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Korea World Leader in Broadband/Technology at Home
bozoman42 writes "67% of Korean Internet users are connected to broadband, some at 32Mbps! In fact, according to the Guardian Article, Korea is leading in nearly all walks of a modern high tech life. But there may be downsides. (Especially as covered here last week.)"
Uuuu. Just a note near-offtopic but which I think it deserves attention. "C and "K", in many European languages, have nearly the same intonations. For Spanish, Portuguese and French the correct name is Corea. At least for Russians is "Koreya". Germans seem to use the term Korea. English don't make a big difference between "C" and "K" but they seem to highly prefer to use "K" in names.
The correct name for Japan is Nippon and it seems that this is the way Japanese name its country. Besides Koreans and Japanese have completely different alphabets and intonations from us, Eurasians. So I don't get the reason why Japanese would be so pecky with one letter. I know that Japan and Korea have lots of problems between each other. However this story seems to have a reason completely different from what you state. The first europeans to reach East Asia were the Portuguese. So they named it Corea. But that was nearly 450 years ago and a lot of water went on since then. Today English is the main language in the world and Russian had lots to do with Korea (the Russian "C" is latin "S" btw). So I wouldn't be admired to see that this was the reason for the shift.
Europe never went the same way as some other countries. Even the huge backslash in Russia is nothing compared to what happened in some other places. The blistering fury, which blowed while Eastern block tried to reach its Western brothers/cousins, was mainly due to the fact that they were not so backward as it seems. Frankly, in the first years after Perestroika, things changed so fast that people joked that in this mood we "will reach and overcome America in its own remedy - Capitalism" (this didn't happen but that's another story). Besides, Europe was always crazy about technowars and the main problem was that a good part of it went once again in the technowar run after having a good dose of it in WWII. Europeans are very much alike and that's a reason why they don't love each other. But that's also the reaons why they can understand each other faster than anyone else.
However Korea is something completely different. They were for long under the grip of Imperial Japan. They suffered two of the most bloody wars of the 20th Century. One of them nearly turned the whole world again into war. Besides, Korea was not top in Science neither Technology. When South started its Long March it had a population in misery, ruled by one of the most bloody dictatorships and suffered several drawbacks from it. Its economy suffered from several problems and it had frequently serious inflationary hickes. It also as an endemic social/political conflict that frequently rises to clashes. Its politicians are also known to be severly corrupted and fall frequently into scandals.
However it is a fact that Korea is one of today's economic world powers, sometimes it even overshadows its past colonist, Japan. And its technological progress is on the top among many countries. Not many countries managed to reach such level. So I take the hat to these guys.