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CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

abc.net.au

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Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#231

Post by mzi »

detourdog wrote: post #229
mzi wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and probably didn't care for commercial offerings of connectivity in their priorities in development. And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time. I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the oth…

I think the point I would want to make is the commercial availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser adoption. I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway t…

That implies that you got on the bandwagon because it was a graphical web? At my department in Sweden it was an overnight adoption when we found Mosaic.

And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#232

Post by drstewart »

superxpro12 wrote: post #211
drstewart wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soft power is just a buzzword to give value to things that have zero demonstrable value. The CIA Factbook has played zero role in giving the US any measurable power.

right. because there's zero demonstrative value in USAID giving aid to foreign countries which is why we just left. ...and then china moved in. The real problem is that the problem isnt binary or immediately causal. "This happened, and then that happened". These problems are slowly developing with more than 1 term in the equation. China doesnt build silk road 2.0 because of one little decision. It's an accumulation,…

What's the Chinese version of the factbook? European? Canadian? Why aren't they all moving in on all this sweet soft power?

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#233

Post by 0sdi »

Retric wrote: post #177
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have Hollywood and spy movies/series now.

Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web. What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.

Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#234

Post by CGMthrowaway »

0sdi wrote: post #233
Retric wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web. What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.

Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.

I had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny spelling and pronunciation.

[1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-...

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#235

Post by regenschutz »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #170
hk__2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.

Do you people even use the models or do you just lie about them? https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...

You're using the Research model that isn't available to Free users. As a pupil myself, I can vouch for the fact that nobody is using the Research models here.

Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its research, or they actually care about getting good grades and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#236

Post by throw263586 »

constantius wrote: post #216
throw263586 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I'm feeding a troll here, but for the benefit of those reading along: The official numbers are a subset of all deaths: only deaths from direct military action are counted. In most wars, excepting the shortest conflicts, those deaths are a minority of all deaths. Even taking the numbers of Save the Children (and I'll let everyone decide whether they're likely an overestimate or an underestimate), it's difficult to thi…

This is not true. The Gaza Health Ministry published all deaths.

You can’t just speculate and make up your own numbers and then complain that sources are not reliable.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#237

Post by detourdog »

mzi wrote: post #231
detourdog wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point I would want to make is the commercial availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser adoption. I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway t…

That implies that you got on the bandwagon because it was a graphical web? At my department in Sweden it was an overnight adoption when we found Mosaic. And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!

Prior to the Mosaic I thought Gopher was superior to a text based WWW. Once ISDN became available I used an Ascend Pipeline 50 and that made IP addresses available across an entire network. The office I was working at also immediately adopted Mosaic/Netscape at that time. Getting PPP to work was definitely heavy lifting for me. Getting an IP address as an individual was difficult in the early days.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#238

Post by crumpled »

elzbardico wrote: post #227
crumpled wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is Creative Commons. Someone could conceivably publish a dead tree version that goes through an editor / editorial process. Imagine being an editor of Britannica. Without having domain knowledge into absolutely everything, you are forced to trust domain experts. Wikipedia has a marked advantage when it comes to building that trust, as the articles have been written under public scrutiny and with a great dea…

Trusting domain experts is precisely what I like in Britannica. I want an environment where real domain experts are not drowned by a mob of midwits.

Arguably, you get more and better domain experts in Wikipedia. I have a set of Britannicas, it's severely lacking in citations and definitely out of date, no matter how new.

The question of article quality has been studied from the very beginning. Wikipedia almost always wins.

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#239

Post by cfmcdonald »

vdqtp3 wrote: post #107
kergonath wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minut…

> build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade How much of that actually came from soft power rather than "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?

I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."

Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

#240

Post by davidguetta »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #76
davidguetta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I guess your sarcasm is not popular in this thread. Perhaps Musk-fatigue.

Its not sarcasm. Grok if an awesome alternative view if you accept that you should use your brain to make your own opinion and not just accept wikipedia (which can be wrong) as truth.
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