The Register is a a satirical Onion-like site, with a weird mix of real and fake news — they mix the fake stuff with the real stuff so it’s hard to tell the difference. Just like Fox news! But The Register is funny.
Anyway, they posted a story about a real NASA project involving rovers, and threw in a few jabs at the hoax twinkies, and… well, just go read it yourself.
Hat tip to all the folks who sent me this link. 
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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July 24th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I forgot about the turtles!!! See? There is proof NASA fakes everything. Otherwise the turtles would have dropped us and we would be crushed!!
July 24th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Actually, all of the stories in The Register are true.
For a given value of true.
They love sprinkling a liberal dose of tabloid-ish “news” in amongst the IT news which is their supposed focus. But they don’t “make stuff up”, as far as I can tell.
They do, however, invent “editors” who write outrageous opinion pieces. And they exaggerate stories of robotics according to their “Rise Of The Machines” theme, which has been running for several years now.
This piece struck me as odd as soon as I read it, because it stretches their limits for irony somewhat.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I don’t buy it. Sure, they had to use a sound stage in the 1960s and 1970s, but these days, they should be able to do everything with CGI from some hidden-bunker data center, or even distributed across thousands of machines on NASA’s and DARPA’s network. Even if they can’t do this now, surely they’ll be able to do so by 2020.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
It was sad to see the debate in the comments about whether or not it was satire.
Sigh.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
“…but ma’am, what does the last turtle stand on?”
“You can’t fool me, sonny” says the octogenarian. “It’s turtles, all the way down.”
July 24th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
El Reg as it’s know in these parts is actually a serious IT news site where they like to occasionally go off-piste with a story. Usually they just take a wry slant on something that’s essentially true. Very occasionally they satirise it into another universe entirely. There are a number of satirical themese running through their articles, but the stuff that’s really critical to their readers is reported more-or-less straight. They’re stock themes include: the rise of the machines; the goings-on of Paris Hilton; finding IT-angles to non-IT stories they just want to cover for the hell of it; buzz-words that should or should not be allowed; slating Apple just to annoy the Apple fanboyz etc.
I don’t work for them or anything, it’s just one of my favourite sites and I thought it a little misrepresentative to compare it to the Onion (which is also excellent) and paint it as a humourous site. They make a handy living from serious news coverage.
July 24th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
[...] preps robots for future fake moon landings, reports The Register. Thanks to BAB for the [...]
July 24th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
El Reg emerged during the 1990s. During that period (and even today, though to a lesser extent) the majority of IT-related news sources were so thoroughly wrong as to be un-intentional self-parody – onion-like, but without knowing it. The goal of El Reg, of course, was to mock this sad state of affairs.
What? No preview? How awful.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
The way I generally describe The Register is as an IT-focus tabloid. Quite a good sarcastic spin they put on many things, and the insane opinion pieces by fake editors are quite fun too.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
I just wish DOD would fake Stealth bombers and other pentagon frills, maybe even fake the Iraq war….think of the money we’d save.
July 30th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Hope we don’t have a nuclear war, we might irridate the turtles.