Not to sound to elitist but do these countries even offer internet to their masses?
On the first day of availability of Firefox 3, Mozilla tracked the locations of all the downloads they could, and logged the results on this map. As measures of Internet penetration in a country go, this isn't too bad. A country with a large number of Firefox users has a large number of Internet users - and further, those users are more than usually sophisticated about how they interact with the network, insofar as they have gone to the trouble to download a web browser rather than sticking with whatever they originally had.
Notice anything surprising between Iraq and Afghanistan? Maybe a country you thought was a backward totalitarian theocracy, but which has a number of downloads comparable with advanced, heavily wired European democracies? A country experiencing a massive post-war baby boom consisting largely of twentysomethings with little time for the bearded old men in power, and keenly interested in the new media which they understand and the Islamist censors do not?
No, of course not. It's just a desert out there full of fundamentalist camel-jockeys who hate our freedom.
They're about ten years too late and it won't achieve anything (in fact I think it's a bad idea at this stage).
That's because the case has been grinding on for a long, long time. Microsoft have been messing about trying to evade a series of judgements for years and years. Do we now want to send them the message 'Avoid complying with the law for long enough that the progress of technology renders the question irrelevant, and then there will be no consequences'? Or do we want to penalise them so that the next time something like this happens, the offender actually complies immediately rather than delaying for the best part of a decade?
A new level of slavery can be developed. Just imagine a totalitarian state with zombie slaves to do all the dirt work. If the Nazis had had this technology they would have used it!
What? No they wouldn't. Why go to all the trouble of genetically engineering a subhuman slave race when you've already got millions of untermenschen all over the place that you need to find a use for? The whole point of the Third Reich was to get rid of the inferior breeds, not to create more!
Mengele would probably have played with this technology, but as a matter of policy the Nazis were fixated on genetic purity. Cross-species gene tampering of this kind would probably have disgusted them.
You jest, but the last great work of 3dfx before they gave up was a beast of a card called the Voodoo5 6000. Ludicrous design. It was nothing but two Voodoo5 5500s on one card - and the 5500 was nothing but two 4500s on one card! The idea was to outdo the high end GeForce cards, and indeed the 6000 compares fairly with the GeForce 3, but the cost would have been astronomical.
This monster demanded vast amounts of power. So they designed an external power supply that plugged into the back of it.
Never saw the light of day; 3dfx collapsed after only a small number had been manufactured, and now they change hands for a small fortune from time to time on the collectors' market.
He's told me numerous time that the "space opera" that you can read about in Wikipedia is just made up by the press, I wonder what's going to happen when he hits OT3 and they serve it to him on a hot dish of shit.
That does seem to be the line they're giving out these days. Trouble is, of course, that when the OT3 documents leaked, the cult sued for _copyright infringement_ - if it had been a pack of lies made up by their enemies out of malice, then they should have sued for _libel_. We can be pretty damn sure, from the ferocity with which the cult defended their ownership, that OT3 was genuine.
You also occasionally hear that the Xenu story is part of older mythology, and isn't really taught now - that the cult has shunted the space opera into the background, much like most Christians do with the more blatantly silly parts of Genesis. That might be true. It's also pretty fucking impressive: to ditch embarrassing doctrines almost before the messiah's body has cooled? That's quick work.
That said, I think the classic HOLY CRAP IT'S A HOT CHICK IN MY COMIC BOOK STORE thing is a bit overdone.
At the end of the Sandman plot arc A Game of You, there's a scene where a woman - not just any woman, a literal Barbie - goes into a comic store. She's buying a Bizarro back-issue for a friend who recently died who'd been a huge fan. Well, 'Weirdzo', from 'Hyperman', but in this continuity Superman actually exists, so, you know... Anyway, as she lays it on the grave, she comments: "In order to buy it I had to go into this bizarre little store. I mean, I don't think they'd swept the floor in a decade, and I bet the staff had to have taken unhelpfulness lessons. And there was a big greasy guy behind the counter who seemed really amused that I was like, female, and asking for this comic. He said it wasn't very collectable. Then he said they didn't normally see breasts as small as mine in his store, and all these guys laughed."
After publication of those issues, Neil Gaiman got a lot of letters from readers. Mostly male fans insisting that there exist no comics stores like that in all the world. And yet ever since, women have been asking him... "How did you know?"
When was the last time a real terrorist was found in a border checkIn 2007, although the terrorist in question had been on ceasefire for a decade, and was by that stage a reasonably respectable member of the political establishment, and had been invited to the US to meet the President.
"How was I to know the nice man in the mall kiosk wasn't sincere about wanting to protect my mind from the aliens?" isn't exactly the start of a stellar legal argument.
They don't tell you about the aliens at the mall. Of course not: you'd laugh and walk away. They tell you that you're sick and that they can help you. And they've got your test results to prove it, and they've got a machine that goes 'ping'.
It's only much later, once you've spent $lots on courses and treatments, that they mention the aliens. Oh, they've long since cured your original 'problem', but you see there's this guy named Xenu and these things called thetans... And if you carry on signing the cheques and doing yet more auditing then you too can become a Super Saiyan OT-VIII Ultra Scientologist with incredible powers.
We also did not put taxation in the hands of the executive (not sure if the English did or not, honestly)
Depends on what you consider to be the 'executive'. Originally, the king could in principle do whatever he liked. One of the major steps towards what we now call democracy was the establishment of the principle that only Parliament could levy taxes. So if the king wanted to declare war, that was up to him, but he had to go and ask Parliament for the money to pay for it. That's the kind of separation of powers that informed the thinking of the Americans when they established their republic.
Things have changed since then, however. While everything is done in the name of the Queen, she has no real power any more, except in the case of an indecisive election resulting in a hung Parliament. The Queen's prerogatives are exercised on her behalf by her Prime Minister - who is, in practice, the leader of whichever party commands a majority in Parliament, and so controls both sets of powers.
Go download a NES emulator and a collection of ROMs. Play through a representative sample of 2D platformers of the late eighties and early nineties. My God, most of them suck so very, very hard. How did anybody ever enjoy this utter rubbish?
Now play Super Mario Bros. 3.
There, you see the difference? Exactly. This isn't nostalgia taking games that were never very good and inflating them to become unwarranted classics. This is time acting as a filter. All those awful games have sunk into richly deserved obscurity. So when somebody publishes a 2D platformer today, we don't compare it against the whole genre: we compare it against Mario at his absolute best. We're going to see some kid's band he's formed with his mates, and we listen critically, and flame them for not being anywhere near as good as the Beatles.
A small number of truly great games, that's what we remember. We've forgotten the crap.
You mean if I want to make a cartoon now, i might have to have an original idea?
Exactly. Remember how Disney's fortune was built on the original ideas of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, the Jungle Book, Robin Hood, Winnie-the-Pooh, the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Tarzan?
That's how animators should do things. Original characters and settings. Not just ripping off the work of others because they're long dead and can't complain about it.
You don't lose anything if I steal your credit card information either.
No, that's quite true. If you copy my credit card information and do nothing at all with it, I don't lose anything. If on the other hand you copy my credit card information, then impersonate me and start buying things with it, then it costs me money. COSTS me money. As in, I have to pay the bills for your spending.
The only sense in which the victims of copyright infringement lose money is that they don't get money they might otherwise have had. That's a very different thing from taking away money which they actually did have.
The simple fact is someone has to pay the bills. So, my question is, where exactly does this "right to read, listen, watch", something I may have created, come from?
The concept of 'freedom of speech' is fairly widespread among the liberal democracies. In its most general form, this right is the right to transmit whatever information you like to anybody willing to listen, without the interference of anybody else.
Most cultures that recognise 'freedom of speech' still impose restrictions of various sorts upon it. Some impose restrictions on speech that would cause panic or riot. Or restrictions saying that the speech may not incite violence. Many restrict speech that might harm the reputation of some third party - sometimes even if that speech is in fact true. Some say that the speech must not offend certain racial groups, or religious groups. Some decide they ought to protect the king from criticism, some protect the government. Some insist that a certain percentage of speech transmitted across certain media ought to be in a particular chosen language. Some forbid you to transmit information that is likely to confuse automated systems that receive it and cause malfunctions. And some cultures have developed a strange concept called 'copyright', in which information can be 'owned', and you cannot transmit that information without the permission of the 'owner': the first person to have transmitted a particular sequence of information 'owns' it, and can forbid others to repeat that information if he so wishes.
There are reasonable arguments in favour of all these restrictions on freedom of speech. I imagine you agree with some of them. I very much doubt you agree with all of them. Some people happen to think that copyright is an intolerable restriction on free speech, and that the loss of the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster is a price worth paying for an internet free of artificial constraints on the free transmission of information.
That's about the shape of it. The buildings themselves are not historically interesting: they're 1940s army huts, put up quickly and on the cheap, and never intended to last more than a few years.
The important thing to preserve is the intellectual achievement. The work of the ULTRA cryptanalysts has finally got the recognition it deserves after decades of secrecy, and it's the machines they built and the papers they wrote that I'd primarily want to see preserved. They form the very foundation of computer science - quite apart from possibly having won the war. These all need a museum dedicated to their preservation and to the job of educating visitors on the importance of all this mathematical stuff - and for that matter, on how the government ended up treating the genius behind it all, the man they owed so much.
The site itself, and the buildings? While I'd like to see them maintained too, they're in competition for funding with a quite ridiculous number of other important historical sites which are also falling into disrepair - and if it comes down to a choice of one or the other, I'd sooner preserve some fascinating example of mediaeval architecture where the building itself is of historical interest.
You know, if Dr Shipman had excused his behaviour by saying 'Well, more people were killed in the Second World War...' then it might have been similar to what you just said.
These are, after all, the people who took a cute teddy bear figure and turned it into a mascot for paedophilia.
We don't build our stuff as tough as those two anymore.
Tell it to Spirit and Opportunity. Remember, Voyager has been flying for over thirty years, but it's spent the vast majority of its time in the vast emptiness of deep space, doing nothing but radio back basic telemetry and radiation readings and such. It's very rarely had to shift any moving parts, or fire an engine, or manoeuvre in any way. And its encounters with high radiation near the gas giants are long in the past. What would actually cause Voyager to fail now? Only the gradual dying of its power supply, as its plutonium core decays away.
The two Mars rovers, on the other hand, were designed for a three-month mission. They're still going five years later. Every day their motors work to push them around the Martian surface. Every day they're exposed to sandstorms and dust devils; they crawl around over dust and sand and rock; they support their own weight and have ever so many moving parts, which they use daily to prod and poke at solid objects. They've survived colossal dust storms that blot out the sun that supplies all their power. They've survived the Martian winter, again and again.
Voyager was impressive all right. But as achievements of engineering, for me Spirit and Opportunity are right up there with Apollo.
It's not something I'd want as core Fallout material - the aliens should be restricted to crash sites and cool blasters to reward dedicated explorers, and maybe the occasional super-rare random encounter for characters with a 10 in Luck. They shouldn't be central to any plot lines. But as an expansion pack? Sure, why not? Go out there and zap some little green men, that's completely in keeping with the 1950s pulp SF aesthetic. In fact in anticipation of this I think I'm going to start up a new character, and not a stealth sniper like my current one, but a heroic manly hero with high charisma and speech because he always talks the alien overlord's daughter over to his side. But... hmm... should he be called 'Buck', 'Dan', or 'Flash'?
'Disarmed' implies that at some point in the past you were armed. This is not the case; I don't think there's ever been a time when ownership of firearms was commonplace. Shotguns and such things, yes, in agricultural areas, but pistols and the like? All but unknown even before they were banned.
Whenever I run into massive multiplication of tabs, it's rarely dozens of entirely separate sites. I'll have three or four/. stories open, and I'll have opened a few subthreads in each one to follow them separately. I'll have several Wikipedia pages open. I'll have the BBC writeups of all football matches of interest from the previous day. So, dozens of tabs in all, but mostly from the same few domains.
Obvious solution, group them together by site. Instead of a dozen separate tabs which say 'Slashdot Co...' have one tab saying 'slashdot.org' and when I click on that it can show me everything I have open. In fact this is too obvious to be a new idea: surely someone's already programmed an extension that makes this happen?
If all life sprang up from common ancestors, why is the fossil record not a continuum? Evolution shouldn't operate in discrete stages, yet that is all we ever seem to find evidence of...
For an animal to become a fossil requires some fairly unlikely circumstances for its death. It doesn't happen all that often - in fact it's incredibly rare. So for the most part we only find fossils of species that have hit upon a successful lifestyle and have spread over a large area, where they live in large numbers. If millions upon millions of animals of a particular species live, over a huge area, and over a long period of time, then the chances are that some of them will become fossils and be found by scientists.
On the other hand, the particular isolated tribe of a species which finds itself living in an unfamiliar environment and forced to adapt or perish... there aren't many of them and they aren't widespread. The chances that one of this small population will become a fossil are very low. So we don't normally get a complete spectrum of fossils of every stage of its evolution; we only find them once they've successfully adapted to their new environment and spread all around.
I'm surprised at that. Buran was able to fly to orbit and return entirely automatically in 1988. The American shuttles were not capable of the same at the time, but in the intervening twenty years they've not been upgraded to have that ability?
Did you never think that? I'll happily admit that I did think that that for some time.
I never did, but I was growing up a little before every house had a VCR, and there were only four channels so Disney-on-demand was not available. I first got my fairytales in the form of paper and ink - and often you'd have three or four versions of the same story in different books, varying in details such as the presence or absence of heroic woodcutters, the eventual survival or otherwise of two little pigs and one big bad wolf, more or less gruesome versions of the eventual fate of any wicked witch, and so forth. So when the TV happened to show a Disney film, I saw it as another different adaptation, not as the original story.
I imagine that the current generation might well be misled for a while into thinking Disney are the original source of these stories. They've done an especially good job on Winnie-the-Pooh: on a Google image search I just ran for that name, the first picture by E. H. Shepard is the 107th result. Shocking.
Slashdot Mirror
On the first day of availability of Firefox 3, Mozilla tracked the locations of all the downloads they could, and logged the results on this map. As measures of Internet penetration in a country go, this isn't too bad. A country with a large number of Firefox users has a large number of Internet users - and further, those users are more than usually sophisticated about how they interact with the network, insofar as they have gone to the trouble to download a web browser rather than sticking with whatever they originally had.
Notice anything surprising between Iraq and Afghanistan? Maybe a country you thought was a backward totalitarian theocracy, but which has a number of downloads comparable with advanced, heavily wired European democracies? A country experiencing a massive post-war baby boom consisting largely of twentysomethings with little time for the bearded old men in power, and keenly interested in the new media which they understand and the Islamist censors do not?
No, of course not. It's just a desert out there full of fundamentalist camel-jockeys who hate our freedom.
That's because the case has been grinding on for a long, long time. Microsoft have been messing about trying to evade a series of judgements for years and years. Do we now want to send them the message 'Avoid complying with the law for long enough that the progress of technology renders the question irrelevant, and then there will be no consequences'? Or do we want to penalise them so that the next time something like this happens, the offender actually complies immediately rather than delaying for the best part of a decade?
Far more advanced results in gorilla speech have also been achieved.
What? No they wouldn't. Why go to all the trouble of genetically engineering a subhuman slave race when you've already got millions of untermenschen all over the place that you need to find a use for? The whole point of the Third Reich was to get rid of the inferior breeds, not to create more!
Mengele would probably have played with this technology, but as a matter of policy the Nazis were fixated on genetic purity. Cross-species gene tampering of this kind would probably have disgusted them.
This monster demanded vast amounts of power. So they designed an external power supply that plugged into the back of it.
Never saw the light of day; 3dfx collapsed after only a small number had been manufactured, and now they change hands for a small fortune from time to time on the collectors' market.
That does seem to be the line they're giving out these days. Trouble is, of course, that when the OT3 documents leaked, the cult sued for _copyright infringement_ - if it had been a pack of lies made up by their enemies out of malice, then they should have sued for _libel_. We can be pretty damn sure, from the ferocity with which the cult defended their ownership, that OT3 was genuine.
You also occasionally hear that the Xenu story is part of older mythology, and isn't really taught now - that the cult has shunted the space opera into the background, much like most Christians do with the more blatantly silly parts of Genesis. That might be true. It's also pretty fucking impressive: to ditch embarrassing doctrines almost before the messiah's body has cooled? That's quick work.
At the end of the Sandman plot arc A Game of You, there's a scene where a woman - not just any woman, a literal Barbie - goes into a comic store. She's buying a Bizarro back-issue for a friend who recently died who'd been a huge fan. Well, 'Weirdzo', from 'Hyperman', but in this continuity Superman actually exists, so, you know... Anyway, as she lays it on the grave, she comments: "In order to buy it I had to go into this bizarre little store. I mean, I don't think they'd swept the floor in a decade, and I bet the staff had to have taken unhelpfulness lessons. And there was a big greasy guy behind the counter who seemed really amused that I was like, female, and asking for this comic. He said it wasn't very collectable. Then he said they didn't normally see breasts as small as mine in his store, and all these guys laughed."
After publication of those issues, Neil Gaiman got a lot of letters from readers. Mostly male fans insisting that there exist no comics stores like that in all the world. And yet ever since, women have been asking him... "How did you know?"
When was the last time a real terrorist was found in a border check In 2007, although the terrorist in question had been on ceasefire for a decade, and was by that stage a reasonably respectable member of the political establishment, and had been invited to the US to meet the President.
Er... what? How would that be free software?
They don't tell you about the aliens at the mall. Of course not: you'd laugh and walk away. They tell you that you're sick and that they can help you. And they've got your test results to prove it, and they've got a machine that goes 'ping'.
It's only much later, once you've spent $lots on courses and treatments, that they mention the aliens. Oh, they've long since cured your original 'problem', but you see there's this guy named Xenu and these things called thetans... And if you carry on signing the cheques and doing yet more auditing then you too can become a Super Saiyan OT-VIII Ultra Scientologist with incredible powers.
Depends on what you consider to be the 'executive'. Originally, the king could in principle do whatever he liked. One of the major steps towards what we now call democracy was the establishment of the principle that only Parliament could levy taxes. So if the king wanted to declare war, that was up to him, but he had to go and ask Parliament for the money to pay for it. That's the kind of separation of powers that informed the thinking of the Americans when they established their republic.
Things have changed since then, however. While everything is done in the name of the Queen, she has no real power any more, except in the case of an indecisive election resulting in a hung Parliament. The Queen's prerogatives are exercised on her behalf by her Prime Minister - who is, in practice, the leader of whichever party commands a majority in Parliament, and so controls both sets of powers.
Go download a NES emulator and a collection of ROMs. Play through a representative sample of 2D platformers of the late eighties and early nineties. My God, most of them suck so very, very hard. How did anybody ever enjoy this utter rubbish?
Now play Super Mario Bros. 3.
There, you see the difference? Exactly. This isn't nostalgia taking games that were never very good and inflating them to become unwarranted classics. This is time acting as a filter. All those awful games have sunk into richly deserved obscurity. So when somebody publishes a 2D platformer today, we don't compare it against the whole genre: we compare it against Mario at his absolute best. We're going to see some kid's band he's formed with his mates, and we listen critically, and flame them for not being anywhere near as good as the Beatles.
A small number of truly great games, that's what we remember. We've forgotten the crap.
Exactly. Remember how Disney's fortune was built on the original ideas of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, the Jungle Book, Robin Hood, Winnie-the-Pooh, the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Tarzan?
That's how animators should do things. Original characters and settings. Not just ripping off the work of others because they're long dead and can't complain about it.
No, that's quite true. If you copy my credit card information and do nothing at all with it, I don't lose anything. If on the other hand you copy my credit card information, then impersonate me and start buying things with it, then it costs me money. COSTS me money. As in, I have to pay the bills for your spending.
The only sense in which the victims of copyright infringement lose money is that they don't get money they might otherwise have had. That's a very different thing from taking away money which they actually did have.
The concept of 'freedom of speech' is fairly widespread among the liberal democracies. In its most general form, this right is the right to transmit whatever information you like to anybody willing to listen, without the interference of anybody else.
Most cultures that recognise 'freedom of speech' still impose restrictions of various sorts upon it. Some impose restrictions on speech that would cause panic or riot. Or restrictions saying that the speech may not incite violence. Many restrict speech that might harm the reputation of some third party - sometimes even if that speech is in fact true. Some say that the speech must not offend certain racial groups, or religious groups. Some decide they ought to protect the king from criticism, some protect the government. Some insist that a certain percentage of speech transmitted across certain media ought to be in a particular chosen language. Some forbid you to transmit information that is likely to confuse automated systems that receive it and cause malfunctions. And some cultures have developed a strange concept called 'copyright', in which information can be 'owned', and you cannot transmit that information without the permission of the 'owner': the first person to have transmitted a particular sequence of information 'owns' it, and can forbid others to repeat that information if he so wishes.
There are reasonable arguments in favour of all these restrictions on freedom of speech. I imagine you agree with some of them. I very much doubt you agree with all of them. Some people happen to think that copyright is an intolerable restriction on free speech, and that the loss of the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster is a price worth paying for an internet free of artificial constraints on the free transmission of information.
The important thing to preserve is the intellectual achievement. The work of the ULTRA cryptanalysts has finally got the recognition it deserves after decades of secrecy, and it's the machines they built and the papers they wrote that I'd primarily want to see preserved. They form the very foundation of computer science - quite apart from possibly having won the war. These all need a museum dedicated to their preservation and to the job of educating visitors on the importance of all this mathematical stuff - and for that matter, on how the government ended up treating the genius behind it all, the man they owed so much.
The site itself, and the buildings? While I'd like to see them maintained too, they're in competition for funding with a quite ridiculous number of other important historical sites which are also falling into disrepair - and if it comes down to a choice of one or the other, I'd sooner preserve some fascinating example of mediaeval architecture where the building itself is of historical interest.
You know, if Dr Shipman had excused his behaviour by saying 'Well, more people were killed in the Second World War...' then it might have been similar to what you just said.
These are, after all, the people who took a cute teddy bear figure and turned it into a mascot for paedophilia.
Tell it to Spirit and Opportunity. Remember, Voyager has been flying for over thirty years, but it's spent the vast majority of its time in the vast emptiness of deep space, doing nothing but radio back basic telemetry and radiation readings and such. It's very rarely had to shift any moving parts, or fire an engine, or manoeuvre in any way. And its encounters with high radiation near the gas giants are long in the past. What would actually cause Voyager to fail now? Only the gradual dying of its power supply, as its plutonium core decays away.
The two Mars rovers, on the other hand, were designed for a three-month mission. They're still going five years later. Every day their motors work to push them around the Martian surface. Every day they're exposed to sandstorms and dust devils; they crawl around over dust and sand and rock; they support their own weight and have ever so many moving parts, which they use daily to prod and poke at solid objects. They've survived colossal dust storms that blot out the sun that supplies all their power. They've survived the Martian winter, again and again.
Voyager was impressive all right. But as achievements of engineering, for me Spirit and Opportunity are right up there with Apollo.
It's not something I'd want as core Fallout material - the aliens should be restricted to crash sites and cool blasters to reward dedicated explorers, and maybe the occasional super-rare random encounter for characters with a 10 in Luck. They shouldn't be central to any plot lines. But as an expansion pack? Sure, why not? Go out there and zap some little green men, that's completely in keeping with the 1950s pulp SF aesthetic. In fact in anticipation of this I think I'm going to start up a new character, and not a stealth sniper like my current one, but a heroic manly hero with high charisma and speech because he always talks the alien overlord's daughter over to his side. But... hmm... should he be called 'Buck', 'Dan', or 'Flash'?
'Disarmed' implies that at some point in the past you were armed. This is not the case; I don't think there's ever been a time when ownership of firearms was commonplace. Shotguns and such things, yes, in agricultural areas, but pistols and the like? All but unknown even before they were banned.
Obvious solution, group them together by site. Instead of a dozen separate tabs which say 'Slashdot Co...' have one tab saying 'slashdot.org' and when I click on that it can show me everything I have open. In fact this is too obvious to be a new idea: surely someone's already programmed an extension that makes this happen?
For an animal to become a fossil requires some fairly unlikely circumstances for its death. It doesn't happen all that often - in fact it's incredibly rare. So for the most part we only find fossils of species that have hit upon a successful lifestyle and have spread over a large area, where they live in large numbers. If millions upon millions of animals of a particular species live, over a huge area, and over a long period of time, then the chances are that some of them will become fossils and be found by scientists.
On the other hand, the particular isolated tribe of a species which finds itself living in an unfamiliar environment and forced to adapt or perish... there aren't many of them and they aren't widespread. The chances that one of this small population will become a fossil are very low. So we don't normally get a complete spectrum of fossils of every stage of its evolution; we only find them once they've successfully adapted to their new environment and spread all around.
So... when 'Terrorism' surrenders, then? Don't hold your breath.
I'm surprised at that. Buran was able to fly to orbit and return entirely automatically in 1988. The American shuttles were not capable of the same at the time, but in the intervening twenty years they've not been upgraded to have that ability?
I never did, but I was growing up a little before every house had a VCR, and there were only four channels so Disney-on-demand was not available. I first got my fairytales in the form of paper and ink - and often you'd have three or four versions of the same story in different books, varying in details such as the presence or absence of heroic woodcutters, the eventual survival or otherwise of two little pigs and one big bad wolf, more or less gruesome versions of the eventual fate of any wicked witch, and so forth. So when the TV happened to show a Disney film, I saw it as another different adaptation, not as the original story.
I imagine that the current generation might well be misled for a while into thinking Disney are the original source of these stories. They've done an especially good job on Winnie-the-Pooh: on a Google image search I just ran for that name, the first picture by E. H. Shepard is the 107th result. Shocking.