Licquia Blog (old)

>From Dean Esmay (who is on a roll, I must say) comes a very interesting first-person account of an American touring in North Korea.

What I found interesting was the scene where the group was taking a tour of a museum containing the gifts to North Korea:

Ever wonder why CNN seems to be the only Western news organization regularly allowed into North Korea? The next room perhaps offered a clue. In the 'Gifts from America' room a whole section of one wall is taken up by gifts from CNN. A few engraved plaques, a coffee cup (yeah, a freaking coffee cup!), a logo ashtray, etc. Probably at most a couple hundred bucks worth of crap that nonetheless get pride of place in the museum - for they reveal obvious signs of respect from a world famous news organization. The people at CNN are certainly using their heads and showing they know how to play the game. Though one wonders how that fits in with journalistic integrity . . .

Now, a coffee cup does not a scandal make. But given CNN's recent admission that they were sucking up to Saddam Hussein for access, should we take it for granted that they aren't doing the same thing in Korea? I don't think so, especially given that the aforementioned traveler in North Korea himself felt moral pressure to not betray the people he had talked to, and this after only a few days in the region with no serious ties or vested interest.

Slashdot today has a story on a new distribution called GoboLinux. Interestingly, it's unique in that it totally rethinks the Linux filesystem layout, putting things together much like Nick Petreley proposed in some ways.

I'll just point out that these guys seem to have been hard at work long before Petreley started his series. Also, they deserve a lot more respect, because they actually built something, and did the hard work to solve the problems their idea created.

They also don't seem to be gratuitously slamming what has come before, which also puts them ahead of Petreley.