JB0

I'm pretty sure that if it turns into a gun, it gets hit my toy gun laws, regardless of how it's shipped.

The issues with toy guns go farther back. Most of it stems from a kid pulling a toy gun on a cop and getting killed over it. Basically, it's another set of child safety laws that sucks all the fun out of things. It's partially BECAUSE it's not unified law. Chintzy orange barrel caps work just fine in SOME states, but not ALL states. I gather toy manufacturers REALLY want the federal government to step in and lay down a unified set of toy gun laws, because it'll make it POSSIBLE to make a mass-market toy gun again.

There are chemical reactions that release oxygen. Some of which can be made relatively portable. And yes, the ISS does use some oxygen "candles." I'm actually surprised, given a failed one was one of Mir's more... exciting... accidents. But the ISS is laid out diffrently, so I assume they've made sure things can't get too out of hand(the Mir accident blocked one of the Soyuz escape pods until it burned out). There's also CO2 scrubbers. They don't actually add oxygen, but they keep the CO2 from reaching hazardous levels. Even if you have unlimited oxygen supplies, you'll still die if you can't get enough CO2 out of the air. If you saw Apollo 13, the air filter cartridge they were replacing was part of the CO2 scrubber.

A. YF-21 helmet's more advanced than the Zero helmet. B. We don't KNOW that the Zero helmet is more advanced. Just because there wasn't any eye-candy showing off of the eye-tracker doesn't mean it wasn't in use on other VFs. I took that scene to be a time-out to explain the long-running "How do they target missiles that fast" question.

Make Starscream a backstabber in the literal sense, huh?

Words cannot express how much I want to see that.

Masterpiece P38! Megatron will always be a handgun to me. Besides, I want to see how they pull THAT off in a Masterpiece-level toy.

Mainly to make sure your set isn't doing anything stupid. Sharpness is usually tied to a retarded feature or 2.

Ah, but Starscream is such a clever traitor that he knows Megatron suspects him far too much for him to scheme effectively. So he's disguised himself as Thundercracker for MORE backstabbity goodness!

You forgot "4-6 and nothing else."

My only dealing with them was asking about getting a Virtual Boy realligned. Was at the end of the system, when they were 30$ or less everywhere you looked. I was actually surprised when they said upfront that "We can do it, but it's honestly cheaper to buy a new one right now." Didn't try to screw around with me(any attempt would have failed, since I knew what the VB was going for in stores, but they could've tried), didn't even just tell me what a reallignment would cost and let me do the math myself. Just came out and said that they could, but it wasn't in my best interests. Earned them major points here.

If I recall, HD-DVD has better transfer rates than BluRay. I don't recall how they compare to high-speed DVD.

Way The Hell Too Bright.

So it matches a real F-15 by accident(traditional Starscream red excepted)? I find that incredibly amusing. Anyways, Starscream isn't real F-15 metal. He's super-high-tech Cybertron metal.

HAHAHA! Best laugh I've had all week. ... Well, the week's only one day old, so we'll include last week too.

Same here. The silver's actually interesting, though. I think he was going for a bare metal look. Cybertron's finest backstabber has no need for puny human paint, and will run naked if he darn well wants to. But as you said, either way it's better than Takara's current paintjob.

My review: Needs more Kaminagi. Seriously, I appreciated that while they did the "NOT REALLY DEAD FOOLED YOU LOL" routine, it wasn't a straight "So-and-so rises from their grave, and they all live happily ever after." Yes, people die and come back. But there's major consequences for them. Some plot issues were left lying for FAR too long. On the other hand, I wasn't expecting some of them to be dealt with at all. Conclusion: It's been an interesting show, and a fun one. I'm looking forward to seeing how the remaining plot threads are resolved in the end.

That happens with ALL TVs. And has for ages. People automatically go for brighter and redder displays, so all TVs have factory defaults of "way the hell too bright" and "way the hell too red" to insure they look their "best" on the showroom floor. WTHTR is harder to correct, and usually requires a trip to secret depths of the service menu. WTHTB is easy, though. Easiest thing to do is probably grab a DVD with a THX logo on it. There's a cute display calibration utility present on all THX DVDs that sets a good baseline. I've found it to land within a few points of my own eyeballing of the situation, but I seem more sensitive to details than some people..

Oh, it's certainly neat, but it still screams "I glued FAST packs to the wings!"

*laughs* Nintendo is one of the loudest anti-piracy people. They'll claim game copiers are illegal(even before the DMCA made them so), emulators are illegal, there's no legitimate use for either besides piracy, downloads of the arcade Donkey Kong hurt sales of Donkey Kong 64 and Super Mario Sunshine(OMG IT AM TEH SAEM CHARACTERERER), etc. Hell, they sued Lik-Sang for selling GBA flash carts. AFTER they bought a truck load for use in dev kits. That's why LK no longer carries mod chips, flash carts, or anything of the like. That may've been what they said, but it isn't what they think.

You'll be waiting a while. He's not allowed out of my garage until he can learn to behave and stop vaporizing school busses.

I don't even know what hardware uses what chip. I never assumed that the DVD player wound up in the best-case scenario, though. So you were saying they all use the cheapest resampling options for non-native sources? I KNOW they don't use a basic resize routine. The ones I've seen aren't anywhere near THAT ugly. So there's SOME effort going on beyond the minimum required. There is nothing preventing a TV from having a good scaler in it. I admit I ASSUME that more than one brand of resampler is used on both the TV and DVD player sides, but it seems a fair assumption. You'll NEVER get the original with a fixed-res display and a non-native source. It's physically impossible. ... Well, unless you're working with an exact multiple of the source resolution(you can get an exact duplicate of 640*480 at 1280*960, for example) What I meant was that if the DVD player's resampler was worse than the TV's, you were better off not using the DVD resampler. Also worth noting that in my opinion, ALL resampled versions are inferior to the original source, regardless of resampler quality. I don't trust ANY computer to properly "make up" missing data.

You know what's MOST annoying? Seeing someone whine every time an image gets quoted, even when it's actually relevant to the post.

Unless it's a TV with a good upsampler. Yeah... not a lot you can do with a native res source. The issue is NON-native sources. Yep. It will generate artifacts too. Some resampling routines will generate less offensive artifacts. Some even employ pattern recognition to fake a higher resolution instead of just hiding artifacts. But it's nothing that can't be put in on either side, and even at it's best it's just making crap up. Native res > *

And for us, it went from a neat idea with way too much crap hanging off the legs to something we'd actually buy. There's 2 sides to this argument, and plenty of people that thought the final version was an improvement, regardless of the fake fuel tanks and wrong shade of gray. I wouldn't have bought the original version regardless. The new one I'll probably grab once it comes out in a real Starscream paint job.