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South Korea Bans Selfie-Stick Sales
Rambo Tribble writes "South Korea has instituted large fines for selling unregistered "selfie-sticks". The problem arises because many of the devices are using Bluetooth radio spectrum, and must be certified to do so legally. Expressing doubts that the regulations and stiff fines will influence sales, one official said of them, "It's not going to affect anything in any meaningful way, but it is nonetheless a telecommunication device subject to regulation, and that means we are obligated to crack down on uncertified ones."
Does South Korea's regulatory framework not allow for the (wildly common in devices where low cost is more important than seriously tight integration) situation where a vendor produces a wireless module, gets that certified and approved, and then someone who doesn't want to deal with the hassle just embeds the unmodified module in their product? Or do they have that; but also have a market composed of 96.83% totally unlicensed chinese mystery modules that may be emitting just about anything and probably are?
For those of us who don't know, a "selfie stick" is just a long pole or boom with a mount for a phone so you can take a picture from farther away or without the phone being in the picture.
I've seen them mostly for folks riding on the dirt where they have a GoPro or something on the end and are taking shots of the front of the vehicle zooming through the dirt.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I thought they were 'under-skirt sticks'...
How is this different from ANY unregistered/knockoff/Chinese copy Bluetooth device? Why suddenly the issue with "selfie sticks"?
What a pain, though, to have to register in each country. Why, I'm shocked, shocked, that FCC registration is not enough. ;)
(OK, SRSLY, assume EU has some common registration. But how do smaller countries deal with this? Are there other region-wide registrations other than EU?)
Or is it that Selfie Sticks are just so wildly popular that suddenly this has become some sort of problem? I'd assume that by next Christmas, this will be a non-issue, as South Koreans will all be hopping on 500mbit/sec pogo sticks.
You do know that a spell checker is not a thesaurus, right?
Some of my old film cameras have a feature where I can press a button and then the camera takes a picture after some time - usually long enough for me to get back in front of the camera.
You could buy all sorts of devices to plug into your phone line, back when we had a clueless government monopoly running the phone system. Some had green stickers saying "this is good" and some had red triangles warning that it could not be connected to your phone system. Absolutely nobody gave a shit about the stickers and plugged whatever they wanted into their phone system. Eventually the stickers went away.
I always just use 'photon capture technician' and put up with the weird looks. 'Photon capture specialist' if the person can't put the damn camera down.
Some of my old film cameras have a feature where I can press a button and then the camera takes a picture after some time - usually long enough for me to get back in front of the camera.
You will find one other exciting feature on that old film camera that is lacking on most smartphones: a flat edge to allow it to sit steadily pointed at the subject. Try doing that with a new iPhone 6 and you are gonna have a bad time. So it's either haul around an awkward tiny tripod that clamps on to the phone, or use the aforementioned "Selfie stick". Why is that so hard to cope with for so many slashdotters?
There are times when there is just isn't anybody else around to take the picture. (second photo).
I read the internet for the articles.
Don't let the "ban" fool you. This has nothing to do with bluetooth technology - that's only the legal loophole being used. Since the selca-bong or selfie sticks came on the scene, they've exploded in the retail sector - but stores missed the boat and street venders have made a killing in sales. Sometimes selling cheap Chinese manufactured devices for as much as W30,000 (about US$30). Seeing that they missed the boat, the big box retailers pushed the regulators to crack down on "illegal" sticks. This is all an attempt to get the monopods sold in chaebol owned stores.
Already in the works, though Hulu picked up the episodes that won't be aired.
"-man" as a suffix is gender neutral, usually. "-person" etc just misunderstand the etymology.
The old English roots are:
* "man", meaning roughly "human", any age or sex
* "wer", adult male (survives in a few words like virile and werewolf)
* "wif", adult female (of any marital status)
Over time we lost the male-specific word, with "man" doing double-duty for male and neuter meanings, while the original meaning of "wif" became "wif-man" became "woman".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
* "wer", adult male (survives in a few words like virile and werewolf)
(Puts on pedantic hat.) You are correct that the Germanic/Old English "were" survives in words like "werewolf" and, for Tolkien fans only, "weregild" (as in "This I will have as weregild for my father's death" from the Silmarillion).
"Virile," however, comes from the Latin "virilis" via French. They are kinda sorta related but not really.
This is a gross oversimplification as any language scholar can tell you, but a fun exercise for any English language speaker is to study the roots of common "vulgar" vs. "high-class" words and find that their roots map very closely to Latin vs. Germanic. Old English was - once the native Celts and Romano-Britons had been displaced - largely a relic of its "Germanic" (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) conquerors and the language of the people. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 (Normans "Nord-mann" being transplanted Vikings who learned French) the language of the nobility in England became French (which was based on Latin) for hundreds of years. While over time the two melded together, you can still (again, oversimplifying) in many cases tell the upper-class terms for things (derived from French/Latin) from the lower-class terms for things (derived from Old English/Germanic). For example:
It doesn't hold true in all cases but it is in general a pretty fascinating window into the evolution of the English language, FWIW.
"95% of all Slashdot
the sticks aren't subject to regulation
it's the bt remote that they're sold with that is.
and in asia, there's sellers now on every tourist street for those. I suspect it's not so much as needing regulation though for the sake of electronics emissions as it is for weeding out the clone makers.
you see, you can buy the exact same thing for couple of bucks OR you can pay fifty bucks for it the exact same thing!
(do you even need certification for bluetooth? huh? it's just off the shelf chip.)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.