Come on, you guys. North Korea just sent another one of their dumb defective ICBMs made out of twigs and rubber bands into the air, where it quickly disintegrated and fell into the Pacific Ocean. Again.
The Japanese government, which doesn’t appreciate rockets being flung around willy nilly, is pissed, despite the fact that North Korea has no idea what the hell it’s doing. They say the rocket—which North Korea says was meant for peaceful, satellite-deploying purposes—passed directly over Okinawa, but no attempt to shoot it down was made.
Because really, why bother? North Korea is its own anti-missile system. Still, this will increase tensions in an already tense area, stall the peace process that could someday unite North and South Korea, and take more money out of the mouths of starving North Koreans and into a rusty log flume with which Kim Jong-un wants to spook the globe. [Al Jazeera]













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Wouldn’t worry about ruining the attempts at uniting the Koreans – at the moment, they’re just managing to avoid killing each other.
Its funny because amateur rocket enthusiasts build better rockets all the time.
…where did you get the fact it failed from? By all accounts I’ve read it’s been a success, even the source you linked to from what I can see.
And no, twitter doesn’t count as a source, find a proper one.
damn you for being a quicker typer than me. I’m looking for the articles I was reading at the moment. Swear the US confirmed it was a success, NORAD i believe making the confirmation.
Anyway, this tweet is from a japanese source. And the Japanese being pissed is because they think North Korea are being sneaky and trying to drop stuff on them. so something rather.
The South Koreans and the US have both confirmed it from what I can see. Sorry, Sam, but in any paper/news site I ran this shit would get you fired. Reading any news site today would have put you right. Reading your own source link would have put you right. Making this big a fuck up isn’t acceptable at all, unless you’re in ill health at the moment.
I double checked myself, after reading that, thinking “im sure it worked”, so yeah…
Isn’t this article about the second stage of the rocket? I swear I was reading this morning that their 3 stage rocket launch was a success. The first stage landed in the waters near korea, the second stage landed near the phillipenes. But the 3rd stage made orbit, which I believe NORAD confirmed.
And if so, that’s kind of what the dropped stages are supposed to do, burn up before hitting the ground.
Stellar journalism, how to get a story so wrong you’d think South Korea paid Sam off.
That’s just Biddle’s inherent racism
NORAD thinks something got put into orbit – http://www.norad.mil/News/2012/121112b.html so I’m not really sure what you’re talking about here.
I love the fact that they felt that “At no time was the missile or the resultant debris a threat to North America.” needed to be included in that post. Especially after describing that it was headed south. south from korea…
Yeah, the rocket worked. It’s only been all over the news…
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/12/12/korea-north-usa-update-idUKL1E8NC0Z120121212
Not entirely sure how you could have got this so very, very wrong, considering articles about NK’s successful launch has been blaring out of every news outlet and political website for the past several hours…
First the writer Jesus was mocking North Korea for their archaeological find and now Biddle doesn’t like it when they launch rockets.
The level of ignorance that the contributors of Gizmodo have towards any number of subjects not related to the next iPhone is staggering.
If anything is stopping the peace program it is the thousands upon thousands of American solders and sailors based in South Korea and Japan which will never leave, even then the citizens of those countries demand it. You might have read the ‘controversy’ of Psy and his anti-American, pro free Korea statements etc…
Its not as clear as West good, North Korean bad. The same goes for Cuba and numerous other countries.
If you don’t believe / cant comprehend this then I would take a look at other UK news today and you will see how the state colluded with terrorists to murders its own citizens. See how things were reported then by fools such as yourself and then go get training on how to be a real journalist and not some racist with a tech column.
Totally with you on this @Shadowmatt. Between the hysteria over this story and the Syrian civil war (or whatever we should call it) I’ve been getting progressively more agitated with he response from most of the mainstream media response, which is basically to back up the government statements.
So they launched a rocket …so what?! Who knows how many rockets we’ve launched in our time? and you can’t deny that every time we do, or one of our ‘allies’ does it can only be seen as a threat by nations such as N. Korea and Iran when put into context of the rhetoric directed at these states.
So let them have their rocket, because it seems that that’s the only way to get respect from the self designated ‘world police’ that is NATO, the USA and the EU.
Today I managed to cook my tea without burning the house down or poisoning myself. In the world according to Sam Biddle I’m a complete failure.
Gizmodo’s writers likes to mock others for their mistakes yet when their writers made incorrect statement, no apology or retraction are made.
“Shome mishtake, shurely”
Above this story is a link to the top twitter fails of 2012.
Should probably get that updated.
I was kinda hoping for the rocket to fall on either Korea or Japan, and then all hell will break loose. This way, at least we can solve the problem quickly.
lol, wishful thinking
Why has no one commented on the hilarious name for the missile (NoDong)?
Spiffing!
The silence from the Giz editors about this cack handedness reporting is nigh on deafening.
I guess Biddle rushed this out so he could get to the pub last night, and is still suffering the consequences.
This is a US syndicated article. If you want the editors here to do something, you’ll be waiting a while…
There are however multiple updates on the US article tentatively agreeing that it may have been a success based on official sources…
http://gizmodo.com/5967710/bumbling-north-koreans-ruin-another-scary-rocket-launch
It’s one of the things that annoy me about GizUK, we get dumped with these American articles but our comments are probably never seen by the idio… journalists who write them.
Does beg the question why these articles are not getting the update treatment when errors like these are made?
I know how you feel…
Updates though would require someone in the UK office to monitor every article on the US site, just in case one does change.
A quick email to Sam, Kat or Chris should be enough to get them to migrate the changes over, once one of us has noticed it.
;D
I would have thought that the articles would be linked in the first place so amendments would get updated.
A website about technology, that isn’t very technical itself.
Ironic?
Hmmm, I really am in a whiney mood today.
It’s thursday, nearly christmas, and it’s cold. Don’t blame you.
I’ve just been to the pub for lunch with two other Giz commenters, so I’m in a happy jolly mood. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Limitations of WordPress… and GizUS use a customised CMS.
Such an epic fail
North Korea needs to chill out, unlike I-ran it doesn’t have much natural resources, does it