leftascenter

Book dates from 2007, and is followed up by “The Mission” where Tim Weiner details the more recent quarter century.

If rocket science was simple, it wouldn’t be used as an idiom 😁

Full story seems to depend on definition of modern. Liquid propellant rockets are theorized in Russia, first flight in states, first real use in Germany, first in space in USSR.

I agree with the first part but simplify the “why they’d do it”:

• it’s easier to choose with nice marketing
• corruption.
• being able to externalize IT.

As for the rest, from what I’ve seen:

• Web infrastructure relies on open source. Military critical OSs are a custom from open source. Security is best working from open source.
• You can pay the same maintenance fee for open source programmers for chasing your targets, leading to Ubuntu, opensuse, LibreOffice teams.
• upgrade is debatable. In the end i’d guess you’re more often better off with your hardware or national servers, but that’s related to security.

Consumers will like it, then enshitificaction. Also your data anywhere in the world.

page count differs between international A4 vs US letter formats.