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50 Years Ago, Sputnik Was an Improvised Triumph
caffiend666 sends in an AP article featuring interviews with the old men who launched the first satellite 50 year ago. The story they tell hinges on luck and the drive of one man, Sergei Korolyov, who died in 1966, unheralded in his lifetime. "When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West... 'At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done,' Chertok recalled. 'We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok'... And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket."
Apple is negative. With all their iPhone and software lock ups.
They're pretty much as evil as Microsoft.
signature is pants
Be fair. Microsoft doesn't have AT&T and various record labels breathing down their neck to make sure a slice of the iPhone pie goes to them to deal with.
Usually, I'd go and blame the share holders, or at least the stock market system for encouraging participants to overlook moral issues in favour of profit, and really I guess I could blame AT&T's, and the record labels owners/shareholders, but I can't really see how Apple (or its owners/shareholders) are to blame for this. Maybe they could have stood up to AT&T? I guess they could have.
Of course, my perception of the world might be vastly skewed.