North Korean Flash Games For Export 211
linzeal writes: "Despite it being pretty-much closed off to the world, North Korea is the next boom place for IT and tech outsourcing, PC World has reported. Flash games are being developed there for outside publishers, largely thanks to the home-grown talent. Does this mean that the the cartoon company that makes The Simpsons might use North Korea as well? Well it looks like they already have started."
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North Korea is actually in a pretty good place to make something happen, if you think about it. At a minimum they don't have to maintain all those C and COBOL systems.
Re:Pyongyang (Score:5, Informative)
Here ya go, for free, at google. [google.co.uk]
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A hellhole is not a tax dodge or investment opp. (Score:2)
It's bad when your country has to be a hellhole, and not a developed country like the US.
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You mean, as opposed to nice cozy China ? We've been disregarding the political regimes of our sweatshops /oil suppliers for ever (well, at best disregarding, at worst helping along), so...
Re:A hellhole is not a tax dodge or investment opp (Score:5, Informative)
China might not be as free/open as some places, but comparing it to North Korea is a bit of a stretch.
China is authoritarian; some of the laws are strict by our standards, but if you obey them and mind your own business, you'll probably be left alone.
Westerners can visit China and go about on their own there without being chaperoned or harrassed. Chinese people can leave there if they want (and some do).
North Korea, on the other hand, is totalitarian -- it's basically a giant prison camp, almost impossible to get into or out of without making very special arrangements, and where you can be executed for making an overseas telephone call [wikipedia.org].
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Yeah right. Those students at the Tiananmen Square, for example, they should have "minded their own business".
(Ok, so you just meant to say North Korea is worse. You don't need to make the PRC look better than it's people to do that.)
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Kent State was only twice as long ago and happened in the US.
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Yes, but the U.S. isn't trying to hide the fact that it happened to its citizens to this day.
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Slashdot poster citing Wikipedia citing Fox News citing the South Korean Good Friends.
Quite.
As far as monitoring goes, the difference between NK and US ("the West") is that NK does it with people in the next room, and US does it with tech everywhere. NK is merely three decades out of date. I cannot enter the US without being interrogated (during which I must affirm that I'm not of certain political affiliations), photographed, retina scanned and fingerprinted; I can't communicate without my words being inte
i knew someone would do it (Score:4, Insightful)
try to draw an equivalency between north korea and the usa
it would be hilarious, if you weren't being so serious
the usa has committed plenty of crimes, and continues to do so, and you should castigate the usa for that
but dude: you fail at reality if you fail to see that north korea is well beyond the usa in the evil behavior department. really
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People who protest in the United States usually seem to get arrested and beaten after they start smashing shop windows and cars (none of which belong to the government), so I would say they deserve what they get.
I'm just going to highlight this as pretty much reflecting the tone of your whole argument: "when a government I like takes away your freedom, it's surely because you were doing something bad".
In NK, you get arrested for whispering. In China, you get arrested for talking. In America, you get arrested for shouting. In each case, the government makes sure that not enough people hear you; it's just that some countries silence you earlier on, as they're not yet sophisticated enough to know the sweet spot which
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What manner of strawman is this? Of course society is a compromise. This doesn't mean it has to be based on outright physical oppression of a majority and trickery to mollify the rest.
Every empire's justification has been "Society = compromise. Deal with it." applied with poor premises. You're rewording the white man's burden.
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Maybe it would be better if such hate speech was illegal,
No it wouldn't.
No it isn't.
"God hates fags" is like "magic unicorns hate puppies". Even Phelps knows it, and has indicated it's not he who hates but magic^WGod.
The right to come out with harmless (from the PoV of rocking the boat carrying the elite) nonsense is well recognised in US law, and is part of the distraction which enables the government to say "see! you are free! You can call Bush a moron! You can call blacks niggers! How can this not mean you are free???"
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I've entered the US dozens of times, pre and post 9/11 and I've never been interrogated.
So you've never been asked whether you were a Nazi, whether you are a Communist, what your purpose is in the US, where you're staying, how you got to know those in the US you're meeting, etc.? I know some of these questions won't be asked to /everyone/, but some are on the standard ex-INS visa waiver form. Or maybe since this is usually done with checkboxes and a smiling man who mostly keeps his gun in his holster, you're misled into thinking an interrogation is just a friendly chat.
(Or maybe you're Canadia
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I've traveled between the US, Middle East, Europe, Mexico and Canada numerous times and never have been asked if I was a Nazi/Communist/where I'm going/who I'm meeting when I come back to the US.
Even on direct flights between Tel Aviv to New York, Amsterdam to New York, Frankfort to Portland, never ever get those kinds of questions returning to the US or going into places like Tel Aviv. Worst grilling I got was Haifa to Greece by Israel on a ferry and Atlanta to Paris when I got to Paris CDG.
Look, I realize
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I've traveled between the US, Middle East, Europe, Mexico and Canada numerous times and never have been asked if I was a Nazi/Communist/where I'm going/who I'm meeting when I come back to the US.
You didn't "travel between", you were American, returning to US. Of course, immigration officials wouldn't try to kick you out from your own country, you moron.
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I thought the American government didn't allow its citizens do business with this hellhole.
Juris-my-diction (Score:2)
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The article mentions this, but it also alludes to the fact that 95 percent of the world is outside the jurisdiction of the American government.
My comment was more in relation to The Simpsons, which falls into the 5% category.
Watch Gracie Films relocate (Score:2)
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Ignorance is bliss
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The Party/military leadership will reap the real profits, those doing the animation will get a few minor perks like decent clothes and enough to eat (mostly to keep up appearances before greedy/gullible outsiders like Eloesser), and the rest will remain... you guessed it... jobless and starving.
You were saying...?
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You were saying...?
He was saying the animators wouldn't be jobless and starving.
Homer Says ... (Score:2)
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
To answer your question, it says that amoral managers are willing to get in bed with the most evil of monsters if it means they can make money. If this is the next "logical step" then something is seriously wrong with this person's decision making process.
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OTOH there's perhaps some, slight chance that such things might contribute to normalisation of N. Korea, eventually (not the only possible path, of course)
People forget that S. Korea was also a bit totalitarian for few decades after the war. But from the start on "our side" and open to business.
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Every single one of those people are carefully selected/monitored by the government. You might as well be convincing a fencepost that freedom is a good idea. The only way they can achieve independence of thought is to get the hell out.
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Of course they are monitored, so freedom of interaction with them will be severely limited. But unless they meet someone from the outside they are even more likely to believe the government propaganda that the rest of the world is even worse off than their great country is. Question is if the few drops that might hit the regular worker makes up for throwing a bucket at their bosses...
At the top of my mind I can see 3 ways to end the current political situation. Military invasion, leadership collapse, and ma
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Question is, how to avoid levelling the Seoul in all of those scenarios...
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People forget that S. Korea was also a bit totalitarian for few decades after the war.
Authoritarian, not totalitarian. The military dictators running South Korea until the 1980s were not nice people, and the citizens living there didn't have any of the freedoms that people living in Western nations take for granted, and the post-war economic conditions weren't great either, but they didn't shoot people or throw them in prison camps for trying to leave the country, or make it illegal to own a radio that cou
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The distinction might be more subtle than you make it to be...
Not only a less than stellar start (Jeju Uprising or Bodo League massacre; both easily exceeding the total number of victims of regime from my place (*) ), what about 1967 "spy ring"? Or generally imprisonments, tortures, protests beeing risky. Or Gwangju Massacre, as late as in 1980?
That's not shooting citizens or throwing them to jails? Were you under (mistaken, I assure you) impression that those weren't happening in waves also in "communist"
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That's not shooting citizens or throwing them to jails?
You misread my comment. I wasn't claiming that purely authoritarian regimes are inherently less deadly - although the death toll usually isn't in the millions - only that the level of state control over individual life is different. Also, I wouldn't characterize many "Communist" regimes as truly totalitarian, including the Soviet Union post-Brezhnev; most of them eventually decayed into pretty standard corrupt oligarchies. It's the degree of social e
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IC. Oh well, many people throw pretty much everything (and anytime) behind Iron Curtain into "totalitarian"; might as well treat it as the accepted term, applied on equal terms...
Because BTW, I wouldn't be too surprised if my place was "better" during most of the '70s than South Korea, and that might largely include also perceptions among populations / in individuals.
Well, except taking on huge national debt that we pay to this day, but this was invisible to people... (and still sort of is, among those miss
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Oh well, many people throw pretty much everything (and anytime) behind Iron Curtain into "totalitarian"; might as well treat it as the accepted term, applied on equal terms...
This is partly because the governing ideology remained explicitly totalitarian, even if the governments themselves relaxed a little bit after Stalin's death. One of the books I'm reading now mentions Hungary as a place where citizens were allowed slightly more economic and social freedom, essentially as a way of keeping them from tryi
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Sometimes changing things from within is the best way. I think it's fair to say more communication with the outside world will have a more positive effect than just ignoring them completely (or bombing them, but since they don't have oil, I don't see that happening).
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citation needed.
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You should really read some history. A good starting place would be here [wikipedia.org].
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You have it back to front. Change from within sometimes leads to more rights.
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Well, you know the suspicion everyone has that the people running things are rich idiots who purchase influence so they can hang the cost of their mistakes on other people?
It tells us that that suspicion is true.
But if we had the capacity to learn from events like this, they wouldn't keep happening.
irony overload (Score:4, Insightful)
irony #1: a television whose wit is only possible in a country with freedom of expression, being drawn by cartoonists in a country where there are no freedoms at all. anyone north korean attempting a north korean version of the simpsons would be put to death
irony #2: a country so beholden to the almighty buck that it will export the production of everything to the cheapest place possible, relentlessly and continuously, until you are driven to places where things are so cheap because of adherence to communist ideology. capitalism's relentlessness includes ways to monetize and capitalize on artifacts of the the communist age. that's an irony china certainly has a lot of domestic experience with
there are about 20 other ironies. see them for yourself
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Oh, of only Kim Jong-il would adhere to communist ideology...
Things are cheap there because of totalitarian oligarchy.
agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
communist ideology is incompatible with reality, much as libertarian ideology is incompatible with reality
attempting to make communism work in reality results in domination of society by cult of personalities. individuals who can do no wrong (while they do plenty wrong). attempting to make libertarianism work in reality results in domination of society by corporations. corporations who can do no wrong (while they do plenty wrong)
balance in all things. unfortunately, we must pay a mighty price in this world for the ideolgoical fools who go to the extremes of libertarianism and communism, when the middle way, the moderate way: capitalism with socialist safety nets, socialism with capitalist engines, the only really valid real world solutions to the paradox that is human selfishness and altruism
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A bit more generally: virtually any pure idealogy, promising to be our savior, is incompatible with reality.
(well, at least if we're discussing nation-level issues; because, say, communism can, did and does work in reasonably small communities)
yup (Score:5, Insightful)
the threat all of us faces is fundamentalism
not just the usual fundamentalism of religions: muslim fundamentalists, christian fundamentalist, jewish fundamentalists, although they of course continue doing the damage they have done for centuries
also, fundamentalisms of politics and commerce: free market fundamentalists, constitutional fundamentalists, brain dead partisans: a sort of fundamentalism of political party, etc
even other bogeymen can be recast as fundamentalism: racism, for example, is a form of racial fundamentalism
whenever you adhere to one aspect of human reality, and make it your only concern, to say that is solves all problems, you yourself, you have become the source of the problems in this world. because the truth is, the world is complex, and simplistic teachings about who and what we are always fail
unfortunately, this truth never stops certain assholes from continuing to tell us that simplistic teachings are the solutions to our problems (and thereby become the source of our problems)
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The saddest, in a way, part is - if quite large portion of those fundamentalists that you mention actually followed the basics of what they themselves claim is their idol...they would be perhaps only half as bad. Perhaps even less.
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attempting to make libertarianism work in reality results in domination of society by corporations. corporations who can do no wrong (while they do plenty wrong)
You are confusing libertarianism with Republican conservatism. If you really look at Libertarianism, you'd see that corporations would lose a lot of the protections of assets and greater liability and fewer government handouts.
here comes the idjits (Score:3, Insightful)
"If you really look at Libertarianism, you'd see that corporations would lose a lot of the protections of assets and greater liability and fewer government handouts"
wow, this is an awesome form of libertarianism. so, dear libertarian, who is going to enforce this liability? answer: some form of centralized government bureaucracy... oops, we destroyed them
libertarians don't understand that when you weaken the government, there is only one power left in the room: corporations. at that point, nothing stops the
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wow, this is an awesome form of libertarianism. so, dear libertarian, who is going to enforce this liability? answer: some form of centralized government bureaucracy... oops, we destroyed them
Hm, perhaps you should actually read the party platform.
We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized.
If a corporation uses force or fraud, it is regulated. The majority of libertarians oppose a centralized government bureaucracy but support state governments to do the majority of enforcement of the laws like how the constitution was written. A small federal government making sure that state laws agree with the US constitution, and a few other duties expressed in the constitution.
libertarians don't understand that when you weaken the government, there is only one power left in the room: corporations. at that point, nothing stops them from corrupting and controlling every remaining government function you hold dear
But there is. I have the power to A) Sue (remember, the government
i'm not going to turn you, true believer (Score:2)
in a comment thread on slashdot
but i'll state my case:
the types of powers you want to remove from government will be replaced by corporate power
corporations are beholden to shareholders. government is accountable to you. so why do you want to remove the only thing that protects you, and replace it with an entity that is not beholden to you at all, not even in theory?
of course, it doesn't always work out that the government is accountable to you: corruption of our civil servants and our legislators, by corpo
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corporations are beholden to shareholders. government is accountable to you. so why do you want to remove the only thing that protects you, and replace it with an entity that is not beholden to you at all, not even in theory?
But it is beholden to you and me. How does a corporation stay in business? It needs money and a lot of it in order to stay in business. Corporations must make money in order to stay in business. On the other hand, a very unpopular law can remain in effect close to forever, especially if there is unpopular and victimless. Look at prohibition, it remained in the books for 13 years despite massive repercussions and general unpopularity.
If I don't like a corporation, I don't support them. But I can't lega
you want a change (Score:2)
that is good
your motivations are pure, and i agree with your motivations as they are my motivations too
but the kind of change you want will make everything you complain about now, worse
please try to understand that
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The limita
that's my favorite part of this bullshit: (Score:2)
"charities"
the libertarian magical cheat
you have a philosophy founded on the triumph of selfishness over all of altruism, and under such a social dynamic, suddenly people are going to be bountiful givers. its hilarious. or rather, it would be hilarious, if so many low iq assholes weren't so earnest about this libertarian foolishness
you are either a willfully intellectually dishonest liar, or you are completely deluded as to your own subject matter
the sum total of your beliefs is to drive this great nation i
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Libertarian paradise [youtube.com]
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Monopoly under libertarianism (Score:2)
A small federal government making sure that state laws agree with the US constitution, and a few other duties expressed in the constitution.
One of these powers reserved to Congress is the power to create copyrights and patents.
I have the power to A) Sue (remember, the government still exists to prevent force and fraud)
A company engaged in nationwide interstate commerce has far more money for legal representation than you will ever have.
B) Not choose to use the corporation
Sure, you could choose not to use the local electric power company, but then you would have to join the Plain People. How does libertarianism handle the natural monopoly characteristic of a public utility?
C) Form my own company (remember, with reductions in government powers comes the reduction of Copyright/Patents)
Which is why the MPAA-owned television news media [pineight.com] support only middle-of-the-road candidates in the
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One of these powers reserved to Congress is the power to create copyrights and patents.
Yes, it has the power to, it is not a constitutional requirement to.
The Congress shall have Power.... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Congress has the power to declare war on Canada also, but that doesn't mean they have to.
A company engaged in nationwide interstate commerce has far more money for legal representation than you will ever have.
So? The only reason why money for legal representation makes a difference is because we live in an age dominated by corporate interests from republicans and democrats. If we had a Libertarian government, the laws would be a lot more cut and dry.
Sure, you could choose not to use the local electric power company, but then you would have to join the Plain People. How does libertarianism handle the natural monopoly characteristic of a public utility?
Most of the time they are not natural monopolies, but rather government-granted monopolies. If you lo
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Federal Assault Weapons Ban (expired recently, but still a good example)
To protect private citizens from force caused by other private citizens.
The "War" On Drugs
To protect people from "fraud (unsafe drugs)".
DMCA
To protect authors from "force (theft)". These are some ways that the proponents of highly nonlibertarian acts of Congress can still shoehorn most of them into the "force or fraud" ideology.
Yes they can, you mean companies like AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a whole host of other cell phone providers?
Say I want mobile phone service, but I don't like the cartel (Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile, all of which raise their rates in unison). Third parties can't enter the market because the governmen
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To protect private citizens from force caused by other private citizens.
Look at the "Assault" weapon bans, that thing banned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:.22_LR.jpg [wikipedia.org] in some guns while allowing people to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Munit02.jpg [wikipedia.org] . All an "assault" weapon was, is the look of the gun. It is a bit like banning Mustangs because they "look fast" all the while allowing cars that can go 200 MPH.
To protect people from "fraud (unsafe drugs)".
No, the fact that drugs are prohibited it prevents people from being able to know what is exactly in them. I know when I drink a beer I'm not going to be poison
Coke, meth, and oxy (CII) (Score:2)
No, the fact that drugs are prohibited it prevents people from being able to know what is exactly in them.
A lot of the drugs on which the government has declared war are Schedule II prescription drugs. When you get coke, meth, or oxy from a licensed pharmacist on a doctor's prescription, you know exactly what is in it. For example, I have a cousin who's on long-acting amphetamines for ADD and a grandfather who's on Vicodin for pain. As for cannabis, the DEA under the Obama administration is delegating that to the states where it should be; currently, 14 states have made it a legal prescription drug.
The government would and would pay the dollar-holders gold if requested. [...] Gold reserves wouldn't need to expand because all it would lead to would be falling to stable prices.
What happens
WTO and tariff wars (Score:2)
Yes, [Congress] has the power to [create copyrights and patents], it is not a constitutional requirement to.
Congress was obligated to join the Berne Convention when it joined the World Trade Organization. Plenty of industries unconnected with copyright that export goods would complain if other countries were to raise duties on U.S. goods in response to the U.S. leaving the WTO just to get out of the Berne Convention.
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You're missing the parent's point. If government is weak, who is going to stop government becoming an arm of corporations? You're deploying the romantic and entirely fictional long-term untouchable to regulate your country.
Corporations and governments are kept in check because they're two mafias in a power battle. Everyone at the top is inevitably corrupt, so the best we can hope for is that they all fight each other and no-one ends up too strong. Take away this battle and you're a decade away from totalita
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You're missing the parent's point. If government is weak, who is going to stop government becoming an arm of corporations?
The people do. By restoring power to the state/local governments, you make elections that count and it has accountability. The Federal government has 535 representatives/senators in the legislative branch to, in essence, serve 300 million people. State governments for example, like, say the 132 member Tennessee legislator only has to serve a little over 6 million. State governments give a lot more power to the people.
By removing lots of powers from "big government" (the federal government) you put mor
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By restoring power to the state/local governments, you make elections that count and it has accountability.
That's not libertarianism, it's decentralisation and promotion of democracy. Why do you expect this to result in state governments which represent the interests of the individual rather than, say, the governments typical of the states of the European Union?
Libertarianism aims to
Communism aims to create a workers' paradise.
taking away special benefits granted by the government to corporations that were making them not responsible to the people
A little revolution's always nice, but who fills that power vacuum? If you're really asking for "the people" to, then we once again don't have libertarianism but local democracy. Otherwise you're back to a syst
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That's not libertarianism, it's decentralisation and promotion of democracy. Why do you expect this to result in state governments which represent the interests of the individual rather than, say, the governments typical of the states of the European Union?
Because when the ratio between the people to representative is low, it makes it a whole lot easier to vote out bad representatives and easier to contact them or even run for office. Its pretty hard to convince an entire state that a candidate is a terrible or great match unless you have a lot of money, its pretty easy to tell a medium to small sized town that a candidate is a terrible or great match. In a statewide election, a single neighborhood doesn't matter, however, in a district or county wide elect
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Because when the ratio between the people to representative is low, it makes it a whole lot easier to vote out bad representatives and easier to contact them or even run for office.
5 million isn't low. You're thinking on a US scale and imagining that surely scaling down a bit for more local representation will mean your voice is heard: but most countries aren't US-sized and their representatives are supposed to speak for far lower numbers.
If you were to successfully implement real local democracy, which would involve much more local and fine-grained management of representatives, you still don't guarantee libertarianism, just democracy.
And for the EU, due to proportional representation, there are a lot more people who have their voices heard, at least in part, than the system of the US.
The EU is a horrible bureaucracy and pretty much
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The US government budget is trillions of dollars. Even at that size it's an arm of corporations. The only way to stop corporations from taking more power it to stop growing government. Or do you really think that the problem is that the US government is still too small?
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The US government isn't "an arm of corporations". It has a friendly symbiotic relationship with them, but it is its own gorilla, able to fling the shit of the voters or its military/security services in the right direction (and vice versa) to preserve its autonomy.
Countries with a more intimate relationship between corporation and government bring to mind British East India or the USSR.
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Everything you say in response makes sense on some level. But what happens when the regulators in that ideal government you speak of are clearly captured? [wikipedia.org]. The problem is pervasive today, and I have trouble seeing how it would be any better once, by necessity, government shrinks to the point that tax revenues are significantly less than the revenues of larger corporations
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I don't see how that answers my question.
The government is there to establish laws, and, ideally enforce them. That's partly the responsibility of the regulators.
But what happens when said regulators are captured by the industry they are supposed to regulate, enacting laws that serve their interests (and not of the public good), ignoring violations, etc. You can't sue any companies in that industry because the laws will have been written to protect them! Look at the last 20 years of 'regulation' and leg
Can't quite agree with that statement .... (Score:2)
To the extent that either a Libertarian and a Communist ideology only works "100% according to intent" when you have all the people involved on-board with the ethical/moral requirements - no, they're both impossible to achieve. (For that matter, the same can be said of true anarchy. IMHO, it's really a great idea in theory, but it doesn't appear to stand the "test of time" if it's actually implemented. Ultimately, it has a fundamental requirement that everyone living in that system functions on a mentally
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Personally, I think the USA would be far more in line with what the Libertarians are advocating if it weren't for allowing the Judicial branch of govt to subvert so many laws by creating rulings that changed their original intent.
Perhaps, but some of the more. . . creative judicial rulings have changed the laws in ways that are much more in line with libertarian philosophy - for instance, Brown v. Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, and I could probably come up with
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What's the alternative, leave them totally cut off to stew? Invade the country and "free" them? This is a baby step towards bringing the DPRK back to the international community. Screeching at their diplomats is one thing, reaching out to the people there is another.
south korea tried the sunshine policy (Score:2)
and north korea responded by building a nuclear bomb, launching missiles over japan, and torpedoing one of their ships
the path of diplomacy actually has its limits, especially when whom you are reaching out to is so mad with rabies they continue to attack you
i'm not saying we shouldn't continue on the path of diplomacy, i'm simply asking you to see that diplomacy does not always succeed, and war and isolation become necessary, at some point. we aren't at that point yet, and hopefully we never get to that po
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If you actually read the article you'll see that 'The Simpson's' is drawn by a Seoul based (i.e. South Korean) company and has no direct association with North Korea. The poorly written article then goes on to mention a collaboration between the north and south on a film that again has no direct bearing on 'The Simpson's'.
How smart is that? (Score:2)
Lenin said "When it comes time to hang the last capitalist, he will probably be the one who sold us the rope."
There seems to be a kernel of truth to what he said. In our quest for ever cheaper labor, we are subsidizing regimes that are dedicated to our destruction. How smart is that? In the short term, it might seem justified but nobody is looking down the road.
It's official (Score:5, Funny)
Flash games are EVIL!!!
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Can't imagine where the game ideas come from... (Score:2, Funny)
Retarded Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The connection is this: An animation company that works on the simpsons is located in south korea. They have been working on a korean folk tale translated into a full length movie, and have been working with north korean animators for the feature.
There is nothing in the article that states (as the summary implies) that any of the simpsons is done in north korea, nor that there are any plans to do so.
Anyone know a better "news for nerds" site that doesn't have all the misleading headlines SlashDot has taken to lately?
I'm kind of sick of this sh!t.
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I'm kind of sick of this sh!t.
consider it more ammunition for Nicholas Carr: A Battle of Wits On the Net's Effect On the Mind [slashdot.org]
That explains it... (Score:2)
Cruel (Score:2)
Serious difficulty in believing this (Score:2)
I am having serious difficult believing that there could be any possibility of world-class advanced technology being developed by anyone in North Korea.
This is a zone where people have been kept at near starvation level of existance by a fanatical idealogical dynastic psychotic family of rulers for sixty years. And kept as slaves by the Japanese for fifty years prior to that (1945). Satellite photos show North Korea as the darkest place on Earth during the night hours. The few refugees that have escaped
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I am having serious difficult believing that there could be any possibility of world-class advanced technology being developed by anyone in North Korea.
Flash is not "world-class advanced technology". And if you RTFA, they aren't even talking about North Koreans outputting Flash directly. They're talking about animators. Now, believe it or not, but North Korea produces quote a lot of cartoons [youtube.com] for its own internal audience (yes, this means that they have TVs, too!), so it's not surprising that they have people who are good at it. Especially considering the stone age tools they are forced to work with.
Who is willing to trust North Korean software? (Score:2)
Who is willing to trust North Korean software? As there likely to be back doors and other spy stuff in it.
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Version 2.0:
http://chicksontheright.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/kji_hair1.jpg [chicksontheright.com]
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Private ownership of computers and cell phones are of course banned, but the state run business can get these things. Only high level party and military members are allowed things like phones or PCs.
And they have a World Cup team. (Score:2)
Maybe we don't know as much about NK as we think we do.