Stupid interwebs

So there's this thing that your browser sends along to web sites to let them know what language you speak. It's called a language code. The one that mine sends is "en-us," and not the "ko" that they should be looking for to ship people content in korean.

Google and Youtube completely ignore this useful string and assume that because I'm hitting their sites from Korea that I can somehow speak Korean. Google is better in that since I have an iGoogle page I can actually search for things and not get gibberish in return. Youtube shows me several recommended videos in Korean every time I go to my home page there, so that's pretty much retarded. Do no people travel around the world? I don't get it. Someone, somewhere, is stupid. Maybe they thought that they'd help me out in case I didn't know how to set my language code. Thanks, morons.

That could actually be related to some advertising scheme. Hell, maybe there are videos there that aren't OK to play in Korea due to some ridiculous copyright restrictions.

Yay copyright. Copyright is basically saying that it's trivially easy to do something these days (make copies of things) so you'd better make laws to protect people having their work duplicated. It's on par with making calculators illegal to protect jobs for people who are good at math. Long term it will disappear, and people in the future will have a hard time understanding how stupid some people could have been. Pretty much every argument in favor of it presents the dubious claim of it being an incentive for innovation (you can sell what you made for a certain amount of time exclusively), or tries to frame it as "how would you feel if you never got compensated for your work?"

The first is bullshit because people would be forced to innovate even more (just in different ways), and the second is bullshit because any viewpoint that relies on you having been injured personally or imagining that to be so is an irrational and emotional response - not a good way to determine policy.