Does this design work in reverse as a generator? If so, a gearboxless generator would be bigger news than a motor. The gearbox is a major source of failures in wind turbines, and it would dramatically decrease the complexity of all types of mechanical generators.

I hear something like "yowie". I don't hear any consonants in it at all.

I read it as a poem.Or possibly a song. It sorta fits R.E.M's "Loosing My Religion", though that may be cheating, because you can squeeze as many syllables as you like into a line and it still sounds like R.E.M.

Lets stop the debate once and for all and use a memorable name that the average consumer can recognize and just as importantly, pronounce. Ladies and gentlemen, geeks and nerds, please support "PC Android". *ducks*

One did try to burn down a masonic lodge.

Funny, a similar story came to my mind - the Mini Cooper at the Monte Carlo Rally. A little British city car, with comparatively little modification, wiped the floor with custom built continental exotica costing many times the price and several times the horsepower, finishing in all three top places in 1966 - after which the hosts banned it on a tenuous headlight infraction.

I had an audi S4 estate (wagon to the USAians), which managed to be almost that. Very low key looks, 350BHP V8. It was very satisfying to see the look on the kids faces as the family car with roof rails effortlessly pulled away from their screaming Honda.

There's already people prepared to spend 100k on a suborbital flight. I imagine a few orbital joyrides would be a great shakedown, and there would be plenty of people prepared to pay upward of 500k for a week long luxury cruise in low Earth orbit. That would raise funds to develop the full interplanetary infrastructure.

The article is not the full story. The plan is to return the rockets to Earth to be reused anyway, so you could leave on a return trip. The hope is people won't want to, but Musk said the trip home is free if you want to go.

I'm less surprised that they want to keep it quiet, than that they thought they could buy someone who can afford a $100,000 car for $1500. Why be so cheap? instead, they just pissed him off and now it's all over the internet. Also, calling it "goodwill" is perverse, coupled with the gagging threats. If it truly was goodwill, and they were confident they weren't liable, they why bother silencing the owner, shouldn't it be heralded as excellent customer service? They can't have it both ways. Either they truly believe they are in the clear, and are being super generous so all the passive aggressive legalese is unnecessary , or they realise there is a high likelihood of liability on their behalf, in which case, don't offer a settlement that still leaves the owner substantially out of pocket. it's a dick move, however you view it.

Blue Screen of Death?

On the face of it, it seems like a good idea for PC gamers to get some more AAA titles, but it means developers will have little incentive to develop PC specific versions. 9/10 We'll be forced to use joypads for all games too, there's no way they'll let WASD twitchers compete with sofa fiddlers. Console FPS games have built in aiming hacks to cope with the inadequacies of the joypad for FPS play. I'm a mediocre gamer, and I played against some friends using some hacky hardware to play on the Xbox with kb and mouse, and it was a massacre. There's no way they'll let that happen, and there's only one way they'll level the playing field.

A unnamed spokesman said 640k should be enough for anybody.

What happened to "Randomize timer"?

My money is on XBOX One:VR as a name. Games will be launched as VR - Only or VR compatible, where you can still play them on the "old" XBone but don't get any VR niceness. VR takes double the rendering power, so the older machine may still be able to play them on a traditional single screen and gamepad setup.