It's El Reg code

Boffin = proper scientist who does important things like explode stuff or look at stars.

Trick-cyclist = The kind of person who calls themselves a scientist and then produces reports like this one.

The sun's only in the way...

...If you're on or near the ecliptic.

Presumably this will be a bit above or below the plane of the ecliptic and so we can get a signal from it.

Tsingtao, really?

Surely Tsingtao Black if you're going to drink a Chinese beer, or maybe Harbin.

Anyway, real ale is also very nice, but different. Personally I'm hankering for some fursty ferret right now.

Bud is that bad though, it's like Fosters or Carling, carbonated battery acid.

According to my H2G2...

We need the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional tense so:

He wioll haven met his daughter and he willan on-take her to be his lawful wedded wife.

Much easier when you have the language for it.

@Paul Murphy

No one said this was the finished product mate.

Scale it up by building it into a mountain by the equator, use high temp super conducting coils, bit of the old liquid nitrogen, and a 3km long shaft, slap a nuclear power station at the bottom (you'll probably need a lake or sea too, for cooling and whatnot).

Then you've got something which you can use to give a bloody good boost to your payload, even that might not be enough to get it into orbit however, but you can certainly get it a damn good way up, at which point you'll need less chemical fuel to get it over the edge of the well.

Who's reggie?

And why does he have a real goose?

And that's where it belongs

There's only one type of weather we should allow in glorious Blighty and that's rain.

These vulgar, coarse things like sunshine and snow should be relegated to the colonies where they lack our refined appreciation of the glories of that gentle watery kiss from heaven to earth that we call rain.

It's probably a reflection on me

That I read "sort out a bit of hash" as referring to a hash check in some code.

I then sat there wondering why a programming problem would be something you'd want to hide.

Oh well.

They'll never make a Matrix sequel

The original had such a wonderfully open and uplifting ending that any sequel would only be a disappointment.

They're smarter than that.

Ah so there is multiplayer!

That's exactly what I was wanting, multiplayer, largely melee combat?

That's just asking for the inevitable

Sooner or later someone will put noughts and crosses into the machines and then bam! No more wars.

Depends on the medium

Everything that's not a vacuum makes like travel more slowly, so you can be faster than the standard speed of light within a material while still remaining firmly below the speed of light in a vacuum.

It's this slowing down that makes things like glasses lenses and magnifying glasses work.

I don't think that it's actually anti-green

I'm pretty sure most people here are very much in favour of reducing energy consumption, pollution and so on. They just don't believe that the current crop of PR based advances actually offer any real advantages.

"Green" energy is a nice idea, but shockingly hard to implement efficiently. The wind doesn't blow on a schedule, the sun only shines when it feels like it (especially round here), tidal energy seems to be bad for the wildlife, wave power is wind energy by another name and requires transmission over long distances and so on.

That's not to say that these technologies don't have their place, far from it. I still feel that the solar powered street furniture like the LED lights that illuminate road signs are very cool and exactly how these technologies should be implemented.

The day there's a story about a commercially viable fusion power station on this site, I'm sure you'll see a lot of love. Tech people love fusion .

The bet? Nothing

They don't throttle the top package normally, especially not when introducing it.

Honestly, no

Even if Twitter were the safest site in the world I'd still regard clicking on links to it as highly suspect.

Yeah a minder...

...It's a sodding phone survey.

Ever been to China? I've lived there, it's amazing how often I wasn't arrested you know. Also in the cities, where this kind of survey is likely to take place (I can't see it happening in a farming village), it's not like the people are uninformed as to the views of the world.

Also I'd say it's a large enough sample of the market for mobile phone apps in China, if not the entire population.

Sorry to disagree

But pretty much everyone I know who's a regular computer user is a touch typist. Hell my keyboard's lost a fair chunk of the letters on the keys, but I don't notice because I can't remember the last time I looked at it.

While I don't really use google's home page any more (there's a reason they put a search box in most browsers), I can see that it might be useful. Of course the search box itself has had a suggestion feature for years now too.

Even my mother, who's not exactly a tech-expert, graduated to touch typing a few years ago. Thinking about it so did my grandfather. I don't think I know any hunt and peck typists anymore.

I was going to say that

Word for word no less.

Penang's probably more moderate

But then it's a lot more Chinese than the rest of Malaysia. And say what you like, I quite like Tiger. (Yes I know it's Singaporean, but they hopped in and out of Malaya so I still call it a native beer. Plus everyone drinks it.)

Obscure?

I don't think Back to the Future counts as obscure.

Required viewing maybe.

It won't be easy

We'll need garlic, a stake of hardened hawthorn, the services of at least three priests of different religions and probably a Jedi.

The Dark Lord is strong in his power and wily in his ways.

Well...

If you know the concept behind second life, you'll agree it is pretty damn sad.

The tenner you wouldn't have had otherwise?

Even if people steal your recycling, you're not worse off

That's the thing that's getting me here, people are whining about the possibility of someone stealing their possible chance to get something they wouldn't otherwise have or need.

It's basically whining about the possibility of a possibility of an idea's possible downsides. I fully expect people to complain about the possibility of people stealing their farts while they sleep when someone works out how to convert them into electricity which could be sold to the grid (fuel cell undies).

It's not like green tea is caffeine free

I mean some of the ones I brew really will pick you up in the mornings.

I don't drink coffee, but I do have a caffeine addiction just fine without it.

You can put the live CD in before you shut down

It's not like you have to stand by the PC waiting for post and then open, put in the cd and then shut it again.

I normally just burn a distro (or more recently make a bootable USB stick), leave the disk in the drive and hit reboot.