Posts by ShadowDragon8685 503 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2010
Hrm...
Did they OPEN SOURCE it, or release it under a Creative Commons license of some sort, such as, say, a Share Alike Noncommercial?
The difference is important, because if they fully Opensourced it, there's literally nothing to stop, say, those wankers who own Budweiser or someone from cooking right out of their recipe book at industrial scale and flogging it.
Except it is. They are attempting to compel a locksmith who's staked his commercial claim in the unbreakability of his lock's security to provide them with a skeleton key which can open any of his locks. This will cause faith in his locks to take a nosedive, as there is no guarantee whatsoever that such a key, once known to be extant, will not fall into the hands of criminals, corporate competition, private malefactors and foreign intelligence services, all of whom will have vested interest in obtaining that key.
And there is absolutely no way in hell to ensure that it will "run only on this guy's phone" and "only on Apple or FBI computers." Once a software weapon like this is created, it can be stolen, or recreated, by others.
This is an absolutely chilling, apalling thing for a court to order.
If this works, I hope and expect that their next step in the security of people's devices is "your device doesn't trust anyone, not even us, unless you tell it to." IE, no bypass, and some kind of tamper sensors that fry the phone completely if someone tries.
I really, really hope that they either appeal it successfully, or (and this is unlikely, I admit,) take a principled stand, say "okay," and whatever they give the FBI is an uber-bricking nuke that completely melts the phone, and then tell the FBI to see them in court, before a jury of twelve.
[e]Even if they lose the court case, any fine the FBI can levvy will be annihilated in the good press (and sales) resulting from making it clear that they will not under any circumstances comply with any outrageous demand to bypass the security on someone's phone.
Nah, we love to have the Eurovision Song Contest running. For a little while, it distracts you Europeans so we can meddle in the rest of the world's affairs without having you nag us.
I mean, except for that one time we meddled IN the ESC... It was a slow year, and we felt like trollin' a bit.
Also, it's worth it for the inevitable post-Eurovision strip of Scandanavia and the World.
@Geoffrey W "How do you educate kids and teens, or indeed adults, to not be interested in mucky pictures?"
You don't, mate. As a 30-year-old man (oh my god, how did that happen?!) I very clearly remember first being interested in getting my hands on pornography at the ripe age of 13, and succeeding. I also remember, at the age of 17, successfully defeating the nannyware on a school computer in under five minutes, as part of a bet with the IT wanker who installed it. I wagered the cash I had on me ($20,) versus his day's wages. The twat accepted, then reneged on the deal when at the 8 minute mark he was staring at the Playboy.com homepage.
"Why do people panic so much about sexuality in the young? We've all been young and been in that situation, and look how we all turned out!"
Ephebophobia. No, seriously, that's a word, look it up. It means the fear of adolescents, which is not generally the same kind of phobia as I have towards anything with greater than four legs, but generally the same sort of thing which leads persons in middle and later age to be irritable, grouchy, and completely out-of-touch with current youth culture.
(Ephebophillia is something very different, and I do not recommend googling that one.)
But seriously, kids are gonna look at porn. Nothing short of global nuclear armageddon is going to prevent that. Possibly not even that, at least not until the old copies of Hustler and Playboy wear out. And even then, that only raises the bar as high as convincing someone to take their clothes off.
Honestly, if you want to stop your kids from having wild amounts of sex, the best thing you can do is LET them have unrestricted access to pornography. Not only will they be better able (and thus more inclined) to satisfy their urges manually and autonomously, but the porn will give them a wholly impractical viewpoint on what a sexy, attractive human body is, meaning that they'll feel inadequate compared to the porn stars, and they'll find almost any prospective partners they can lay their hands on to be equally imperfect and less desirable. Which is not to say it's an absolute guarantee, but it'll help.
In Star Wars, at least it makes some sense; the march of Galactic technology has been glacial for millenia, to the point where you can plausibly hurt or destroy a modern vessel with an ancient one. (For comparison, imagine a Greek Trireme destroying an Aegis-class missile destroyer.)
Between that, and the Galactic Empire which almost certainly would have clamped down on a lot of technology to better improve their grip on the galaxy, it's not entirely implausible.
But, yeah. It's not so entirely bad, though - I mean, comparing the Movie-era TOS stuff with the ENT stuff and the movie-era stuff, while still a bit pants, definitely looks like it could plausibly be the result of a hundred and some years worth of advancement on the same technologies, whereas the TOS stuff just looks campy.
I know I'm going to be hated for this...
I really, really hate the original Enterprise design.
NOW, before you get out the laser pitchforks and prepare to castrate me with a bat'leth, hear me out!
In terms of the Constitution class starships, I always preferred the refit - the swept-back nacelle pylons, the non-glowy-ball-fronted, oblong nacelles, the neck-mounted photon torpedo pods. The movie version, in other words, the version that shares a lot of parts commonality with the Miranda class.
I just think it looks better.
"When seconds count, the police are only minutes away" is only for use when you are threatened with PHYSICAL HARM. And ONLY with physical harm. Not privacy invasion. Property defense, yes, if you reasonably fear that the other guy will use violence to claim your stuff - if they're breaking in, absolutely. If they grab your wallet and leg it, no.
Do you understand me? It's irresponsible gun-owners like Kentucky McShotgun who put more ammunition in the hands of the gun-grabbers. Unless that drone was FIRING UPON him or his kin, he had NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER to shoot it down.
I love that you've gotten 13 downvotes for this.
It's all "We wanted to get into an outrage and harrumph over someone invading people's privacy! How dare you bring FACTS and DATA into the case which shows it isn't nearly as clear-cut a case of peeping tommery as we want it to be! HARRUMPH! I say, HARRUMPH!"
Get over yourselves. Privacy isn't as all-sacrosanct a right as you think, and not all measures are justifiable in protecting it. You want to enjoy privacy, erect a physical barrier between you and people who can potentially see you. We do this all the time, they're called WALLS! And FENCES, and ROOFS. The dude with the drone is in the right here - Kentucky McShotgun was just itching to blast him one of those dat-burnt newfangled snoopin' machines and he took a well-aimed long shot. That doesn't make him a heroic paladin of privacy, it make him the arsehole who shot down someone's drone when it was way, way the hell out of his business.
I am in fact a yankee reader of El Reg, and unlike you, I'm not too chicken to hide behind a Guy Fawkes mask when I say things that may be controversial.
I was pointing out that your sarcasm was inappropriate. Even governments must look at bending when they enact laws which are out-of-touch with reality. Just a a Celtic King cannot command the tide to cease rising, and attempting to make alcohol a prohibited substance worked out very poorly in the U.S. the last time it was attempted, and just as the sharing of movies, TV shows and music continues at flank speed on the internet despite massive governmental and business crackdowns and attempts to regulate them, the technology that enables on-demand taxi services can't be banished into the ether. It's a service people obviously want; both riders and drivers, and it threatens the very core of the traditional taxi industry because it has basically none of the traditional overhead so associated.
That's both a good thing, and a bad thing; a good thing in that it forces taxicab companies and governments to rethink the way they conduct and regulate taxi services, but also a bad thing in the way that Uber, et al, are becoming so prosperous by pursuing levels of "fuck our employees" that would make Sam Walton say "son, that's going too far."
First: You are aware that a lot of places, even in the US, are heavily rolling back the "War on Drugs" since it's proving to be an even more enduring clusterfuck than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq (both of them,) and Afghanistan combined, and even going so far as to outright legalize recreational marijuana, right?
Second: I suspect rather more people are looking to make some extra bank with their cars than are looking to make dosh running drugs.
Thirdly: That was called Silk Road, the investigation to take it down took what, like five years, three crooked cops and an absolute charlie foxtrot at the end of the race, and it's probably already been replaced by now.
Honestly, I think Uber have kind of a point here...
Without some kind of massively invasive way to snoop on and block the traffic of specific apps, governments can't really stop this kind of thing. Striking down Uber will be like striking down Napster.
I can see the appeal too, especially in a dogshite economy, where many folks will have autos left over from better times/handed down from their elders, but no way to actually use those resources to make them any dosh. Meanwhile, the actual hurdles to becoming a proper taxi driver are super-steep, and since most of them involve basically winding as an automotive prostitute to a pimp cab company that owns the cab and makes you rent it - meaning it's possibly to actually LOSE money on a hard day's work depending on factors entirely outside of your control - I can certainly see the appeal of a guaranteed "delivered a fare = dosh in the bank" system, especially in the comfort and feeling of safety (however illusory if the guy in the other seat decides to pull a knife on you,) of your own auto.
That having been said, the on-demand labor model is so top-heavy that the word I'd use for it is "usurious," and pretending that Uber drivers are "independent contractors" is a farce in what I imagine is something approximating 98% of all cases. Sure, there might be some folk using it as a means to pick up a bit of extra on the side, and there might be like, the two or three people out there who are signed up to more than one of these systems and take their fares on a purely mercenary basis, but for the vast majority of people doing this, I suspect that Uber is their primary or sole source of income, by which they earn a living; that makes them employees.
Cautionary tales for all would-be "superiors."
Just because you're paid more than somebody does NOT mean you KNOW more than somebody. When they try to talk to you about a potential issue, you should listen to them, they may be trying to cover YOUR ass and not just their own.
(Attempting to cover YOUR ass is exponentially more likely the less you treat them like disposable cogs in the machine.)
It wasn't an unexpected bill for £100,000, it was going to be an unexpected bill for £600,000 over a twelve-month period, in 1997, which is roughly £975,000 today.
GW was also a lot smaller back then, so getting this dropped in their shorts would have been a hell of a lot more of a problem, since as John mentioned, this had apparently blown through their entirely yearly IT budget in under two months.
It seems that the standards of professionalism to which James' former employer who may or may not be Games Workshop adhere to are "Be polite, be efficient, and have a plan to sack everyone you meet."
Since they have all the professional courtesy of a great white shark in a fishery, they have no reasonable right to expect anything but that in return. If you sack someone in the worst possible terms short of having them escorted off the premises by armed police officers, you really have no right to expect them to have any loyalty to you, nor to do anything for you except wash their hands of you.
As of the moment you use phrases like "effective immediately," then they're no longer working for you. They no longer have any obligation to warn you of any financial disasters you may be facing.
It sounds like they called him into a room, had some security goons sack his desk (in the manner of Vikings sacking a village,) and throw anything they thought was personal shit (hope he didn't have any personal Warhammer figurines at his desk that they might mistake as company property!) into a box, handed him his marching orders, then frogmarched him to the door.
So, yeah. My thought would have been "Well, fuck those guys." Certainly wouldn't have been "I'd better call that guy who just fired me and tell him how hosed he is if he doesn't get appraised of the ISDN situation."
Seriously, coming two days on the end of finishing Life is Strange, this one hurts. And yet...
Well, Clara's still around. And in a way, she's an absolute immortal, moreso than anyone else since her death is an FPiT (though that probably doesn't mean she should go hopping in front of any Extermination beams any time soon.)
Ashildr's back, too, and the two of them are now running free throughout all of Time and Space, but...
I don't imagine the Doctor could have failed to get the hint when Clara said "for all we know, she could be me."
I think he just realized that he needed to play coy to let them leave.
So, I'm sad. I loved The Impossible Girl, and Grandpa Doctor. I'm sad to see it end, so very, very sad. On the other hand, they ended this in a way I can actually be glad about:
Clara's not dead (not really,)
Clara didn't get memory-wiped,
Clara didn't somehow "give up the life" and go back to being an absolute mundanity,
Clara didn't get trapped by a timey-wimey wibbly that the Doctor could fix in about two days if he only gave it a few minutes' thought*.
Clara exited to have her own adventures. By now, she's the equal of the Doctor; hell, I was half-thinking that the actual Doctor could buy it for real, and Clara could actually assume the name as a title, maybe he'd pass it on.
*Amy and Rory were sent back to early 1900s New York, and the Doctor noted that he couldn't land the TARDIS anywhere nearby. All he had to do, however, would be to land the TARDIS as nearby on Earth as he could get and take a train/plane to NYC to pick them up and take them back to the TARDIS.
This one was great. I was just expecting yet another "tarpulin in the sub-basement, bag of quicklime and shovels at 3 AM" joke.
Tricking the idiots into getting themselves arrested, however, was just bastardry above and beyond the call of bastardry; doing it Need for Speed style and culminating with them piloting the Lotus at full speed into the back of the plod?
Priceless. Go symbol's tooltip says it all. Which is exactly what the Bastard and PFY did!
Woe Betide those Gallifreyans, they may have done it this time.
The Doctor has just lost his best friend, quite possibly permanently (the jury may still be out on that and it ain't over 'til it's over, I say,) and then spent two MILLION years punching his way through a superdiamond wall. All because he was too BLOODY STUBBORN to give up.
He really is the Oncoming Storm, and the stormclouds have been gathering for so long that the Time Lords of Gallifrey should be very, very afraid. They've successfully turned the wrath that even the Daleks fear upon themselves.
I see two possibilities here.
By "The Hybrid is me," the Doctor meant himself, and has claimed to be either metaphorically, or literally, half-human. This is not really implausible, since we know that some humans will survive 'til Gallifreyan times; both Clara Oswald and Ashildr will be 'round that long, and we know the Impossible Girl successfully infiltrated Gallifrey at least once. Wouldn't that be a boot in the ass - you killed his best friend and his mum at once?
By "The Doctor is Me," then he meant Ashildr, and he's sussed out that he, Ashildr, and Clara, have all played their parts in a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Gallifreyans feared The Hybrid, and knew the Doctor knew, so they coerced Ashildr into putting the Doctor through hell. Clara, of course, being Clara, got herself in the way of it, and managed to get herself killed in the process without averting anything because PLOT. The Doctor has threatened to rain down hell on Ashildr for what she did, but I expect the realization that she's been played too, and it's caused her to kill someone she liked AND alienate the only person she respected as any kind of an equal, is going to make her feel very, very wrathful towards the Gallifreyans.
Hence, she's going to show up, looking for some revenge of her own. And the Doctor will then have to choose to intervene again... Or stand aside. And this time, he may just stand aside. He may just say no. Seriously, this cold piss him off worse than what Davros and Missy did that most recent time.
Very emotionally powerful episode... But they missed two obvious outs.
1: The stasis pod. Quoth the Doctor, "if you're alive, it keeps you alive." They could've bunged Clara in that.
2: Clara could have said "No. I'm going to run. And do you know what I'm going to run? It's not because I'm scared, Doctor. It's because if you don't SEE me die, it wasn't final. If you don't SEE it happen, it's not a Fixed Point in Time. So I am going to run, and you aren't going to look back. You're going to look forward, you're going to make whoever put Ashildr up to this sorry they ever heard the name Doctor, and then you're going to do something so CLEVER, you're going to put on a bowtie, a leather jacket, combat boots and a pinstriped waistcoat when you play your guitar at my welcome back party. Got it?"
Cue an epic legging it. The "out" leaves a hole in Clara's death you could pilot s Death Star through, let alone a TARDIS, but my favorite would be to go find those blokes who ride around in micro-miniaturized kaiju recreations of folks, get them to lend him another one of those person-imitating thingies, then grab Clara off the street when the group split up to do their searching, bung her inside it, and tell her to do what comes naturally.
Then cue an epic rock ballad version of the Doctor's theme, played by the Doctor himself.
[e]Come to think of it, on reflection, that could STILL work. But first, the Doctor has to get his Oncoming Storm, his Time Lord Triumphant, on upon those pitiable fools who set this nonsense up in the first place.
That depends on what you Kickstart, mate. Stick with entertainment titles.
I got the deluxe edition of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and some goodies (an e-novel and a map,) and got my mitts on the full game earlier than launch, for my $25 Kickstart, when the deluxe edition alone ran to $30. Not a huuuuuge boost, I suppose... But I was pretty confident I would get it, and I was gonna throw the money at it anyway.
Eh...
Well, if they gave it all honest effort and simply failed, I say, shit happens, you move on with your life, and it's almost certain nobody is RUINED by this except maybe the guys who were trying to get the product off the ground (pun fully intended.)
After all, investment is inherently a risky proposition, and while if you're careful and only back entertainment products, Kickstarter can be more like a long-term cash-up-front pre-order, anything hardware-related is going to be more risky.
Of course, if there WAS actual knowingly fraudulent behavior involved, then that's another matter. But the distinction there is one for the courts to determine, I would say.
Wait, uh...
That's... That's not how acceleration works.
If you're hovering over the sun, not at orbital velocity, using constant thrust to keep yourself up, you'd A: need to precisely cancel the acceleration-towards-the-sun-by-gravity with thrust, not exceed it (or else you'd be accelerating away from the sun,) and B: you'd be subjecting the crew to HIGHER G-forces.
To get Earth-normal gravity under 27g conditions, you'd need to be accelerating TOWARDS the sun at 28g, not away from it.
The idiots on the space station, no, but I'm talking about the UNIT soldiers who made a complete mockery of the word "soldier" the prior two episodes running.
Say what you will about Clara's departed boyfriend, at least he seemed like someone who could grab a rifle and start to operate; the UNIT troops in the two episodes prior to the most recent one seem less like trained soldiers and more like random morons who were put in tacticool outfits, and please don't even get me STARTED on the UNIT plane, which was apparently completely devoid of missile countermeasures, AND piloted by an idiot dumb enough to fly back into what he knew was contested territory in what amounted to a civilian aircraft on a low and slow approach, rather than, say, landing at some completely bumfuck out-of-the-way RAF base, commandeering a shitload of soldiers and heading home to take care of business.
Your son has impeccable taste, Jagged. I share his hatred.
It's one thing for the soldiers to be simply outmatched by aliens with superior technology/superior sneakiness, it's quite another for ostensibly special forces equivalent soldiers to behave like they're completely incompetent morons.
Y'know what would make a good pallete cleanser after this bollocks?
The Doctor getting himself into a pickle he can't talk, sonic, or clever his way out of, and then Clara, the Osgoods, Kate, and a whole mess of tactical operators come and save his ass, not with mcguffins or hamhanded moral-of-the-story proclaimations, but with the judicious application of nothing less than lethal force.
Especially if the aliens are going "Hork Dork our tech's so super we can be completely overconfident!" only to get completely wiped out by the technologically-inferior species which actually committed highly-trained warfighters who take the situation seriously to the endeavor, XCOM style.
But honestly, I've had that problem with this whole series, STARTING with the first episode where Missy got up to her usual BS and the snipers didn't immediately ventilate her. Seriously, why EVEN BRING THEM, why bring ANYBODY, if you're going to order them to hold fire when they're being vaporized? For that matter, what kind of soldier is going to actually HOLD FIRE when his buddies are being disintegrated?
Bloody hell, that bugged me, too. An object in orbit doesn't need any bloody antigravs, because it, DEFINITIONALLY, orbiting!
Now, that having been said, it IS possible for an object to be at orbital heights over a planet without going at orbital velocities (and hence, not being in orbit,) if it's being held up by antigravs/constant thrust/something else.
But that's a colossally stupid idea for anything short of a TARDIS.
I'm going to espouse an unpopular viewpoint here...
Clara Oswald is fan-tastic, the Impossible Girl is great, and everybody who doesn't like her is subjectively wrong.
(You see what I did there?)
But I still think there's something odd going on with this one. Even for Doctor Who, the whole "the stuff that's in your eyes when you wake up mutates and eats you if you don't sleep" thing tripped my bullshit meters waaaaaay too hard, and thie episode seemed to have a surprisingly strong anti-transhumanism edge, what with the Doctor flat-out rejecting using technology to improve a fundamental facet of human life...
Which is rich, coming from the bloke who's regenerated once more than he's supposed to already, especially coming from a member of a species that gets to regenerate AT ALL. (Although, to be frank, the idea that it takes until the 38th century and requires a giant, clunky, external pod to do this strikes me as even more bollocks, especially when we had episodes featuring major transhumanist technologies back in the leather jacket days of Nine.)
Why, exactly, should the OIG investigator be fired?
He suspected theft of a parcel by a postal employee, not mail fraud. He corresponded with the seller under that premise, and law enforcement officers and investigators are generally required to provide identification when asked, and for good reason.
Really, who's ballsy enough to attempt to steal the identity of a LEO? Well, this utinni, apparently, but seriously, you DO NOT want to go down a road that has law enforcement refusing to provide their credentials. Down that road leads to far greater impersonation of law enforcement, since anyone loud and burly can just start shouting "Police! On the ground! I don't gotta show shit!" and people will comply for fear of legal problems if they don't and oh look, now they're being robbed/kidnapped/raped/murdered/assaulted with a bannana-cream pie.
I'm late to the action, so I suspect this will never be replied to, but...
The Doctor was wrong. Really, really wrong.
Wrong to forgive Bonnie so readily; has he forgot the MURDERS she committed? Off the top of my head there's the UNIT pilot and other staff from his poncing-about plane, since we sure as hell didn't see any of them make it off the plane (not to mention the other Zygon in there,) not to mention all the murders she was INDIRECTLY responsible for, like the middle-aged woman and all those UNIT guys.
She doesn't DESERVE to be Osgood. More, she can't really be TRUSTED, even if her entire reasoning behind this uprising was, as the Doctor pointed out, childish and flawed.
Secondly, wiping Kate's memory? Repeatedly? About things vital to the security of the UK and Earth as a whole? The Doctor doesn't deserve the trust she places in him, and quite frankly, he's the one who needs to grow up: sometimes, to keep the peace, to serve the greater or greatest of goods, killing has to be done. Like, well, with the freaking Daleks. They only EVER go on a murderboner, exterminate countless people. You'd be entirely justified in annihilating each and every last one of them, because no matter how many times he tries, no matter what face he's wearing, they NEVER turn nice. They're genetically incapable of it.
Also, he gravely miscalculated. Kate didn't have a 50% chance of getting what she wanted and a 50% chance of not getting what she wanted. Setting off the nuke under UNIT Black Archive would have stopped the Zygon rebellion just as readily as the nerve gas would have done, and the last time this situation came up, she was ready to pull the trigger on that, too. She had a 100% chance of averting the war, and a 50% chance of the cost of so doing being the entire population of London.
She also could have just, I don't know, quickdrawn her pistol and shot the three Zygons in the room. We already know she's faster on the draw than a Zygon, and two of them had their hands full with Clara at the time.
It seems to me that the simple solution is to state unequivocally that a store has the right to search things which an employee might reasonable smuggle goods out in, and that the employee has the right to be compensated for any and all time spent being searched: ergo, the clock-out happens AFTER searching, not before.
That should satisfy all parties involved. The stores still have their right to search your things, but they'll exercise that right much less liberally since they're paying you for the time. And if they want to spend an hour searching someone, that person and everyone behind them in the queue will be getting time for it, so while they may be massively inconvenienced, they'll be being compensated for it.
Just because you've done something unwise that enabled a criminal to take advantage of you does NOT in any way, shape, or form, mean you "deserved" to be victimized, or that the police shouldn't do everything in their power to catch the perfidious party and plonk them in the pen.
El Reg's attraction of snarky tech and vaguely-tech news and the Bastard Operator from Hell couldn't POSSIBLY be of any possible interest to any English-speaking audience outside the United Kingdom (and maybe Ireland, if they're particularly drunk and/or sober,) right?
Hell, El Reg has a San Fran office, don't they? I don't think it's unreasonable for the stories to carry the conversion that those of us yankees will understand without having to visit xe.
"You must admit that it would have rather ruined the whole 'plane getting shot down by bad Clara using a MANPAD' part of the plot if the aircraft had been able to avoid the missile by flying at altitude, blanketing the electromagnetic spectrum with noise and popping flares and chaff as if it were going out of fashion."
To be quite honest, it would have made UNIT out to be somewhat less the incompetent, bumbling fools that they have been so far.
> notClara fires MANPAD at the plane.
>> Cut to plane cockpit, lock-on warning.
>> Close-up of COUNTERMEASURES flashing on the screen, pilot shouting something sharp like "Oh bollocks!" and jerking the yoke.
> The plane banks sharply, flares and chaff dropping like they're going out of style. Cut to credits.
Next week's ep:
> Repeat from the launched MANPAD.
>> Missile detonates in the chaff cloud, plane flies on, unhindered, pilot climbing fast and hard.
>> Cut to notClara is looking somewhat bewildered, and checks to see if she brought more than one. She hasn't.
> Cut to inside the plane, where the Doctor, Oswald, and the restrained Zygon are mashed against the side of the aircraft. The Doctor claws his way to the intercom, demands to know what the bloody hell is going on.
>> Pilot tells the Doctor that they've been fired upon and the countermeasures' auto-deployment saved them.
>> The Doctor asks if he can do that again.
>> Pilot says no, that was all they had.
> Doctor calls Clara's phone, notClara answers after a few moments.
>> Doctor says 'you only brought the one, didn't you?'
>> notClara says she wasn't expecting actual competency from UNIT.
>> Doctor says they can't always be played like clowns, and tells notClara that he's coming for her, and if he doesn't find his Clara, there will be hell to pay.
> Roll opening credits.
But no, apparently UNIT are so stupid and/or critically short on budget that although they can actually negotiate a "President of the World" position that countries which are at one another's throats will both honor in times of alien invasion, they can't afford chaff and flares for said president's ride.
New Who has an unfortunate habit of making UNIT troops out to be utter incompetents. I think the last time they were ACTUALLY effective was when they loaded steel-jacketed rounds and kicked Sontaran ass.
These guys? Complete morons.
Seriously: even if you think they MAY be your actual freaking parents, you don't just put your guns down and follow them into a confined space. You treat it like you do any other hostage situation: order them to get on the ground and restrain each and every one of them. Even a Zygon's gonna be in a peck of bother with his/her/its (dunno what the proper gender pronouns for Zygons are, or if they're even applicable,) hands in manacles; and if it shifts back to break free, well, you splatter the son of a gun.
That's what you would do EVEN IF you had no reason to believe that there was a significant chance they were shapeshifters and not your actual parents. These were so obviously shapeshifters it was painful.
It's also bloody obvious that there's at least one Zygon, maybe more, in the UNIT basecamp; how else would the Zygons just "have" exactly the right "hostages" on hand? They wouldn't, and it's even less likely that the loved ones of ONLY those people who are actually looking at the Zygon camp would be there. Seriously, the drone operator's family? Loved ones for EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the UNIT team?
And for that matter, there wasn't a single one on that team who had such a shitty relationship with someone that a Zygon ignorantly mimiced that they would've gladly taken the opportunity for a consequences-free shot at them and considered bagging a Zygon instead a consolation prize? Or someone willing to step up next to the commander, point their rifle at the Zygon imitating his mum, and say "You're either a Zygon or not, but either way, you're not MY mum. Get on the ground and put your hands on your head, or I will open fire, human or otherwise."
It's just...
No, just no. Please, please, PLEASE get an ACTUAL military veteran as a consultant, and actually LISTEN to them for a change. It doesn't make the aliens look badass when the humans are behaving so painfully pants-on-head, pencils-up-nose, gibbering-wibble-every-three-seconds retarded that fat civilians can poke holes in their behavior in five seconds flat, it just makes the humans look painfully incompetent. Seriously, if a Medieval queen can off one of them with a freaking dagger, how about the guys with guns actually get to do something useful for a change?
(Also, what was with that drone operator? There's supposed to be at least two operators for a UCAV, and a commanding officer who has to authorize ordnance release. Why didn't someone else just grab the stick and push the button?)
Awh...
The Doctor's poncing-about plane got blewed up? That's a shame.
Also, what kind of moron at UNIT designed a "Presidential Jet" for President of the World without military countermeasures to prevent things like the plane being shot down with a MANPAADs? For that matter, why was the pilot flying low and slow off the coast, did the Doctor order him to take the scenic route?
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