Korea Twists and Turns...

North Korea traded artillery music for Mozart:

... The reclusive state, where performances are more likely to include titles like "Let's Support our Supreme Commander with Arms" and "Song of Coast Artillerymen", staged a concert of Mozart's works that included the overture from "The Marriage of Figaro", the official KCNA news agency reported.

The event was organised to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, KCNA said late on Thursday.

"Artists of the State Symphony Orchestra successfully presented the peculiar attraction and diverse emotion of music pieces of Mozart through exquisite rendition and truthful representation," the report said.

North Korea shuns popular music from South Korea and the West as subversive and has been known to jail people who possess recordings not to the liking of communist officials....

Cool. Mozart.

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news, South Korea is considering gold farming regulation (courtesy SecondLifeInsider) - which, as the article points out:

...By imposing penalties on virtual currency exchange, the Korean government will deprive native companies of access to a rapidly growing, $1 billion dollar market that will still be serviced by foreign companies. Many MMORPG developers already have policies forbidding the commercial exchange of virtual currency, and some might question if it is fair to the tax-paying public to shift the costs and burdens of enforcing those policies to the Korean government...

As Blanda Bandal commented at SecondLifeInsider, there is a question of how many people in South Korea specifically use SecondLife, but then - if it becomes criminal for SecondLife to be used, the answer is that it would become - roughly - zero. A pity, that.

Korean Lesson of the day: Communism is selectively open, Democracy is selectively closed. At least in Korea, it would seem. Weird.