDE in Korea.
• Microsoft in Korea

The quesion is, can a single company do as much as an entire country can on it's own? I doubt it and so does Microsoft. Why else would they buy off their competition? They should have all confidence they will prevail without such tricks. The trend outlined above indicates they have no such confidence and can't really keep up.

The screenshots above speak for themselves, even if your browser does not support the characters a default install of Mepis does. The Microsoft programs are unmodified English language programs. Free software has Korean character support and translations that Koreans are giving themselves. It's difficult to see how M$ can maintain dominance without doing more than writing korean language how-to's.

If the Iraq fiasco was about eliminating threats to America, there were many more that had priority. North Korea's nuclear program was well-established as a real thing, and they test-fired an empty missile that landed in Alaska. If it was for humanitarian reasons, other places like Darfur took precedence. If it was for solving regional conflict that was aggravating the area, then Israel-Palestine would take precedence.

Also, the anger is over the US administration claiming that Iraq as an "imminent threat" that "there is a link between Iraq and what happened on 9/11" and that Iraq was seeking Uranium from Africa. All of these proved completely false. The American people were promised that it wouldn't take more troops to keep the peace than to win the war, and that Iraq would finance itself, and that Americans would be greeted as liberators.

Ministry promotes robot to teach students English

Network Robots Will Become Family Member This Year

Wow, given this potential, I am surprised this work was not published in one of the bigger journals like Science or Nature?

Mostly because this news is old hat.

Here is an article and a nice pic of the lady from 2004.

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200411/kt200411261 7575710440.htm

Why is it that the iPod dominates the .mp3 player market? It would seem that the evidence at hand directly contradicts your assertion as Apple currently controls a 74 percent market share in the U.S., the world's single largest MP3 player market.

How does Dr. Byeon (Byun?) Jae-jeong know what capabilities the CIA has? If South Korea is aware of "39 wiretapping devices", shouldn't they be able to shut them down? Assuming all of this is true, even if the US power grid is hacked into and knocked out by North Korea, would it really take that long to get it back up and running? The Blackout of 2003 didn't seem to be a huge catastrophe. I *highly* doubt that US Pacific Command is vulnerable to any sort of internet attack, but I could be wrong. (From The Korea Times) "Byun called on the government to increase the budget for the buildup of the core capability needed to cope with advanced scientific and information warfare, especially for the protection of information." Maybe this guy just wants more money and is willing to make stuff up to get it?

The Korea Times has a more informative version of this article.

Yup sure sounds sounds like the appropriate people to bash. Who says there is no bias here?

Here it is. Sorry to disappoint you, but it's basically a motorized tripod with a machine gun and an infrared camera on it. No relation to the Navy's Aegis system or to anime.

than to replace miles and miles of fences, layers deep, in mine infested terrain.

the aEgis robot looks like a pretty straight forward design.

Perhaps automatic targeting can be enabled only when a large number of infiltrators have been detected and verified by a human operator.

Oops, silly me, the "whatever reason" is of course that they cut two screens out of each substrate. This puts the measurements at 1.87m by 1.10m, and each pixel would be pretty much exactly a millimeter to a side.

The largest 16:9 screen they could get from this substrate, incidentally, would be 97" (source). Obviously by cutting in the other direction and wasting quite a bit of the material, though.

In related news Samsung have recently announced a 102 inch plasma , so I doubt plasma is dead yet.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200412/kt200412161 6225410440.htm

Forgive me for being sceptical, but the wheelchair in the background in the Korea Times article just doesn't look right for a paraplegic who's been in a chair for 19 years. Armrests !?! Gimmie a break ...

Yes, we remember cold fusion

Even though these guys are from top universities.
"The team was co-headed by Chosun University professor Song Chang-hun, Seoul National University professor Kang Kyung-sun and Han Hoon, Ph.D, from the Seoul Cord Blood Bank (SCB)." quoted from Korea Times.

...it's still just one press release.

with some additional details here

Korean Times

Agreed.

From the Korea Times: http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200411/kt200411261 7575710440.htm

Kang added that since cord blood stem cells are later than embryonic stem cells, they have little chance of causing the fatal teratoma. ``Embryonic stem cells are omni-potent in that they can divide into any thing even including a tumor cell. But cord blood stem cells are developed enough not to cause such troubles while retaining as powerful a differentiation capacity at the same time,'' he claimed.

Let's forget about the moral/ethical reasons for not pursuing embryonic stem cell research - let's look at it from a scientific (*gasp* - a conservative Christian talking about science!) point of view. Less capacity to cause cancer = a good thing, no?

- Another Brandon (my last name is Danner)

They are incredibly far from missiles that can hit anywhere close to the US.

quite sure of that, are you?

they proved they are capable of lobbing missiles over japan in 1998, thus posing a threat to their neighbors. it's only a matter of time before they scale them up to reach the continental US.

Complaining about 'outsourcing' to Japan is kind of pointless, they have an independant animation industry that caters to its own market and isn't trying to make American-style animation. The real outsourcing is being done to Korea, where they work on 'Japanese' and 'American' productions. To use an car analogy, you shouldn't be worried about Toyota selling in the states, you should be worried about Ford building factories in Mexico.

Okay, I think I should let you in on an open secret of the animation industry: a lot of it is done in Korea. Both American and Japanese.

I mean the shows a produced, written, directed, and 'key-framed' in the U.S. or Japan, but the in-between cels and coloring are often contracted out to a animation house in Korea, because animation is a labor-intensive process and Korean animators are cheaper than U.S. or Japanese ones. And I'm not sure that it's entirely a bad thing, since many of these projects wouldn't be made if it weren't for the ability to outsource the 'grunt work'.

Did you like the Simpsons? Korea.
Futurama? Korea.
Most Nickelodian toons? Korea.
Nadesico? Korea.
Love Hina? Korea.

Of course, I'm talking mostly about TV animation, it might be different for movies. Disney certainly can afford to have hundreds of in-house animators working on a film, I don't know if Ghibli can.

If you don't believe me, go buy the first season Simpsons box set, Matt Groening talks about the business process of animation there. Also see if you can find a DVD called 'Animation Runner Kuromi', a anime DVD about how the animation business itself works in Japan.

Also: Korean Animation
Even North Korea is doing it

Problem is (seems to be?) that because Japan is a strong country, anything they say or write is more likely to be taken for granted overseas. Korea can shout all they want, they wont be heard.

For example, should I say east sea or sea of japan? Well, It's pretty much always been east sea. Korea and China use the term, but guess which one the rest of the world is using?

There are also some diputed teritories and signs of american involvment in the dispute... (the bastards ;)

Add to the history rewrite some fake archaeological discoveries and you end-up with Korean people being very angry not just about what Japan did but about what Japan is doing now.

It really is fascinating to be living here in Korea. It is a country still strongly affected by its past history. For instance, they have programs on TV about people looking for their displaced relatives in kazakhstan or uzbekistan (Blame Stalin) and when you go to Ansan, the Koreans who returned from Sakhalin and live there speak better russian than I do...

But from what you wrote, I guess you don't have to go very far to see signs of history being rewritten. In France, anybody who dares say concentration camps never existed or that gas was never used for killing Jews, ends-up in Prison. I don't like my country much but some things they do right. No use hiding behind some ammendment to try and spew crap: if you do, you know the risks...

South Korea may not be as free as you think. A few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn (from a friend of mine who is teaching English there) that the government was blocking access to a number of web sites, including blogs hosted at Blogger (a.k.a. BlogSpot) and TypePad (a.k.a blogs.com).

The Korea Times and other news sources reported that this was done to frustrate the distribution of videos depicting the decapitation of South Korean hostage Kim Sun-il. But you hardly need to point out to Slashdot readers that blocking entire domains like that entails a lot of "collateral damage". My friend in Korea, for example, was unable to read his own blog, which consists mostly of his poems.

I submitted this as a Your Rights Online story, but it was rejected for reasons I still don't understand. This is the kind of story that I depend on Slashdot to keep me apprised of.

In what way is this "News for Nerds"?

Korea Times story from June of last year check the text under the picture....

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

North Korea and Iran don't have delivery systems that can reach the US

Wrong.

you must remove the space between watch and 2004. http://photo.hankooki.com/gisaphoto/20040106/watch 200401060216410.jpg

North Korea fired a test missile that landed in Alaska. How did Iraq's alleged WMDs become our top priority?

Simple, Iraq is in a hotspot (Oil, proximity to Saudis and Israelis), and N. Korea would remind the public of the horrors of Vietnam. Which invading president would you vote for?

Actually, Koreas is the #1 country in the world when it comes to broadband internet usage

I'm sick of reading the US McMedia, so I tried to find articles about PRC policies that were not written by US media. There is a newspaper in Hong Kong called the South China Morning Post that does not always print the party line no questions asked. Using their search engine I found (in English) headings of articles of interest such as "16. Teacher held over Web Articles critical of authorities" and "26. Police Charge Website's Founder With Subversion". But registration is required along with a credit card payment by article, so I abandoned the search.

I figured a South Korean news site might have a good perspective so I checked out the Korea Times and there was plenty. Today South Korea sold DSL equipment and "services" to the PRC. I was surprised to read that China claims it will lift restrictions on overseas trips by its citizens starting next year. But I found nothing critical of existing PRC policy. Is there in fact nothing to report, or is it a non-issue to the South Korean people, or is the South Korean government making newspapers keep quiet about PRC human rights gaffes to smooth things for the proposed East Asia Trade Agreement? I'm sorry to say I couldn't find an answer to that question. I will check out Taiwanese and Japanese news sites when I have time.

I'm sick of reading the US McMedia, so I tried to find articles about PRC policies that were not written by US media. There is a newspaper in Hong Kong called the South China Morning Post that does not always print the party line no questions asked. Using their search engine I found (in English) headings of articles of interest such as "16. Teacher held over Web Articles critical of authorities" and "26. Police Charge Website's Founder With Subversion". But registration is required along with a credit card payment by article, so I abandoned the search.

I figured a South Korean news site might have a good perspective so I checked out the Korea Times and there was plenty. Today South Korea sold DSL equipment and "services" to the PRC. I was surprised to read that China claims it will lift restrictions on overseas trips by its citizens starting next year. But I found nothing critical of existing PRC policy. Is there in fact nothing to report, or is it a non-issue to the South Korean people, or is the South Korean government making newspapers keep quiet about PRC human rights gaffes to smooth things for the proposed East Asia Trade Agreement? I'm sorry to say I couldn't find an answer to that question. I will check out Taiwanese and Japanese news sites when I have time.