MSW

Busas main strength is the drag strip...too heavy and too long a wheelbase for knee scrape track ripping...as for drag raceing, stock busas really aint that much quicker then most stock liter class sportbikes anyway, and is actualy slower then a few of them...and there is a large aftermarket industry for modding them with turbos, NOS, cams, etc... Not really...at least in the grand scheme of things...a typical twin webber IDA carbed, duel port headed and mild cammed 1700cc VW motor is only about 100hp...a huge increase over stock to be sure, but not even competitive in the numbers game with most stock modern cars...but 100hp in a stock bug is another story! to each his own (ugly!? Lackluster performance!? sure you ain't confuseing it with the Mondial 8?)...I actualy think the 308 is one of the best looking Ferraris ever made...and yes you can find them that cheap if you look hard enough, the prices have come down a long way from thier 90's peak...besides there are lots of other exotics in that price range (example Lambo Japla) but they arn't in show room new condition to be sure...and will likely need lots of work... A few weeks ago I almost brought a 1983 Lotus turbo Esprit with 70,000+ miles for $4k...it ran, and could be driven, but needed restored...but the lack of info on modding these cars made me rethink the deal. Or stuff a small block into a Fiero...a iron block and head 383 stroker only adds some 80lbs over the stock 2.8L V-6 in the GT, bolts right up to the getrag 5-speed... Or stuff a v-8 in a old 240-260-280Z...heck why not just mod the inline 6 instead... Or find an old mid 1970's Chevy Monza...light weight Vega basied platform and for a while a 305 V-8 was optional.

$6,000 to $7,000 can buy you a lot...from old muscle cars in decent shape to year old 600cc sportbikes...aircooled VW street machines to thier watercooled brothren...you could even pick up some exotics like Lotus turbo Esprits that are in need of minor restoration...or even, if you shop carefully, an old restoreable Ferrari 308GTS/GTB. Sure, at that price some cars are outside your grasp...For example early 70's Cudas are quite pricey, but thier twin at Dodge...the Challanger...are quite affordable, which makes little sense as both cars share platforms, engines, etc...course a simular situation exists between the first gen camaro/firebird F-bodies

With that much metal on the upper body, it would need to be anchored to the ground (as in steel I-beams buried 6 feet deep in concrete) for such a feature to actualy work.

I think almost everything pales in comparison with that little "prank" . You said it! At first I was quite suprised...Obviously would have ment a lot of changes in our lives...But I quickly got rather excited about the whole thing...even started laying out preliminary plans for the babys room, telling a few of my friends, etc...this was going to be so cool Then she clued me in on the joke and now I feel let down

My girlfriend dropped the "Im pregnant" April Fools Day bomb on me this morning... For half the day I was under the mistaken impression I was gonna be a daddy... Sorry, But this Macross Plus-liveaction flick joke just pales in comparison.

The new Ford GT-40 is the american supercar? Well I really can't knock it to much. The kit car industry has been shoveing GT-40 kits out the door for decades now. And it is basied on a great classic race car...but really Ford, what were you thinking makeing the new 3,500lbs GT a street car with no race pedigree? Come on Ford! If you want to get in on that showroom sportscar action (but not commit to race funding) well your old partners DeTomaso are working on a new Pantera! Lord knows you helped them out before, building one very fine sports machine...hell you could have cashed in on "cool factor" surrounding the DeTomaso Magusta spied in Kill Bill Vol2 And pulease! the "american supercar" only aspires to beat a Ferrari 360 Guess Ford hasn't heard of Vector and a number of other small American companies fighting for that title....even this old Vector (with a transverse mounted twin turbo V-8 sourced from GM) gave Ferrari some stiff street performance competition.

I want one of these Its a Myers Manx SR...basicly a dunebuggy street rod kit car from 1970...very rare, only something like 60 of them made...yeah, I'm a closet VW aircooled fan at 1300lbs...even a mild 1915cc 145hp street VW motor can make them really scoot, with a power to weight ratio on par with a brand new Pontiac GTO...besides I just love the bodylines

:opps: Sorry Pat, I had only read far enough into the thread before makeing my post to see some concern about Macross (and other such anime) suddenly being considered child porn because of a shower scene...I should have read the whole thread as it now seems the guy is only being charged with parole violation (I missed that and your posts containing much more reasoned, logical assestment of the situation) As always there is more to the story then fits into some tiny little news summary...especialy true when even a hint of politics are involved

Um...the guy has not been CONVICTED yet, he has simply been charged... Further, anime like Macross are clearly exempt under the "Miller test" (from: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/f...w/obscenity.htm ) even if convicted, the case will float up to the suprime court level eventualy (which is how they hear cases to preside over constitutional issues)... And if, in the case of Ashcroft VS Speach Coalition (the case that got the "virtual child porn" bits of the CPPA thrown out) is any indicator (it involved photo real CG models of child porn)...well then styleized drawn artwork like hentai anime will be dissmissed too... heck the judge will probbly dismiss the case long before it reaches a conviction just on the legal precident established by the suprime court

Ah...Exkaiser, its the first of the Brave series...Faibird, Might Gain, Dai Garn, J-Decker, Gao Gai Gar...Its a series of largely unrelated shows sponsored by Takara. Kinda the evolution of the Transformers, most of the mechs were sentient bots. In Exkaiser the bot kaiser (one to the right in the image) could change into a sports car and combine with a truck like vehical to form the titular Exkaiser bot (one on the left of that image)...there was another bot (name escapes me ATM) that had a plane form that could combine with Exkaiser to form Great Exkaiser...the show also featured a pair of trains that each transformed into bots and could combine together into a larger bot...Obviously the shows themseves were primarily ment to sell Takara toys, but some of them ended up being pretty good shows all thier own (I've only seen J-Decker and Gao Gai Gar so far, both are quite cool)

Dammit Man, that sucks!...I hung out there a lot (well havn't recently, but last few years I was always there), trade information, shoot the crap and all that...was a great place. I know White Drew Carey and several others from here hung out there as well but now its no more What a lousy immature thing to do, hacking the site like that.

A bit of everything....Some I.C.P., Tech-9, Ministry, NIN, KMFDM, Orbital, Juno Reactor, Beastie Boys, Led Zepplin, Misfits, Green Jello, Mushroomhead, Dead Milkmen, Mindless Self Indulgance, Tub Ring, Faith no More, the Pimps, Slipknot, Beta Band, older Dwight Yokum, Jonny Cash, Talking Heads, older U2, some Greatfull Dead, Tom Watts, Rob Zombie, Anthrax, Hendrix, etc... Hey areaseven: May I suggest KMFDM? they are a largely simular industrial/metal type group also from Germany, but picked up on the old Wax Trax label that was home to Ministry, Thrill Kill, NIN, etc...thier NIHIL and XTORT albums are a pretty good starter...

Yes..at the time the plan was to unleash the 2ed gen car in 1969 with the 303cid engine...the GM strike pushed the cars release back to the mid 1970 model year, and the engine never lived up to its potential...Pontiac had licensed the T/A name and so they put together what we know as the 1969 TA inorder to hold the spot open for what became thier 2ed gen basied race cars... From what I remember the 303cid race motors were sorta like the 302cid chevy in that they started with a bigger engine (Pontiac 326 IIRC) and destroked it...Pontiac also lowered the deck hieght, meaning the heads were closer together and a narrower intake manifold had to be fabricated...they also used ram air V heads which required a new camshaft (the valve orders are different...everything up to ram air 4 had E-I-I-E-E-I-I-E intake/exaust valve order like on a small block chevy...ram air 5 are E-I-E-I-E-I-E-I type heads)...from what I remember the engine had oiling and cooling problems and thus got canned...the production 1970.5 T/A was suppost to get a ram air 5 equiped 400cid engine...however, once the T/A race comittee droped the 305cid engine homologation rule for production cars, Pontiac didn't have the bugs worked out of the new heads in time so they got ram air 4 instead. And as Pontiac could compete in TA raceing with canadian built cars equiped with chevy 302cids...and the looming insurance hikes and emission standards that would soon kill the muscle cars...the ram air 5 program got shielved and never saw production. I've got a ton of Pontiac books and stuff up in the attic...the history of the SD program, stuff on the Micky Thompson HEMI heads, etc...If I get the chance I'll try to dig some of it out.

The father of a friend of mine was one of the engineers working at Pontiac during the time (his contribution to the 2ed gen firebird mainly delt with the brake system)...he died about a decade ago, but he used to tell all sorts of stories about his time there..his real passion was BSA bikes - had a garage full of them... I remember this one story he told concerning the 2ed gen development...IIRC he said it was spring 1969 and they were just getting the new 2ed gen tooling transfered around at the plants...they had a couple of test mules built...the engineering was largely done on the car, but they still had to work out production issues...the test mules were largely just frames built by engineers with a mix of 1st and 2ed gen parts, each built a little different (erm built to established 2ed gen specs, differences being stuff like one would route the wireing different then another, etc...just trying to work out the best way to build them an such)...well the test mules started sliceing up the rubber front brake lines...so they tried to mount them differently...still ended up cutting the brake lines...re-routed them again, and they still got cut...anyway after a few days of this, the problem was solved when it was discovered that the test mules had the wrong inner fender wells (IIRC he said they came from the Chevelle parts bin)...not the fiberglass ones they ended up useing...funny thing is that the fiberglass ones were all ready to go, but due to a clerical error on the build sheet for the test mules they got the wrong inner fenders

Damn!...been away from this thread for too long Anyway as a fellow 2ed gen T/A fan, and former (and likely future) owner of several Phyrox asked a question a goo while back: Now this is going by memory..so some of it could be way off...Chevy got into the the then still new TA race series with thier 302cid Z-28...and what races on sunday sells on monday, And Pontiac was getting a bit jealious that thier own pony car wasn't selling (not to mention American Motors and the boys at Dodge were prepareing thier own entries)...problem was that they didn't have a competative engine to meet the max 305cid Trans Am raceing rule...thus the late start Poncho engineers came up with the 303cid, but it wasn't looking to promiseing. IIRC, Delorean (may he rest in peace) was still in charge at Pontiac then...they opted the Trans Am name, but didn't have a car yet...what we know as the 1970 model year firebirds were originaly suppost to appear in 1969...engineering was hard at work on them (Delorean had been trying to make a Pontiac firebird named sports car sense the 1950s...and Pontiac wasn't too happy about inheriting the Chevy developed Camero pony car design...so there was pressure from Pontiac to have much more say in how the 2ed generation developed)...However (IIRC) the plan for a 1969 Firebird T/A began to fall appart when there was a big workers strike...so the 2ed gen got pushed back (actualy didn't hit showrooms til february 1970...makeing them 70.5 models) and in the meantime the engine wizards were still trying to make the lil 303cid both competitive and reliable enough to be sell enough cars to be homologated into the T/A race series...but the engine wasn't up to snuff...and the rule makers of the T/A race series decided to drop the engine homologation requirement (still had to be a production car...just didn't have to have a engine under the 305cid cap)...so what we know as the 1969 Pontiac T/A was the result of that (it too was a mid model year car)...it was just sorta thrown together last minute like so Pontiac could race in the following season... The 303cid motor never really woked right, and Pontiac...under the graces of the T/A race committee...mostly ended up useing the Chevy 302cid engines in thier race cars.

I wanna see it, if for no other reason then its steampunk But I'll prolly wait for the DVD as it isn't likely to get shown around here as for its boxoffice numbers... I don't know...$150,000 is a lot of $$$...especialy for only 2 days on 39 screens...Yeah, opening weekend is important for the modern Hollywood buisness model...but the modern model is basied upon the runaway success of Jaws and Star Wars in the 1970s...Hollywood used to do things quite differently before then...shame they can't seem to remember how, or are willing to try. Hollywood used to do traveling "regional" releases...a film would be in release, sometimes, for years...they would release say a hundred prints in NY state, run them for a month...then move the prints to Ohio, run for a month..then to Virgina, etc...this let word of mouth do much of the advertiseing...and a great many became very profitable when it was all said and done....but of course this takes patience, something very lacking in our modern instant gratification Hollywood

Injection molding typicaly doesn't require a mold release agent (but this is often dependent on the shapes of the parts themselves as well as properties of the plastic material used in them)...however the injection molds themselves often require lubrication as they contain moveing parts...ejector pins and the like...additionaly the molds may have hot oil or water flowing through them to keep the molds at a consistant temperature... Most likely its just the lubrication used on moveing componets within the mold itself.

I have WinDVD. Problem has nothing to do with that...it can't play the DVD because the drive reports there is no DVD to play...I know all about the autorun feature, problem has nothing to do with that...the drive still plays CDs fine, and some older DVDs... I put a affected DVD in and nothing happens...fire up windows explorer to explore the DVD and I get nothing (same as if I tried to explore the drive without a disk in it)...even the MS-DOS command prompt finds the drive empty...same DVDs work fine in the 5 year old DVD player attached to my TV. It seems to be a driver issue...put a DVD in and it does try to read the DVD file allocation table...almost like the driver is programed to not work with DVDs made after a certain date, so it reports to Windows that the drive is empty.

Well not a complete dunce, but close enough A while ago I got the Will Smith I, Robot film on DVD...not a great film, but better then I expected...anyway I've watched it on my PC DVD rom drive. But today when I decided to get a couple of screen captures of the car Will drives in the flick...I plopped the DVD in and nothing happens...erm...let me explain, by default I've always had autorun turned off...so thats not the issue...however what happens is that the DVD drive doesn't seem to think it has a disk in it ... which is pretty much par for the corse with any recently released DVD I've tried to play on the PC. So Ive been trying to get older DVDs I own to work...DVDs I know, and have screen captures to prove, they once played fine on my PC...some of the oldest ones still do, but now even somewhat old titles like my copy of the ADV release of the Shin Getter Robo OVA arn't working at all anymore (same frikkin deal...acts just like there is no disk in the drive). The only thing that I can think of that has changed is that I've updated the DVD rom drive a couple of times sense the whole (doesn't recognise DVD in drive) problem started last year. I don't copy DVDs, I don't rip them to my hard drive. I like to watch them on my PC to get screen caps and when my girlfriend is watching something else on TV...not to mention the picture quality is better on my PC moniter than on my old TV. I'm assumeing this is a driver problem...and I've tried to roll back to an earlyer driver version, but my PC says there isn't on on file...and as the DVD is just the same one that came already installed in my PC (HP brand) I have no idea on what specific model it is or where to find older drivers for it...so I'm resigning myself to the possability of buying a new DVD drive...but I want to be sure the same "no play" issue doesn't crop up with it. So does anyone have ideas on how to fix this, or suggestions on DVD drive that will work with these disks?

erm, no..

Okay...this is an old, OLD one...but well worth it as it has comedy, action, and adventure, some sexy character designs (but no..um...sex scenes like in Ninja Scroll..that I remember anyway), and although its basied on a manga you don't need to have knowledge of it to follow the film...so check out Space Cobra, its quite entertaining. Course there is also Galaxy Express 999, My Youth in Arcadia, Millenium Actress, and Wings of Honneamise.

Things in hollywood don't have to be "greenlighted" at the same time or even in production or release at the same time to have bearing on each other. Remember that scripts flow through the hollywood culture years, sometimes even decades, before they get picked up and made. Some get picked up and then sat on for years or even decades. My point was that Reign of Fire's script was going through a lot of hands years before it was actually made. Chances are the D&D movie was picked up because they wanted RoF... or the other way around. You never know the backroom shenanigans with movie scripts unless the people responsable actually talk about them. Just look at the massive hassle the original Alien script went through in it's road to production. A lot of movies are like that. It's only after the script gets picked up or the story gets optioned does the real boardroom altering begin. Yes, I know...I just think both D&D and Reign of Fire being made had far more to do with the deal Peter Jackson struck wth LOTR then with each other...and that whole deal prolly wouldn't have been made if Dragon Heart had flopped years ago...and Dragon Heart would likely still be sitting around in script form if Jurassic Park, Hercules, and Xena on TV had flopped too. Its not like Roger Corman decided to make Battle Beyond the Stars because Disney opted to make the Black Hole...they both had far bigger coat tales to ride on. When Dimention decided to risk $300mill on Jacksons LOTR, a whole lot of other production houses sat up and took notice..."thats a lot of cash! But if thats where they are putting thier money, maybe we should make a dragon picture too...just in case!".

You know most of us pay good money to garbage collectors to get rid of the crap we already have...If you want free crap, we could all save a bunch of money by connecting our toliets to your house! If you consider it crap when its selling for $20 on the CD rack, then WTF makes it worth a free download?...crap is crap. My gawd, with all the mud you guys like to sling at the music and film industry for produceing such crap...Its like your neighbors have a Pitt Bull they swear craps solid gold...you can even buy a pile of it for $20 at thier weekly garage sale...But you can obviously tell the dogs crap is like that of any other dog and pass on the deal...Yet, late at night you sneak over and steal some Its not like practicaly every store that sells music doesn't have a CD lisening station, its not like you can't rent DVDs and video games...it's not like you don't have tons of music, film and even video game reviews to gauge the general opinion and value with...with as much time and effort as it takes to download crap for free you could already be aware of just how crappy the crap is...But no, you want your crap, and want to eat it too...instant satisfaction is the name of the game, not enough patience to wait for soemthing to reach the discount bin, not enough forsight to wait until the hype dies down, can't be bothered with checking through the compilation or "best of" CDs for those particular songs you want...nope its just consume, consume, consume.

Um..D&D was a late summer/early fall 2000 release, about a year and some change before the christmas season 2001 LOTR:Fellowship of the Ring release. Reign of Fire was released in 2002, during summer before LOTR:Two Towers was released...Unless they sat Reign of Fire in a vault for some two years, I don't think they were given the green light at the same time. But anyway...back to D&D $36million? Jeesh! where did that all that money go? One thing I've learned is that Hollywood likes to bloat and then gloat over film budgets...They have very creative accountants Take the Blair Witch Project film for example. The directors stated it only cost about as much as a Ford Tarus to make (say $24,000). Mirimax buys up the rights, and suddenly the films budget is often quoted at a cool million...its almost like they do this to diswade competition I don't know, the D&D flick didn't have any "A-List" stars in it...the only "name" actors (thinking Jeremy Irons, Thora Burch) had rather limited screen time (prolly only a week out of thier schedule to shoot thier scenes), IIRC they shot at least part of it in Prauge and maybe on a dozen sets, costumeing could cost a bit, but I don't recall a lot of elaborite stunt work or physical effects, not to mention that there wasn't a whole lot of CG enhanced live action shots (where a creature or something was added later to the shot....IIRC, most of the CG shots seemed to stand alone, meaning no live action elements)...in real dollars, I can't see them haveing spent more then $15 million tops... It was a bad investment anyway...but I'm thinking this sequel is going the "direct to video" route (as in Starship Troopers 2)

I vaugely recall it mentioned that the D&D film budget was around $23 million...which is quite low for Hollywood in this day and age... It also came out before LOTR, and was prolly partialy green lighted because Dimension publicly invested so much in Peter Jacksons LOTR films...So the D&D film may have been seen as a quick, dirty, exploitive, and cheap "test balloon" to gauge audiance reaction and cash in on the bulgeing LOTR hype...So I wouldn't be suprised, when it is all added up, that the D&D film made back its money... Still, I would MUCH rather see a Shadowrun flick