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The Internet Black Hole That Is North Korea
Nrbelex writes "While other restrictive regimes have sought to find ways to limit the Internet — through filters and blocks and threats — North Korea has chosen to stay wholly off the grid. The New York Times discusses the total lack of 'net access facing the North Korean state, and what it means in the long term." From the article: "The South was illuminated from coast to coast, suggesting that not just lights, but that other, arguably more bedrock utility of the modern age -- information -- was pulsating through the population. The North was black. This is an impoverished country where televisions and radios are hard-wired to receive only government-controlled frequencies. Cellphones were banned outright in 2004. In May, the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York ranked North Korea No. 1 -- over also-rans like Burma, Syria and Uzbekistan -- on its list of the '10 Most Censored Countries.' That would seem to leave the question of Internet access in North Korea moot."
The Internet is all about sharing information. Yet, they chose to make it difficult for people to share and access it. Gosh, I hate this nytimes.com login form. Here is a direct link to the article (no login required).
According to this weeks Economist, even the army sometimes starves. Families fight to help therir sons avoid concsription into army units notorious for malnutrition.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I'm no fan of socialism/communism/stalinism, not at all. But the lack of resources is quite relevant to North Korea considering the Juche ideology of self-reliance. There are plenty of nation states with a collective economy that - while crappy - perform better than North Korea. I don't think resources are the reason why North Korea can't compete with the prosperous world but I do think it is why it can't even compete with Cuba, Middle Eastern theocracies, and so on.
Jeju Province (part of South Korea) is to the south; Tsushima Island (part of Japan) is to the south-east.
Not true. North Korea does actually have elections, with some rather serious caveats. The President is permanently the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung (deceased) and there is only ever one candidate for each post in the Supreme People's Assembly. You didn't think they were called the "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea for nothing did you? Oh and voter turnout is nearly 100%! This shows how much they love democracy in North Korea!
Oh, I should also mention that Kim Jong-Il, the Chairman of the National Defence Commission, doesn't need to listen to the Supreme People's Assembly. It's actually sort of the reverse. But don't the Dear Leader a dictator! He was born with birds singing and two rainbows in the background!
That's probably unintentially ironic considering second world was the Communist bloc. I wonder if first and second were reversed inside the iron curtain?
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
If you could get the message to them and be believed in time, probably. The problem is that they have had a lifetime of being told thet Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung are the source of all things good, and thet everybody outside NK is a lying hyaena out to destroy the workers paradise. It wouldn't take many weeks to overturn this. The trouble is that Seoul is within easy artillery shot of the NK aremy, and it wouldn't take many hours for NK to wreck large areas of it and kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of S Koreans. Even malnourished soldiers (and the ones near the borders get the best food) could fire off a hell of a lot of shells before they were overrun.
The other problem is that if you do get through to them, every singlr North Korean is going to want out of there fast, and you will have 60 million refugees flooding into S Korea and China, or anywhere they can get a boat to. A problem that would make the Vietnamese Boat People look like a trickle. Both SK and China are terrified of this. China could probably topple the NK govenment within weeks if it wanted to - but it is desperately afraid of tha anarch that would follow. The same Economist article said that it was rumpured that the Chines army had stiied whether it was possible to take over NK "blizkrieg" style, so as to be in charge before the country collapsed into chaos, and had come to the conclusion that it was impossible.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Only children, simpletons, and power-hungry ideologues believe in socialism any more
Then why does Norway have the highest standard of living in the world?
Seriously, get your damn terminology straight.
Socialism does not equal communism!
Even then it isn't black and white. North Korea is Stalinist Communist (as opposed to Marxist Communist or post-Stalinist Kruscheve Communist with each its own type of dogma)
Heck... Hitler's government was National Socialist and that is as far as you can get from communist ideology.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
USSR did not number the worlds (Warsaw pact v. NATO and the rest), this numbering was invented and used by the capitalists only. See also this.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
NK isn't communistic - they are stalinists. Whether or not the former is a good idea is questionable but probably still debatable, but the same cannot be said about the latter.
Those lights are fishers. They use very bright light to attract fish or shrimp to the surface. There's a lot more of this around japan on this picture. They appear to be clustered around richer fishing grounds.
it's not about the SUCKING POWER, although the nk internet does suck. it's about the mass, and inescapability.
The gravitational field outside a black hole is identical to the field produced by any other spherically symmetric object of the same mass. The popular conception of black holes as "sucking" things in is false: objects can orbit around black holes indefinitely without getting any closer. The strange properties of spacetime only become noticeable closer to the black hole. End quote.
So as long as we're ignoring the actual meaning of the black-hole metaphor a better response might be, "north korean internet isn't very massive. so it's not a black-hole."