Posts by ShadowDragon8685

Is Alphabet-Google 'too big to jail'? The Lords find out

I can't see any antitrust processes against Google going well.

The name itself has become a genericized trademark meaning "to look up information on the web." One does not say "I'm going to use Google to look for [Info]," they just say "I'mma Google that for you real quick."

And the thing is... Nobody except Google's business rivals wants that to change. Google is, at its core, a search engine. Years and years of refinement, advancements, and more refinements, have lead to it becoming dominant - because it is the best at finding what most people want.

I mean, really, what are regulators going to do? Block connections to google.com? As soon as people get over the initial panic of being unable to search for things and dredge up the vague memory of Bing and Yahoo (which I was surprised this year to learn still exists,) the first thing they'll do is search, using Bing or Amazon, "how to use Google in [country]."

It goes beyond that, though; gmail has become as integral to so many people's lives as Google web-searching. Google Docs/Drive has, too, and while everybody and their mother might offer webmail services, to my knowledge nobody offers what Google Drive does.

Any kind of serious anti-trust actions aimed at disrupting Google would lead to outrage and pandemonium. People's lives would be massively disrupted. Some people might even be outright ruined if, say, they can't get at their vital information on Drives or their Gmail. Android phones would all be in rough shape, too, since they default to the presumption of a lot of these services existing.

Like it or not, through a combination of being That Damn Good and some shady sneaky tactics, Google has become a vital infrastructural component of the everyday lives of more people than I can count. Actually knocking them down would be tantamount to political suicide, and might even lead to hordes of angry voters whose lives have been seriously compromised demanding a rollback of antitrust laws.

So what can be done?

I dunno. I'm not sure ought CAN be done. If they tried some cockamamie scheme to "split up" Google the way they split up Ma Bell, you'd just leave a bunch of orphaned services which are so interdependent upon one another as to be rendered non-functional. I guess you could, say, make a demand that Google set up their services such that you CAN choose to use other search engines to power the search bar, say, using Bing on the YouTube website search bar to search for videos...

But literally nobody would do so, because why the hell would you? What would be the point?

New DMCA rules mean you can fiddle with your tablets, routers, cars (as if you weren't anyway)

Which means sod-all when the problem is some thoroughly mechanical malfunction that Farmer John can fix with a welding torch, the way his pappy and his pappy's pappy fixed their John Deeres before them, only the difference is that this time, John Deere can claim they violated the DMCA and sue Farmer John and take his family farm.

"Car control systems are also now fair game, the Librarian has ruled, although not until next year. The EFF had requested this, although motor manufacturers lobbied hard against including it, but the recent spate of car hacking cases and the ongoing VW scandal appear to have swung the argument."

I hope this also applies to farm equipment.

John Deere have been horrifically abusing the DMCA to sell farmers licenses to tractors instead of, you know, selling them fucking tractors, ever since they started putting electronic engine controllers in them - meaning that it was illegal to (say,) repair your tractor yourself, meaning you'd have to pay John Deere to send a tech out to do it.

Aussies' distinctive Strine down to drunk forefathers

"Strine." I love that word. I wish I'd known that word back when I was running a tabletop game of Eclipse Phase, and I introduced an Australian-born wilderness specialist who would teach my players (all but one of whom had lived all of their lives either in space, or in big cities and then in space,) wilderness skills.

They accused him of exaggerating the accent, if not faking it entirely. He asked them who you'd be more likely to listen to teaching you rough-and-tumble wilderness survival skills: David Attenborough, or a man who sounds like he's actually wrestled a crocodile by choice, for fun.

(The dark secret? He wasn't faking the accent at all. Playing it up a bit maybe, but not at all faking. He really was what he claimed to be, one of the last bushwhackers alive.)

I guess the point is... Hey, it's not all bad. A strine may not make you sound terribly booksmart (though it still sounds moreso than a thick southern drawl,) but it makes you sound wilderness smart. :)

Northrop wins $55bn contract for next-gen bomber – as America says bye-bye to B-52

I just hope they don't pull the same retarded crap they pulled with the F-22, where they get way into development, then Congress decides it's costing too much and cuts their order number... Which OF COURSE means the price-per-unit goes up, so you don't wind up spending less money, you wind up spending the same amount of money on less materiel.

Re: Crew

Because you don't want a computer making the final decision about whether or not to release potentially nuclear ordnance, A Non e-mouse.

Drones can be jammed. If they have to be sent up against a technologically advanced country like Russia, there is a non-trivial chance their command systems can actually be spoofed, allowing the enemy to turn them back on you, or at least give them orders to (a) nosedive into the ground, or (b) turn off their radio and land at an enemy airbase to be captured properly. Hell, some asshole in Iraq with a laptop figured out how to tap into the video feeds from the damn things.

It's all Me, Me, Me! in Doctor Who's The Woman Who Lived but what of Clara's fate?

"That particular historical stereotype is inaccurate. The Vikings were no more warlike than any other peoples of that period of history. Which is to say they were plenty warlike, but they didn't go around raiding villages willy nilly."

Anachronistic or not (and there's certainly at least some truth in it,) we literally saw Ashildr's father coming home from a raid in The Girl who Died.

When Capaldi was first put in, I was furious. Outraged, even.

I'd just warmed up to 11 after discovering 10 early in 11's season and blitzing the prior seasons. I didn't like 11 when we switched to him, too, and then I warmed up to him.

I'm warming up to Capaldi (Dunno how to number him, what with the War Doctor lurking anomalously in the list somewhere,) faster than the other two.

I'm also quite fond of Clara, and I was beyond overjoyed when I heard she was coming back this season, and disenheartened to learn that she's going away.

I liked Clara, because in her, I reckoned, the Doctor had met a match; someone who could retain the point-of-view of the human, but who could, arguably, be every bit as eternal and long-sighted as he.

After all, she is the Impossible Girl. She tore herself apart and flung herself into his own time stream, so as to always be there, right when he needs someone to step in the most. I hope that gets called back to somehow. That, perhaps, Clara is an eternal reincarnator; eternal, ageless, but in a different way to Jack Harkness, the Doctor himself, or now Ashildr; when one falls, another will crop up to take her place, and eventually, she'll remember who she is. What she's capable of.

And with Ashildr, well... I like her, though it seemed like she was really trying to force her callous exterior at times, but at the same time, did the Doctor forget that she's literally a Viking's daughter, daughter of a raider, who made his living sailing over the water to that which belonged to other people? He's SURPRISED that she's more comfortable with bloodletting as a way to get her way than he is?

I also think the twist is that Ashildr isn't a threat to Clara at all. She wasn't menacingly staring at Clara... She's just watching, waiting for the Doctor to abandon her, so she can step in and hug her. Then maybe take her by the hand and take her to the Discarded Companions Club, where they can get a hot cuppa and a stiff drink with Dr. Martha Jones, Wilfred Mott, Vastra, and maybe Strax (if Sontarans live that long.)

Brits send Star Wars X-wing fighter to the stratosphere

The X-Wing is not very well-designed for atmospheric aerodynamic flight. The center of lift is entirely wrong, there's no rudder and no elevators/canards.

Better than a TIE fighter, sure. But in-universe and IRL, the X-Wing is an atrocious flyer on solely aerodynamic principles. It also only has landing legs, not wheels, so take-off would be impossible without some kind of launch assist, and landing would be absolutely impossible without either some kind of flying trapeze style thing where it catches onto a dirigible, or just lithobrakes.

So, nope. Not gonna fly until the invention of the repulsorlift.

Rise of der Maschinen: Daimler trials ROBOT LORRY in Germany

Re: @moiety

I would have thought that even the strictest polities would have allowed her to retake the test by now!

Or did she just say "sod it" and give up?

Re: @moiety

"IIRC, there were also problems when the machine unexpectedly gave control back to the human (e.g. When the machine encountered an unexpected issue). Either the human didn't realise or wasn't prepared to take back control."

I don't know what, if anything, could be done if the human wasn't prepared to take back control, but lorries - and airplanes - should probably have some LOUD WARNING that audibly says "MANUAL CONTROL ACTIVATED!" Or something to that effect; something that would prompt the pilot/driver to go "oh shit!" and grab the stick/wheel.

Daimler might also want to talk to, oddly enough, long-haul freight railways. In the US at least, they have a button that the engineer needs to press every now and then to ensure they're not TOO distracted/haven't died suddenly. Something like that might help - you don't want the driver to be pulled too far out of the loop, after all.

That having been said, lorries have an important safety feature airplanes don't; the machine can simply switch on the flashers and apply the brakes gently, giving traffic behind them time enough to react and bringing the vehicle to a complete stop. Much (presumably German) swearing will ensue, but hopefully no bloodshed.

Re: Sacrificial Board Member?

Perhaps he drew short straw, or perhaps he was the only one with the appropriate training and qualifications to operate a lorry?

Pocket mobe butt dialing clogs up 911 emergency calls, says Google

Wow. That story is... Frightening.

I always learned (Yank here,) that dialing 911 and then not saying anything would send police your way, lights-and-sirens style. But then, that was twenty-five years ago, when I was just a wee nipper. (Gods help me, I'm OLD! How did that happen?!)

Having said that, I wonder if it's still the case. I've caught my phone trying to call 911 once or twice, usually when I was trying to do something entirely different. I think I always managed to catch it before the call actually connected. Thankfully, the one I have now doesn't butt-dial (also, I never make use of back pockets.)

It kind of does seem like there should be a way to surreptitiously send a signal to the cops that says "I'm in trouble, I CANNOT SPEAK, and I fear for my life, please come to my rescue sirens screaming." Obviously, misuing this feature would be... Well, bad. But on the other hand, having people who get killed while an operator cuts them off thinking that they butt-dialed is worse.

On the other hand, treating every mistaken connection as a full-blown emergency is, evidently, a logistical impossibility. In an ideal world, it wouldn't be, and, just like straight out of the evil overlord list, any suspicious activity or loss of communication would be treated as a full-scale crisis, but you'd need to increase the number of police by an order of magnitude at least.

Happy birthday to you, the ruling was true, no charge for this headline, 'coz the copyright's screwed

Re: xkcd... @Brenda McViking

Actually, copyright laws exist so that you, Smallname McProfessor, or Nobody MacFictionAuthor can't write a groundbreaking book, struggle to put out a few copies, only to have Giantfirm O'PrintingPress start churning out tome after tome and taking 100% of the money that ought to belong to you.

Of course, that was what copyright laws were INTENDED for. Nowadays, Giantfirm O'PrintingPress just buys your arse lock, stock, and barrel, and take 99% of the money that ought to belong to you.

This was the right ruling, but for the wrong reason, I say.

Frankly, "Happy Birthday" should be classified as modern folk music and hence, simply un-copyrightable by any party whatsoever, in much the way a trademark can become genericized by becoming house-hold words used to apply to any such device (such as band-aid.)

11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

Fraud, then. In the U.S., people were worried about that in the early days; that's why gas pumps had those big glass spheres. They'd actually fill with the requested amount of fuel before pumping it to the hose.

Frankly, it being Mexico, I'm surprised more diddling fuel station owners haven't wound up dangling upside down and decapitated from bridges.

The ONE WEIRD TRICK which could END OBESITY

Re: Use your common sense? Common NONSENSE!

"Use your common sense?" Really? "Actually know what you're eating?"

You DO realize that packaged foods are required, by law, to actually state what's in it? And to give nutritional information on the packaging?

The HARDEST things for me to eat is NON-packaged foods that don't come from a chain restaurant. Chain restaurants all provide nutrition information (most importantly, calorie count,) even if the numbers are astonishingly high, they at least give you a basis to say "Okay, I can eat half of this entree for lunch, and have the other half for lunch tomorrow."

Whereas if you get it in a diner, or, say, get a raw carrot or apple, or "free range" chicken, you have basically no basis. Yesterday, I had a bowl of leftover pasta, chicken and broccoli penne from somewhere. (I dunno, I didn't order it, someone I live with did.) Checking My Fitness Pal, the possible calorie range for that was 225-510 calories.

Re: How big a portion do you need ?

Speaking from personal experience, (the plural of anecdote is not data, I know,) it is VERY HARD to get the restaurant staff to understand you want LESS FOOD than they are prepared to serve you for a given price. I have this problem on rare occasions I go out to eat.

For instance, about the lightest breakfast I can order at my local diner is three basted eggs, two pieces of toast, and a breakfast side, which I usually get as cottage cheese.

Last time I went, though, I was feeling kind of full from having eaten a bit more the day before than I wanted to, so I wanted to just skip the side entirely and have my eggs on toast. So I told the waitress "no side, no special potatoes" which are the default side.

Special potatoes, by the way, is basically an entire potato, cut into chunks and fried hard, with a metric tonne of garlic. They're sooooooo tasty, and so, so terrible for you, a gigantic pile of empty carbs and calories.

I didn't want them, because I knew I didn't NEED more than the eggs and the toast (and the toast was being generous, since they always pre-butter it.) So I made SURE the waitress knew I DID NOT WANT THE SIDE.

She brings it out to me, and yep, there's special potatoes on it. I wound up eating half the damn things, and I checked them on My Fitness Pal, half the potatoes added up to 3/4ths of the calorie count of two slices of buttered rye and three basted eggs put together.

Re: Personal anti-favourite-

"Making portions smaller means that fatties will buy two."

No. No, it does not. Portion control is one of the most desperately-needed anti-obesity measures. Along with in-your-face, unable-to-not-see-it "This is how many calories are in this if you order it" labeling.

One of the very, very few things most people WILL NOT DO at a restaurant is order seconds. One of the fast food joints actually commissioned a study back in the day WRT how to get more business. The guy who did the study found that people wanted more food (IE, they weren't feeling satisfied by the fast food meals,) but that they didn't want to go back for seconds for fear of shame of being seen as a glutton. He reached the conclusion that by increasing portion size, people would be more satisfied with that restaurant's meals over those of their competitors, and thus, they would get more business.

Of course, they promptly ignored him, but when the idea was revisited in the '80s or early '90s, well, things went crazy. And that's why an American "Medium" drink is the smallest size they sell, and is the same as a European "huge," while an American "big gulp" is a European "oh my god, you're actually going to drink that? You madman!"

Doctor Who storms back in fine form with Season 9 opener The Magician's Apprentice

Meh...

The ending was second-most disappointing bit for me, honestly. Missy's reintroduction was the most.

Handmines? Scary. Cheesy, but scary.

Child Davros: dropped a WTF.

Missy's back? First off, didn't the Brigadier take care of her so the Doc or Clara wouldn't have to? I'd have thought an overcharged Cyberman gun enhanced by Time Lord tech should have done the trick - or, if not, would have at least triggered a regeneration!

Then, of course, there's the "no body" question. And, thinking about it in hindsight, Missy did "die" then, under very similar circumstances to the way she "died" now. Clearly, that vambrace time-machine of hers teleported her away and made it look good to those doing the "killing." This clearly also happened with Clara and the TARDIS.

We've seen what happens when the TARDIS dies. It creates a vortex of time and blows up all of space and time, getting rid of stars and such, and replaces the sun of the local system with itself, blowing up perpetually. That is not what happened here.

So, presumably, a TARDIS has a similar "get out of destruction" system in place.

No, where I'm disappointed? We've already seen that the TARDIS will admit the Impossible Girl with nothing more than a finger-snap. I was fully expecting her to fake-out the Daleks, dodge towards the TARDIS, snap her fingers, bolt in through the door and shut it behind her, then leg it to the console and throw the old girl into gear as a dozen Daleks and their ceiling turret did their level best to exterminate it. Could have gone full Star Trek with that, sparks flying, instrumentation exploding, ceiling girders falling, etc.

But the worst part was Missy's "reintroduction." Frankly, the idea that an entire team of snipers - whose whole JOB is to put the target down if they do something untowod - would hold fire while not just one but TWO of their fellows are just disintegrated - is absurd. Why even bring them - why bring ANYONE!?

Frankly, Clara should have said "You know something, Missy? I have three words for you: All units, fire." Missy then does her blue "disintegration" trick under a hail of projectiles, causing Clara to say "well, that at least clears up how she did it. I know bullets aren't supposed to do that, and I've seen a Time Lord regeneration, and that was not it. Now, where's that time machine we should have in our own archives, eh? I need to go find my friend."

The Doctor, rocking out with an electric guitar, riding a tank, however?

Awesome. Entirely nonsensical, of course, but when you're a Time Lord and you're convinced that it's the end of the line, you may as well go out rockin'.

Ad-blocking super-weapon axed by maker for being TOO effective

Re: What's the fuss suddenly about adblocking?

I switched from ABP to ABE a little while ago, when someone told me something about ABP selling fully out so that it would actually refuse to block certain ads, not even offering the option to blacklist them manually.

I switched to ABE, because when it comes to adverts, I prefer the nuclear option. I don't want to see a single fragging one. I do not buy anything which is just randomly shoved in my face. Sorry, Google, just because I searched "Horse Breeds" does not mean I need tackle and a saddle. Nor am I in the market for any of Anne Summers' products based on my search history.

When I need to buy something, which is almost never as I have no income whatsoever and basically live on the largess of beneficent family, I go and search it out manually. Adverts, therefore, only serve to annoy me and detract, in any form they are delivered, from my internet use experience, in substantial and meaningful ways, both in terms of bandwidth and in terms of the inevitable charlie foxtrotting they give my browsing.

Sod them all. People who make a living forcing adverts down other people's throats unwanted should all be forced onto the bread lines.

Ex top judge admits he's incapable of reading email, doesn't own a PC

"* The Liberal Party is best understood as an analog to the UK Conservative Party or the moderate wing of the US Republican party. It is in no way liberal in the way the word is used in the US."

Thanks for that footnote. It does help us poor leftpondians figure out what's going on.

I guess they're taking the "liberal" in their name from "liberal economics" rather than, say, liberal anything else?

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

Re: Na Na Nana Na @ShadowDragon8685 PRIVATE AIRSPACE!

I'm sorry, I don't buy that.

Technology should not be restricted by laws, laws should adjust to accommodate technology.

Drones are, quite simply, the way of the future, just like cameras were.

People just need to get with the fact that folks' cameras are gonna be buzzing around doing stuff, and they might be seen, incidentally or intentionally, and if they don't like that, then they need to take steps to block the view of those drones, just as they took steps to block the view of Joe Blow walking by with a camera. Now Joe Blows' camera has wings, they need to adapt.

Privacy is something you have a reasonable expectation to when you're within four walls and under a ceiling you have control over, or which deal in delicate times where you expect it (IE, a public restroom, or clothier's fitting room.) When out in the yard, not so much.

Now, the drone guys were being arseholes and no mistake, they definitely should not have been buzzing over people's houses, but that was not a shooting offense. They definitely should have been much higher and/or over the street or sidewalk.

Re: Na Na Nana Na(not a coward-forgot password)

I'm sorry, at what point did the drone's operators intrude in this person's yard?

Putting up a tall fence does not make your property magically invisible. It blocks line of sight by virtue of being a solid object. But you can't claim that nobody flying overhead is in the wrong if they happen to observe what's going on there, just as you can't claim that somebody is in the wrong if you put up no privacy fence and someone observes what's going on in your yard under those circumstances.

Now, if the drone was hovering around rooftop level, then yeah, they should have been yelled at for that, but calling the cops and having the cops slap the cuffs on them - or slap a fine on them - is an appropriate response, not shooting the drone down. That's only acceptable if the drone is actually shooting AT you, same as if the guy was physically present with a camcorder.

Meh. I'm of two minds on this.

On the one hand, I'm a firm supporter of gun ownership, gun use, and especially home defense.

On the other, I'm also a firm believer that you are responsible for the privacy you wish to enjoy. If it can be seen by someone who is not trespassing, you have no right to complain. (ex. if you walk around naked in front of bay windows, you have no right to complain if people stop and enjoy an eyeful.)

In this case, I have to ask the question: how high above a property's ground-level boundariesl does their jurisdiction extend? Does the height of the tallest permanent structure on that land matter? (I think it should, to cover, for example, skyscrapers.)

Does a person have jurisdiction over the airspace above their home at all? And if that is indeed the case, how much will that jurisdiction be abrogated in the name of public passage? For example, in the US, most homes' property lines actually extend out into the middle of the street, but you can't, say, go and erect a fence crossing the sidewalk and your half of the street. Whether or not you own the land (and hence are technically responsible for it, particularly for clearing it of snow and ice in winteritme,) you aren't allowed to, say, put up traffic cones to reserve the curbside parking area for yourself, nor are you permitted to prevent others from traversing the sidewalk.

Ultimately, I think people are just going to have to accept that elevated persons (or their agents, IE, their drones in this case,) can look onto their property, and they're going to have to treat the air space like they treat the sidewalk; either put up a big fence (in this case, a dome?) or just do without and accept that anything that can be seen from an elevated point of view is still something that's in plain sight, and hence, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

That said, the drone operators definitely should not have been flying low and/or slow enough that some hick with a shotgun could take it down. They were in fuckin' Kentucky! Folks 'round those parts tend to be good shots.

WRT the question of how high above someone's property their jurisdiction ends, I dunno. Perhaps 25m above the height of the highest part of the tallest permanent structure on the land. You definitely shouldn't have to tolerate someone buzzing your tower with a drone, but at the same time, you shouldn't have the right to go full paranoid arsehole and shoot down anything that crosses the property line.

Chechen women swindle ISIS via social media: 'We need roubles to join you xx'

Re: Why arrest them?

One-size-fits-all law enforcement is as silly as one-size-fits-all sex toys.

Scamming near-as-objectively-evil-as-can-be-found-on-this-Earth terrorists out of cash may violate the letter of the law, but frankly it's absolutely heroic, and ought to be treated as such.

Even if those women did profit off it, they stole from people who are objectively horrile, and $3,300 almost certainly buys a hell of a lot of 7.62 Soviet in the middle east. They have, in a slight but meaningful way, impaired ISIS's warmaking ability, and in doing so have made themselves targets of interest for ISIS. I see nothing wrong with allowing them to keep the proceeds of their time and risk.

Re: Why arrest them?

Or you could say that these heroic, if somewhat mercenary, Chechen women were using clever social engineering to deprive a terrorist organization of their funding.

Brassiere belays boob-bound bullet, begetting bruised breastbone

Yeaaaaah, I'm gonna have to say that if the underwire bounced the ricochet, it was tumbling and had lost so much of its energy that the woman's bare breast would have bounced it, too.

Probably pick up a hell of a bruise one way or another, though.

Yahoo! parties! like! it's! 1999! with! retro! billboard! revival!

Yahoo's still alive?

They oughta just pack it in and sell off to Google for whatever they'll be given.

Reddit meltdown: Top chat boards hidden as rebellion breaks out

I don't use Reddit personally, except to read things people link me to, but...

Wow. The corporate overlords are clearly out-of-touch if they axed the one member of their paid staff that the unpaid volunteer hordes respected, and DIDN'T anticipate a "FOR THE HORDE!" reaction.

Wonder if they're going to...

A: Scramble to get chooter back at any price, realizing that they're teetering on the edge of a social shit-storm that money cannot simply otherwise buy their way out of?

B: Attempt to locate and employ a widely-respected volunteer moderator in the hopes that they can calm things down?

C: Take heavy-handed draconian measures, including banning widely-respected volunteer moderators who are expressing outrage and solidarity with chooter, which will inevitably make things worse.

Place your bets, place your bets!

Spaniard sues eBay over right to sell the Sun

The sun is a public good, is it not?

It seems to me that claiming ownership of the sun is absolutely pointless, and will remain so for all foreseeable futures.

Quite simply, laying claim to the sun is silly. Sillier by far than laying claim to, say, the moon, or Titan, or Venus or Mars, or Ceres.

The sun is, by far, the vastest thing in the solar system. Additionally, unlike the physical resource wealth of other locations, which would be more potentially worth laying claim to (my money's on Titan as being the most practical to lay claim and extract resources/set up colonies on,) the sun's use is in the energy it beams out into space.

Unfortunately for anyone who would like to claim the Sun, it meets the defining characteristics of a public good - it is non-excludable in that you cannot reasonably or even unreasonably restrict access to the energy being emitted from it, and it is non-rivalrous in that use by one party does not in any meaningful way impact the use of that energy by another party. You can't stop someone from putting up solar panels, or deploying a solar sail, or benefiting from the effects of solar energy reaching their home, such as photosynthetic plants growing, or what-not. Not without going and shooting them, which would be a tad difficult if you're set up on near-sol asteroid exulting over your ownership of the majestic fire god and they're half-way to the Oort Cloud.

It would be like trying to sell the Earth's atmosphere. Not canned bits of it, just the atmosphere of the Earth, in part or in whole. It's laughable, and any attempt to actually use force to enforce your claim would be seen as the efforts of a madman.

On the topic of laying claim to portions of other bodies in the solar system, the entire question is moot. No matter what some 50/100/150-year-old document may say, ownership will belong to the first party to get out there and lay claim to it, with the only way to contest said claims being the old-school way: to go there and fight them for it.

BOFH: Step into my office. Now take a deep breath

Perhaps this boss, like one of the ones they previously attempted to do away with, will find himself "accidentally" locked in the backup storage safe?

RAF Eurofighter gets a Battle of Britain makeover

Re: Five minutes of internets sleuthing..

Smegging beautiful, that is. Thank you.

Backpage child sex trafficking lawsuit nixed thanks to 'internet freedoms'

This is how rights get stripped away - an attack which is outrageous in scope and shocking in nature fires up the ignorant masses to decide "Something must be done, and that something must be done NOW! Not later, not after informed deliberation, not after someone cashes a reality check and decides that existing standards were sufficient, but RIGHT NOW SOMETHING MUST BE DONE RIGHT THIS INSTANT WHY ARE WE NOT DOING ANYTHING WHAT ARE WE ANIMALS/COWARDS?!"

And so something is DONE RIGHT NOW. And when it's done, it turns out that protections have been stripped from laws and over-grasping, far-reaching laws have been passed that allow true, genuine outrages to be perpetrated - by those who should ostensibly be upholding the laws.

Think about 9/11. A bunch of wankers crashed some planes into building, and was that outrageous? Yes, it was.

Exactly how many airplane hijackings has the TSA, the agency which was hastily assembled in the public fervor to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW stopped? Precisely zero.

Meanwhile, they ARE doing things like perpetrating mass thefts of traveller's properties, forcing mothers to drink from bottles of breast milk, instituting ridiculous lines and delays, harassing people who have taken them to court previously and won, etc. And this is to say nothing of the powers the other alphabet agencies acquired for themselves in the aftermath of that gigantic charlie foxtrot.

So, just extrapolating wildly from previous experience, if in the fervor to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NAO, Backpage was found to be liable and a criminal party to the acts of criminals who used their service for bad things, it would be the death-knell of all forms of internet forum and commentary which are hosted or have interests in the United States of America. Nobody could dare host a forum, for fear someone would break a law on it and they would themselves become liable.

So, everybody who's screaming for them to DO SOMETHING NOW, for them to "reverse it on appeal to common decency," think about that. It would be the end of these very story commentary pages, in fact, because El Reg has, I believe, a San Fransisco office that could be held accountable if some dirtbag in Phoenix, Arizona, used some crypto-speech on El Reg's forums to inform a cohort he was going to rob a bank in Montana, and then did it, and El Reg somehow became an accomplice because the dirtbag did part of their dirtybag communications on these forums.

THINK before you people scream for ACTION. Acting before you think is how we get Patriot Acts and Guantanamo Bay and Extraordinary Rendition. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and you guys are driving the asphalt truck!

Plod wants your PC? Brick it with a USB stick BEFORE they probe it

You know, I bet the governments love things like this for THEIR illegal operations - IE, the ones they do in other countries, whose sovereignties have laws against doing what they're doing.

"Government doesn't like competition" indeed.

NASA: We're gonna rip up an ASTEROID and make it ORBIT the MOON

Well...

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep, after all.

I hope this works. I hope they keep funding NASA.

BOFH: The Great HellDesk geek leave seek

Maxim 29.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.

[e]Oh wow, ninja'd. Amusing to see how far Schlockians have penetrated, though.

Google, Amazon 'n' pals fork out for AdBlock Plus 'unblock' – report

Ads can FOaDiaF.

You know, I'm not old, or so people tell me, but I feel like I'm not young, either.

I don't have great internet, even by American standards, which means I have shit internet by the standards of everywhere in the most-civilized world. But things were worse back in the days.

You know the days I'm talking about, the days when computer games were bought in boxes, the days when you'd eye a Counter-Strike server with a ping of 600+ as "Eh, I can probably tolerate it." The 56.6 days.

I was young, and stupid. Those were the days when using Netscape Navigator instead of Internet Explorer meant you were tech-savvy. (I am no longer young.) Advertisements got worse, and worse. Eventually, they became absolutely unbearable; you'd spend five minutes downloading ads and ten seconds downloading content. The ads were insane, they'd jump out at you, scream at you, make pornmoans at you. It was atrocious. It was unbearable. I thought I had to live with it.

Then came the days of Firefox. The reason I switched to Firefox, in fact, was largely because of a little thing called AdBlock Plus.

I haven't looked back. The advertisers got out of hand, they were given free reign, and I pulled the trigger on them all. To this day, my reaction to seeing an advertisement is rightclick > AdBlockPlus: Block this Image.

To everyone who says "Oh, but the content producers need the money," I have to say: I don't care. I just don't. Your arguments fall on deaf ears, and your whinging just hardens me further. I hate being advertised to. I absolutely loathe it.

I consume hardly anything, I have practically nil income, existing entirely at the largesse of family members, who are themselves on fixed income. I'm not going to be buying anything, so advertising to me is pointless. If I DO keenly feel a need for something, I will search for it on my own terms. There is no such thing as something I needed but didn't know I needed until I knew it existed. I have never, not once in nearly 30 years on this blasted, miserable rock, purchased anything that was being suggested to me by advertisements.

And it's getting worse, in other corners of life, too. Advertisements are everywhere, screaming at you "Buy our shit!" I don't want your shit. I don't want to see endless commercials on the television, because I don't have any money to buy products. (The worst are food and drug advertisements, which should be banned outright along with tobacco ads. Seeing a food ad makes me hungry, even if I've just ate a full dinner. I'm not saying it's why I'm obese, but I am saying it could be a contributing factor.) Honestly, I just ignore the ads, I read a book on Kindle, or scratch the dog behind the ears, or just tune out.

The Ad Men know they're on the outs, they know that by and large, people are sick of their bullshit. One of the most common phrases around is "Jesus, why is the TV so loud? Turn it down!" I didn't turn the TV up, the advertisements just have their volume CRANKED ALL THE FUCKING WAY UP so you will PAY ATTENTION AND BUY THEIR SHIT. Or, more likely, you'll just change the freaking channel, and channel-flip - my aunt's solution. (Drives me batty, because I HATE missing a minute of my show. I just ignore the ad.) They're also striking back with their on-demand service: Comcast USED to be okay about this, but in recent years they disabled the fast forward on most viewings of TV shows. Then they apparently twigged to the fact that people were using the scan-ahead button (that skipped five minutes ahead,) to skip the majority/entirety of the ad spots, and rewinding as needed, so they shifted it to ten minutes up.

It's a battle. One I hope they lose, but as for myself, I will do everything in my power to insulate myself from advertisements. And on my PC, at least, I have the power; they can't FORCE my computer to download and display content. The only question is whether I'm willing to go to the lengths necessary to prevent it from doing so, and I am.

Because the ads get more obnoxious with each passing minute. They're banal, they're intentionally attention-grabbing, distracting me from what I ACTUALLY want to see. They're information I don't need to see, that is useless to me, and in fact actively hostile to me, because they are attempting to make me part with money I don't have.

So bugger the lot of 'em with a rusty spoon.

FROSTY MISTRESS of the Outer System: Pluto yields to probe snapper

The scientific world got to have their metric notations. We Yankees convinced them to use our billions. Get over it.

About the probe.... Well, this ought to be interesting. I've never agreed with deplanetizing Pluto, always felt it should've been grandfathered in. Still, it'll be nifty to see what they can see.

From what they said about closest approach, I'm guessing this probe isn't going to be inserting itself into orbit of pluto but is just going to swing by on a parabolic path. Where's it going after that, assuming it doesn't crash into a moon?

Doctor Who's tangerine dream and Clara's death wish in Last Christmas

Thinking about it... What I find incredulous is that a braincrab on Unnamed Lava Generica World nails the doctor, and then five more just materialize on Earth, nailing four random blokes and the most important person in the Doctor's life, the Impossible Girl. That's why I kind of think it would've been better if it had just been the one brain-crab, and the psychic power of the Doctor was enough to reach across all of time and space.

That said, I did think there was a certain... Poignancy to the bit where it starts to come out that the braincrabs generate fantasies within fantasies, and since it's Christmas Eve, everyone's mind would go straight to Santa Claus.

Everyone's mind, that is, except for a select few people who hear a certain grinding whirr and a gong. That's when I began to believe, erroneously, but plausibly, that the Doctor wasn't even in the brain-simulation at all, but was a mental construct entirely of Clara's; her mind would reject Father Christmas as someone come to help her, after all, she'd start to question it, question him, think analytically about him... But who would she never, *ever* question, no matter how ridiculous or implausible it would be that he'd turned up? Who would she listen to, even obey, if showed up and started talking gravely, giving her an urgent, direct imperative to not question a thing and do what he said?

The Doctor. Kind of like Pond's unbreakable faith in the Raggedy Man - faith which, ironically and paradoxically, turned out to be completely justified, even when he had to shatter that faith entirely in order to save her.

So, what're the possibilities that they're still sucking down a faceful of alien wing-wong and the entire next season will be a dream? I hope not, 'cause that would be bollocks, especially with how much I enjoyed seeing "The Doctor and Clara will return" at the end.

Also, I kind of wish her title would come up more, along with The Oncoming Storm for the Doctor. I mean, let's face it, they're basically the ultimate guile heroes. So much so that the Dalek Empire had an epithet just for him, and that's not the kind of epithet that a fellow gets lightly.

Okay, so, dirty confession here...

I liked Last Christmas.

That said, I think it would have been stronger if the braincrab had only been on the Doctor; that his immense psychic potential and deep connection to Clara had been enough to drag her into his braincrab dream, and when he rushed to her home, he found her, waking up and all right.

Either way, I kind of liked it. I was unsure about the Capaldi Doctor at first, but he grew on me significantly. And the line at the end, promising that Clara will be back, was quite enheartening.

Doctor Who trashing the TARDIS, Clara alone, useless UNIT – Death in Heaven

As for other things about this episode...

Re: Osgood's death.

Pointless. I liked her. I can only hope that was Zygon Osgood; maybe they've been trading off days and this was Zygood's day (and day to die.) Though if that were the case, you'd think that Zygood would have undisguised itself and surprised the hell out of Missy... Also, those soldiers were apparently UTTERLY useless, to the point I suspect that they may have been holograms under Missy's control all along. Seriously, they were BEHIND her, and didn't notice her picking the lock on her handcuffs? (And for that matter, why did they restrain her with handcuffs, and not zip-ties? And why didn't they SEARCH HER when they had her restrained? USELESS!)

Why didn't the DOCTOR order someone to search and make absolutely sure that Missy was very, very thoroughly restrained? He of all people should know how crafty and canny she is. He was the President of the World at the time, he could've ordered them to fling her out of the plane and they would have!

Re: Missy's plan.

As Missy was so fond of pointing out, she's bananas. Or at least, likes to put that on. You'd think that Time Lord medicine would have cured sociopathy, but I guess not. I reckon she was trying to break the Doctor, as usual, and turn him into a willing participant. Well, that was always going to end badly for her.

Re: Missy's death.

Could go either way, honestly. The Brig did blast her with a cyber-weapon, and he'd be familiar enough with Time Lords to probably have set the thing as high as it would go. Cybermen do prefer to kill humans so they can convert them, but they have to be able to ramp up the pew-pew power, if enough cyber-blasts are capable of overloading a Dalek's shields and blasting it to bits even through its armor. One-on-one, a cyberman's not a match for a Dalek, but we've seen them acquit themselves admirably in the middle of pitched firefights where they can focus fire on individual Daleks. So, it could go either way; a full-power shot from a cyberweapon to a Time Lord might be enough to kill them dead even if they had regenerations remaining, or it might not. Even if not, however, we don't really know how many regenerations the Master had left; he'd undoubtedly spent at least five, and probably more. Missy might have been his last, or not. Or, it's entirely possible that the blue of the cyber-blast covered up Missy's blue teleporter, and she's not dead. Or she was killed and teleported out as she was in the process of dying, and Regenerated somewhere else; the Doctor did say she had to have a TARDIS somewhere else. We may or may not have seen the last of the Master/Mistress.

Also, do note that the Brigadier only fired /after/ he was certain that the Doctor was going to. It's a very minor thing to think of, but it clearly was a measure of his respect for the Doctor. He would have had every reason, every justification, and even every authority, to execute Missy unilaterally on behalf of the United Kingdom and the Planet Earth, but he respected the Doctor so much - and respected the Doctor's jurisdiction over another Time Lord so much - that he stayed his cyber-gun until he was sure that the Doctor had made the decision to fire. Then he, like the Doctor sparing Clara from having to do it, spared the Doctor from having to do it. Clearly, Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart isn't the kind of officer afraid to get his hands dirty the way Danny thinks of most officers.

Re: The Master returning as Missy.

Obviously, something happened. The last time we saw the Master, he was marching on the Time Lord Council with vengeance in his eyes, and was spending Regeneration energy to counter Rassilon's technology-granted power. Even if he prevailed and slaughtered the council without taking a mortal wound in the process or needing to regenerate, of course, Gallifrey was being pulled back into the Time War, and he was trapped on a planet besieged by Daleks. Lots of opportunity there for him to beef it and Regenerate as a guano insane Scotswoman. Or, hell, he might have triggered the Regeneration voluntarily, just to change his face. Or, for another switch altogether, he might have used simple transhuman technologies (trans-Time Lord technologies?) to give himself a full body/accent revision /without/ a Regeneration; we know that Time Lord tech is certainly advanced enough for that. Suffice to say, the Master returning as The Mistress is not something that makes me go "that can't be!"

Re: Nick Frost as Father Christmas.

I'm glad I sat there digesting the end on my couch, rather than ending the on-demand playback I just watched, or I'd have missed the stinger. Clearly, they're setting up the Christmas Special. And we all know what the Doctor's Christmases are like, so undoubtedly there's going to be much with the running and the shouting and the screaming and probably the dying. But Nick Frost as Father Christmas? Heh. I wonder if Simon Pegg is going to be joining them... I hope so. That should be a good one.

Re: Could have had Cyber-Clara

I was expecting that, actually, but it didn't happen.

Then again, Vastra and Strax (and probably Jenny, between Vastra's Silurian tech and Strax's medical training) should, theoretically, still be around, with two of them probably inhuman enough to be immune to cyberconversion. You'd think that they'd take action, too, what with London being their home as well.

Of course, one could also ask where Martha Jones and Micky Smith are, what with Jones ostensibly still being a member of, or at least affiliated with, UNIT, etc, etc.

In the end, well... Any overt lack of control on Missy's part, or any oddity of these cybermen, can be adequately explained by the fact that they are not normal cybermen. There's no cybercontroller; there's no Cyberman plot. This is all Missy's doing, and it's entirely understandable that Missy wouldn't be as expert a cyber-controller as an actual cybercontroller. That's why a lot of them danced around, dazed and confused; only the ones she'd personally preprogrammed (in the cathedrals) would be ready to go with her plan. Remember, there were only four attacking the plane, it's entirely possible she called those four from a reserve she didn't mention to the Doctor (maybe the ones in the Republic of Ireland,) when she mentioned the number of cybermen in the cathedral in London.

It would also easily explain why certain, especially strong-willed individuals, like the Brigadier, or Danny Pink, with personal, close emotional connections to the situation at hand, and probably some awareness of what was going on, were able to defy her. (The Brig probably followed her safety-briefing instructions voluntarily, to maintain the ruse that he was under her control.)

As regards the mutual, devastating lies...

They were entirely understandable, and entirely boneheaded. The Doctor lied to Clara because he didn't want to admit how hurt he was that Missy had lied to him, how hurt he was that his homeworld wasn't there. He wanted to spare Clara from any guilt she might have felt at realizing that she'd insisted that he either execute, or let her execute, the one person whom they knew WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT, knew the location of Gallifrey, without taking the time to interrogate her or fact-check it.

Clara, in turn, perceived the Doctor as being something she hadn't seen him really be since he wore a bowtie: happy. Joyful. Elevated by mirth and cheer. As far as she knew (though she really should have remembered Rule One: The Doctor Lies,) everything was going aces for him, he was going to be able to go home, see his granddaughter, maybe his parents, for the first time in far longer than anyone should have to go without seeing them. She did, after all, demonstrate knowledge about him - I daresay that not even the Master knows the Doctor as well as Clara Oswald does, perhaps not even the Doctor knows the Doctor as well as the Impossible Girl knows the Doctor. She did, after all, impersonate him /so successfully/ as to prevent herself from being cyberconverted, and only someone who had firsthand knowledge that she was NOT the doctor - IE, Danny Pink - was able to say for sure that she wasn't the Doctor.

In tabletop RPG terms, she rolled a natural 20 to tell an absurdly unbelievable lie, and pulled it off. She told a whopper and got away with it, largely thanks to the massive circumstance bonus of practically being the Doctor's own biographer. So she, of all people, would know just how important going home was to the Doctor; and she'd also know that if she told him that Danny Pink had chosen to send the youth back instead of himself, it would crush him, because she would be crushed, too. It might even delay him from going home, sending him off on another attempt to bring him back from wherever he had gone. So she lied, so that he could believe everything was peaches and roses with her, and he could go home; unfortunately, he'd also lied to her, and he didn't have a peachy, rosy home to go back to.

Entirely understandable, entirely boneheaded, and the kind of thing that could only happen because both of them cared more about the other than about themselves. Am I happy about it? Not in the slightest, I loved the Impossible Girl. Perhaps the Doctor will actually regenerate /into/ her at some point in the future, because Jenna Coleman has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she has the chops to be The Doctor. Perhaps she'll come back. Hell, perhaps another time-echo of her will show up; she is still the Impossible Girl, the girl who tore herself into a million, billion pieces and scattered herself throughout all of time and space. Or perhaps she'll figure out how to repair the Time Lord bracelet and use it to locate the Master's TARDIS and go off on her own adventures throughout time and space, perhaps picking up the Doctor's Daughter along the way or something. Or maybe she'll pop back to the late 1890s and chill with Vastra, Strax and Jenny.

Either way, I refuse to believe that a mundane goodbye and the life of a schoolteacher forevermore is what awaits Clara Oswald.

3D printed guns: This time it's for real! Oh, wait – no, still crap

Sooner or later, it'll happen. And I'm not worried.

Look, let's face some facts here.

Anyone with machining skills and supplies can build a gun. Not just "a" gun, mind you, not just a crappy zip-gun. Something along the lines of the UK's own Sten gun, or the Greasegun of my homeland.

If it was good enough to arm front-line soldiers being sent to war against the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, it's definitely going to be overwhelming against your average street cop, especially as even very old firearm designs are fully able to take advancement of munitions development that has taken place in the intervening 70+ years. (Just so long as you respect the weapon pressure tolerances if you're thinking of using +P rounds. Or you can beef up the mechanism with sturdier metal.)

And the thing about the Sten gun and weapons like it is that you don't need a complex armaments factory to build them, either. Or, indeed, a proper factory of any sort:

Norwegian resistance fighters built Sten guns right under the noses of the Nazi regime.

Danish resistance fighters did so, too, producing 200 in a bicycle repair shop alone, to say nothing of the other workshops, greater and smaller.

Polish resistance fighters started building them on their own, again, right under the Nazi's noses, some of which were of superior design and construction to the ones actually being built in the UK.

For an ironic twist, the Germans themselves manufactured about 28,000, though exactly why they did this is unclear, given that they had all the captured Sten guns they could ever want for espionage and false flag operations. Probably doesn't really count, though, since Mauser was making them.

And more, too, it's a very easy gun to copy and modify, apparently. And yet, you don't often see criminal groups armed with hand-made submachineguns.

That's why I'm not worried. All told, it's just too much hassle for crims to bother with. Will there come a day when you can simply manufacture a firearm in your own home? That day came 70+ years ago, bare minimum. Even with advances in desktop manufacturing technology and firearms technology, it's still going to be too much of a bother for most people who have malevolent intent at heart, even should miracletech like desktop nanofabrication or personal replicators come into being.

(Also, if personal replicators or desktop nanofabbing come into being, then I would expect that medical science should have advanced to the point where being shot in the head isn't game over, greatly reducing the impact of persons of unkind intent being able to manufacture a gun in their own home. To say nothing of the fact that person of ill intent would need to think hard on the fact that if they can make a gun that easily, so can anyone else.)

Clara goes to the dark side, with dark secrets revealed in Dark Water

Missy, Master. How did I miss that?

I have to admit, there being two plot twists was something I wasn't expecting. I called "Cybermen" as soon as we saw the sitting skeletons and the Doctor mused about who'd want to keep corpses in such a condition. But the return of the Master, that one took me by surprise.

Generally speaking, you don't expect the Doctor's antagonists to work together, not unless they're coming together in an army of doom to murder him. (And you don't expect the Master to work together with anyone, period.)

Still, this all could have been avoided if the Doctor hadn't forgotten his standard dodge for the "my friend is dead, but if I go save them, the events that made me go save them won't have happened" paradox, that being to simply fake the dead person's death.

And re: Danny having shot a boy? Well, yes, that was a bit cliched, but powerful. It would have been gutsier, cinematically speaking, but probably less sympathetic to most audiences, if instead he'd shot an armed combatant.

Doctor Who's Flatline: Cool monsters, yes, but utterly limp subplots

Is everybody a barking madman around here?

Is everybody a barking madman around here?

This episode was *bloody brilliant.* Danny Pink and his subplot got shoved firmly to the back (his whole plot got what, maybe 90 seconds of screen time, and he himself got maybe 20?), Clara was forced into the position of being The Doctor, and she did so in such spectacular fashion that you'd think she actually put on Matt Smith's Bowtie. She DID use his sonic and psychic paper, for crying out loud, and we all know that entire companionships go by without the Doctor giving up his sonic for so much as five minutes, let alone a whole bloody episode.

And she was good at it. As for the Doctor, well....

I'm starting to think that he has more in common with Danny than he'd allow you to speculate without clobbering you. He's clearly burnt out, millennia of fighting with great evils and seeing people he couldn't save get killed have taken their toll on him. His lines were telling: "You were a spectacular Doctor, Clara. Goodness has nothing to do with it." Remember earlier? "Clara... Am I a good man?"

A fellow who believes he's not a good man, who's lost the faith in the righteousness and the rightness of what he does is a goner. That's a wound that you can't regenerate from, that's one that'll stick with you no matter how many times your body regenerates. And the Doctor is clearly an old boy, showing his age, his weariness with it all...

Wild and Irresponsible Speculation: I think that they may be planning to kill off The Doctor for real, only to have Clara Oswald, the Impossible Girl, take up the mantle entirely. Possibly even Regenerate her and reveal she's been a Time Lord all along, or else Capaldi-Doctor gives her any remaining regeneration juice he has to kickstart the process. Then he expires, or worse, physically survives, but is completely mentally exhausted. Upset and traumatized, but realizing that something has to be done, Clara Oswald rises from the metaphorical ashes (or knowing the sometimes hamhanded imagery this lot uses, literal,) and says "I am the Doctor." Hopefully to Danny Pink.

Or, better yet, something like....

"I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord, the Inheritor of the Oncoming Storm, adopted daughter of Gallifrey, I'm 25 years old from the planet Earth, and I need to figure out how to fly a TARDIS before we crash!"

Hell, if they can do it to Thor, son of Odin...

Zippy one-liners, broken promises: Doctor Who on the Orient Express

It's hardly a surprise for me to take a stand on an unpopular opinion. It seems to be my lot in life, but thanks for standing up for me.

I like Clara. I like the fact that when she stood on the precipice of forsaking what her life has become, she threw herself, almost literally, back into it.

Heck, thinking about it, all of the Doctor's prior companions have been unable to let go of the life... At least, all of the ones whose ends we know enough about.

Rose Tyler - become the Bad Wolf, basically an incarnated Goddess, then went back to being merely mortal, and later was trapped in a parallel universe where she wound up working for their version of Torchwood, but she eventually wound up with a humanized clone of the Tenth Doctor to keep her company. Somehow I doubt they settled down to be a soccer mum and a schoolteacher after that.

Jack Harkness... Is Jack Harkness. See Also: Torchwood.

Mickey Smith - Though once the boyfriend of Rose Tyler, was last seen carrying a gun and engaging in urban warfare with a Sontaran in the company of Martha Jones.

Donna Noble - Was forced out of the life by the Doctor being an idiot. She was fully prepared to die as a human with the memories and intellect of a Time Lord (*the* Time Lord,) burning as the brightest candle that burns shortest, rather than consign herself to a life of mundanity. The Doctor consigned her for her, because he's thick at times and the show's writers have a habit of (in)conveniently forgetting McGuffins (is it MacGuffin in context of the Tennant or Capaldi Doctors?) that could solve the present problem quite handily.

Martha Jones - Got off the TARDIS, promptly enlisted in UNIT as an officer-doctor. Was last seen carrying a gun and engaging in urban warfare against a Sontaran in the company of Mickey Smith.

Sarah Jane Smith - See also The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Amy Pond & Rory Williams - Possibly the only ones I know of to give up the life and settle down to a normal existence, though not voluntarily. A Sleeping Angel got Rory out of the blue, and Amy went and let it nail her to be with him. Also caused by the Doctor being thick - he knew the damn thing had sent them back to some time in the early 20th-century New York City, and that his TARDIS was prevented from landing anywhere near New York during that time frame. What exactly was stopping him from landing the TARDIS somewhere else on Earth during those time frames and employing earthly transportation to recover them - we've seen him go back to England during similar time-frames, so at the very most he could land in England and ask his friend HM the Queen to lend him a jet to go and pick up his pals. Or, if he can land relatively nearer to NYC, say, Newark Delaware, he could take a train. (Or he could ask Vastra to wait 20 years (we know she's in London in 1893) to have a look for them once or twice a year, bearing in mind that the publication date of the book should give them a good time-frame for when to start looking, and then pack them up in a stasis pod until he can retrieve them during the 21st century.) But I digress.

River Song - She married the bloke, she sure as hell didn't get off the ride willingly! (In fact she was torn apart by something evil that lives in the darkness of the galaxy's biggest library. That's what you get when you build a gigantic paper library rather than, say, a massive distributed data-storage center.)

And here we have Clara Oswald, the Impossible Girl. It remains to be seen, but given the track record and what we've seen of her... It doesn't seem in her character to say "That's it, I'm done. No more adventure, no more saving the galaxy, no more gallivanting through time and space, no more having fancy dinners aboard modes of transportation that have no business flying through the void of interstellar vacuum and no more carriage rides in Victorian London with Vastra and the gang, that's it. I'm off to be a schoolteacher to whom nothing exciting ever happens again."

Clara could have gotten off the ride at any time, it's not like she was obliged to stay, not like Danny and his enlistment in the military. Clara has stayed on because she *likes* it, the adventure, the excitement, the occasional bit where she's personally responsible for the continuation of the galaxy as a whole. If she *did* get off the ride now, what then would become of her? I doubt she could just go and live a life of ordinary schoolteaching. Hell, remember Donna? She had *one ride* with the Doctor, and that was enough to make her spend her life poking her nose into news of crazy things happening, undoubtedly putting her life at risk and quite probably leading her into one or two jail cells for breaking and entering, or resulting in her having close brushes with murder and other things of ghastly nature, but she did it because she wanted to find the Doctor. Because she wanted to get back on the ride.

Even if Clara got off, I don't believe she could live a settled life happily. She'd be bored with it, she'd probably wind up an adrenaline junkie, free-running through industrial parks or volunteering for dangerous humanitarian missions in war-torn parts of the planet, and that's just the earthly outlets, leaving aside the possibility (or even probability,) that she'd be snatched up by UNIT. It isn't as if she's unknown to them, after all, what with having walked through the doors in the Doctor's company during the Day of the Doctor and all that, or else trying to dig up Vastra in the modern day and see if she could get back into the Doctor's sphere of influence through a mutual acquaintance known to both of them. (Or else become a weirdness-chaser like Donna.)

I have to say...

I disagreed - STRONGLY disagreed - with the second two El Reg reviewers.

Frankly, the romance with Danny that's been played up infuriates me.

"Oh, I made my life for a while running hither-tither throughout the cosmos with a bicardiac madman in a blue box and we saved the galaxy a hundred times over - oh, and I tore myself into a billion pieces and flung myself throughout the entirety of time and space to make sure that galaxy-saving takes place, making me definitely equal to and possibly a bigger hero/vital element of time and space integrity than the Doctor himself is... But I met a man and now my ovaries have told me it's time to hit the emergency break on anything else that's going on in my life and start having kids" thing makes me want to go thermonuclear.

Clara Oswald is not just a girl. In fact, if she were CLARENCE Oswald, we'd not be having this discussion at all.

Clara Oswald is an *Adventurer*. A heroine whose bona fides put her in the most exalted of company. Her fate should not be determined by her reproductive organs or hormonal balance, and that's what the whole "Clara's leaving the show" thing is. They're trying to predestine her out of the show via reproduction, and... >_<

Clara's lived a life of adventure. She's gotten used to it by now. Why should she be in such a hurry to give up a life of adventure? Could someone who's become accustomed to fantastic things and heart-pumping adventure and running flat-out for your life from Daleks and Cybermen and what-have-you REALLY just forsake it all for a life of 9-5 educating the aggravating yoof and reproduction?

I highly doubt it, and that's why I found her U-turn at the end so compelling. Does anybody else remember Martha Jones? She was my favorite (until Donna, and now Clara,) but she took that biggest step and got off the TARDIS voluntarily, again for reasons of "I'm a woman and my ovaries are ticking." (In her case, there was the addenda "and if you're not going to service them, I'll go find someone else who will.") I really hated that, I thought it was crap, but she'd been showing the whole "getting to fancy the Doctor" for most of her season.

Danny Pink seems to have come out of nowhere, frankly. What attachment does Clara *really* have to him? He makes her laugh, takes her to dinner, okay. The Doctor takes her through time and space, gives her the opportunity to put herself in mortal peril for the sake of doing good. Can Danny Pink shrink her to the size of an ant's mandible and let her go crawling through the insides of a Dalek to try and turn it good? Can Danny Pink afford her the opportunity to save the galaxy?

That's why I liked her U-Turn at the end. That was when she realized that she was about to get off the ride for good, and consign herself to a life of mundanity, after having proven that not only CAN she be an adventuring hero, she LIKES it. She doesn't want it to stop, isn't ready to get off the ride. She stood literally at the threshold of choosing between the end of the Impossible Girl and the beginning of Clara Oswald, Mum, or remaining the Impossible Girl, and she chose wisely. Or at least, correctly.

Also, the most powerful bit of imagery in this episode was at the end, I thought. With Clara and the Doctor throwing the TARDIS's levers together. I mean, really, who else would the Doctor knowingly suffer to throw the controls of his TARDIS? Only River Song comes to mind, and I view the bond between Clara and the Doctor, rocky though it may be, as being just as deep.

Frankly, I'd rather see Clara die than retire. Though, really, dying is to Clara what dying is to the Doctor. She'll just reincarnate again.

(Wild and Irresponsible Speculation: When she tore herself apart in the Doctor's time-stream, she reassembled as a Time Lord who keeps regenerating into herself in different eras.)

Doctor Who becomes an illogical, unscientific, silly soap opera in Kill The Moon

I wanted to, as Clara said, smack the Doctor so hard he Regenerated.

Leaving aside the nonsensery with the moon, or about humans ceasing to go to space, or the fact that there's no way in literal hell that the Space Shuttle could get to the moon (it can't, not without massively engineering a project so intense it would've been simpler to scratch-build a purpose-built ship for it,) or that said space shuttle could land ON the bloody moon in the manner that it did without smashing into a BILLION tiny pieces (seriously, try that landing approach in Kerbal Space Program and see what happens - now note that KSP is much, MUCH more forgiving about lithobraking than real physics are,) ... All that aside...

Doctor. Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. Is he *DENSE* or something? Did that last regeneration damage his brain?

This is Clara. Oswald. She isn't Amy Pond, she isn't Martha Jones or Donna Noble, or Rose Tyler, or any of the others he knew for less time or were less important to him.

This is Clara. Freaking. Oswald. The Impossible Girl; the one girl so *selfless* that she willingly stepped into his bloody time stream, tearing herself into *millions* of bits and flinging herself throughout all of space and time, effectively damning herself to an eternity of reincarnation, to protect *him*, from the Great Intelligence that sought to undo him at all points simultaneously. He's had fourteen lives so far, there's no telling how many *she's* had, how many times she'd had to reincarnate to save him from some act of a hostile animating force, but we know beyond a shadow of a doubt it's not limited to once per regeneration of his. To some degree, she's aware of this, too.

She is, if anything, at least as much of a hero as the Doctor, because without her his own heroics would have been derailed. She also doesn't have the benefit of his millennia of continuous experience.

So, what the hell? She's already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt she knows what sacrifice means, that she knows what it is to do the right thing, even if it's frightening, or dangerous, or even if it means literally killing herself. The stabilizers weren't on her bike and haven't been ever since her first trip to Trenzalore, if not before. So... Has he just plain forgotten? Or is he *completely* thick, insulting her and emotionally hurting her like that?

Or is he just being a right bastard and trying to intentionally drive her off, because if he doesn't then this copy of her will *never* get off the TARDIS and get down to the business of shagging Mr. Maths Teacher and spawning the dynasty that will lead to that poor bloke getting trapped at the end of time?

Honestly, I wouldn't put that past him, but I'd give it even odds either way. The Doctor can be a right moron when the the show-runner wants to get rid of a companion. Remember Donna, who was dying because she'd absorbed a Time Lord's ancient memories into a human brain that was biologically unprepared to deal with it? Now do you happen to remember that Ten had, in that very control room (unless he'd put it away somewhere else,) a device capable of physically changing someone's species, at least from specifically human to specifically Time Lord? Because he sure as hell didn't.

Hey Brit taxpayers. You just spent £4m on Central London ‘innovation playground’

Re: Whilst this is irksome

Re: Transpareny, I dunno. Think of all the opportunities for people to recreate that Red Nose spot with the Doctor, Amy and Rory getting the TARDIS stuck in the TARDIS.

Re: Irksome

Do remember that transport-wise, not every place is, in fact, identical. What works wonders in one place may be an utter flop in another, even if they are seemingly similar. Going all-in on something as major as transportation infrastructure, only to find out that it turns out poorly - or, indeed, as a complete unmitigated cock-up - would be, in a word, disastrous.

Testing something out in a small scale before you go all-in with it would seem to be the prudent thing to do. Or would you prefer the UK go all-in with anything and everything that's "worked out alright" anywhere else without consideration?