Mowgli1647545497

My advice, HoosierDaddy aside, is do not go to Bloomberg. They were the place with the doctor there that got sued for doing operations while intoxicated, and the staff was covering for him. Also, whereas the TLC procedure ~$3000+, you routinely hear Bloomberg runs those deals where its "~$300 per eye"(!) Um okaaay... Never chase bargains on your eyes man is my opinion. Anyhow - my wife, my sister and my father all have had it done. I actually watched my wife's procedure. All three say it was the best thing they ever chose to do for themselves. All went to TLC (where Tiger Woods went if that matters to you - people where money is no object choose the best...). No haloing or starburst from any of them, no re-lasering at the 6 month checkup either. Dad's has been 4 years now, sister 2, wife one. Wife and dad had a pretty big astygmatism too, which was corrected. No dryness problems among them that they tell me.

Oops someone asked where I got that quote - got it off CornerCarvers.

Sad thing is guess how many idiots will now think they beat a Cobra in a race if they run this guy? More than realize this car is fake, I'll bet money on that.

Yes, but I'm betting the Roush and Saleen kits include pistons at the very least. As for the supercharger vendors of course they'll sell you anything, regardless of wether or not you grenade your engine, they just want something on the market NOW. When, in a few months if it becomes irrefutabley proven on the street that you need also forged internals to blow them, THEN you'll see the vendors start offering that too, as an extra $... I'm still hopeful though.

Apparently Ford has used hypereutectic pistons and not forged units, with EXTREMELY small ringlands in the new Mustang GT engine. While I agree that yes that is great for engineering efficiency and I'm sure helps their engine rev happily and freely and also helps them get 300hp n/a out of those little 4.6s it won't hold boost well at all. That mean anyone looking to boost their 05 better just invest in some pistons up front and save yourself the headache? That Sucks.

I saw someone quoting Colletti at some diner event saying they were going to use the 5.4 liter engine, but wether it was going to be boosted or not is up in the air. I would take with a grain of salt any powerplant info until the project gets a project start date - then they'll lay down requirements. Until then all we've got is the project has been greenlighted.

You're joking, right?

Latest SVT news: Next Cobra fall 2006.

hmm, the next Cobra delayed? My wallet thanks SVT. But then I may just buy a GTO when they get some muscle... so my wallet weeps anyway. But as for the delay - I'll see what it says in the next SVTOA mag. Colletti usually does an op-ed answering scoops in the media. But I wouldn't be surprised. There's no compelling reason for Ford to pay to make an SVT version of the new stang so soon. The body style alone will carry them thru 05-06 in sales. They don't need the Cobra as a Halo car with the Ford GT out now... And until or unless something comes on the market to challenge its market position (sales more than performance, but even on the performance side the Mustang GT at 300hp ~$21k there's no other new car that comes close), I can see them sitting on their business heels. (The NASTY scuttlebutt is that SVT go absorbed by Team Mustang... but thats a nasty rumor. Kinda like how SVO evaporated inside Ford: other project managers come in and raid the team) Can't say I'm hurt if the Cobra is delayed - I like my current car, and the Corvettes and GTOs have some neat things in their pipeline I might have to purchase. Hell I even kinda perked up hearing about that AWD Acura.

HEAR HEAR! My uncle (a bone surgeon) pays more in insurance premiums than I make in a year, and I am well into the highest federal tax bracket. Its just sick. Torte reform is NEEDED in this country. It will solve alot.

http://www.richardsimmons.com/images/img/RichardBiofotos2.jpg

... holding to see what SVT does with it next year. I played the "waiting on the production line" game with my 03. Ugh what a pain, but then I have no patience, waiting hurts my thingie. Next car comes off the dealer lot.

Gives imports 10 more horsepower per filter. Double em up for 20... Disclaimer: Does not work on Bass, Carp, or Salmon.

Horseshit gets the nose going too.

Best mod for the EVO? Boosting it to 29psi on pump gas.....

Wait a year - it'll get better

"blah blah blah the quality of the people working the counter at xyz blah blah blah" Isn't this like arguing about what's better: Schlitz or Old Milwaukee?

fixed

Can't speak for Ohio, but in California we used to see "Car-B-ques" (cars on fire) almost daily, certainly weekly. My wife worked for a large insurance agency at the time who handled many of these fire claims, and handled the investigations for the CHP. The majority of the fires were due to fuel system leaks. The majority of these cars' ran primarily BP fuel. That was California. Not drawing any ties between BP's additives/ethanol-usage and the above here, just conveying my family's experience. Regardless, personally I haven't used BP since I moved to Cali. Wether the connection is there or not, I prefer not to test it with my car. I understand I may be wrong. As for folks having to run 100+ octane exclusively in their cars, sucks to be you. smile.gif Wanna race cross country?

Oh yeah - Wolfenstein: ET - forgot that one. Good game. "Free" certainly doesn't suck

Call of Duty - best WW2 game after MOHAA Battlefield 1942 - nice quick arcadey action Operation Flashpoint - Modern warfare. The Big One, WW3. Do you want huge battlefields with everything from infantry to drivable IFVS to Tanks to Helos to A10s? Literally full company sized engagements? Hundreds of men and vehicles duking it out? Want to be schooled on just how tiny one man with an RPG really is on the modern USA-vs-Soviet battlefield? Then this is your game. Nothing else can come even remotely close (the Battlefield 1942 series and mods are nice, but alot more arcadey, alot smaller, in numbers and map size) - Not for everyone, alot of run-n-gun gamers "don't get it" with OFP. I've designed almost 80 "maps" for this game. Send me a PM if you want any or want to try Co-Op. Big learning curve though. But cheap - its probably in the bargain bin now. Some Gold versions out now, and TONS of add-ons created by now that up the vehicle count and special effects. Turning into the "Falcon4" of the realistic shooters. If you know what that means, you'll want this game. Halo - Bought it, dumped it. Sucked on the PC... woulda been great 4 years ago, but had been utterly surpassed once it got released on the PC by just about every other title out there. Good singleplayer game though. And playing a FPS with a gamepad is an embarrassment, so I flushed it. It was great on the xbox though when it came out. Doom3 - good to hear I was not the only one who was bored, fills void til Halflife 2... Joint Operations - 150 people per server, 'nuf said... No AI to speak of. No bots at all for multiplay. Small arms only really, gameplay surprisingly like Tribes, which is not a bad thing [ 30. September 2004, 10:40 PM: Message edited by: Mowgli ]

Soon as missles come into play, you have to fastforward right to the Aegis. Or just forget boats altogether and talk about attack aircraft. Me, I like big mean-ass monster ships slinging shells the size of VW Bugs at each other smile.gif As for Captains, KBond, you couldn't be more right, its the difference between a hard-charging Beatie and a simpering Jellicoe (thats not fair to Jellicoe actually, but eh, who cares smile.gif ).

That'd be cool to read. I know next to nothing about special ops and would like hearing from someone in the know.

And the Best All-Around Performers Are... And now the moment we'e all been waiting for, or not. Again, judges, your scorecards... Yamato - 170 Iowa - 206 Bismarck - 146 Richelieu - 174 King George V - 152 Vittorio Veneto - 130.5 South Dakota - 196 Not surprisingly, Iowa is the winner in the Best All-Around competition. American secondaries and AAA were awesomely effective. The Axis ships, particularly Vittorio Veneto, were horribly outclassed in this department. In the Middleweight category, South Dakota comes out on top again, followed again (though more distantly this time) by Richelieu. Well, that sort of wraps it up. A very complex topic, all in all, and one which is impossible to answer conclusively. (Kinda like gearheads debating fastest cars.) After all, as in all things having to do with combat, luck would have more than a little to do with determining the outcome in a clash between any of these steel monsters.

Operational Factors Finally, a sort of catch-all category. What I am trying to capture is how useful the ship was in conducting a naval campaign -- what was her radius of action, how easy was she to keep on station, and so on. Yamato - 8 Iowa - 10 Bismarck - 8.5 Richelieu - 9 King George V - 5.5 Vittorio Veneto - 7.5 South Dakota - 9 Again, this category is very subjective. What I'm are trying to do is develop an index of how useful the ship is in the context of a naval campaign. So I think of 3 key areas: Powerplant Efficiency, Combat Radius, and Sea-Keeping, then add em up. 'Powerplant Efficiency' is an mixture of both the amount of power per ton of powerplant weight, as well as the amount of power per cubic foot of powerplant volume, including electrical generating capacity. These figures were drawn from Dulin & Garzke. 'Combat Radius' is based on the ship's nominal radius at 16 knots speed (which was fairly difficult to arrive at; most radius of action figures for these vessels are fairly incomplete.) 'Sea-Keeping' is based mostly on anecdotal evidence found in various reference books (i.e. 'King George V was very wet forward'). A couple of points need to be made here. First, I was very surprise that both the French and Italian powerplants rated as well as they do, although I knew that the French design was very compact. I would guess, however, that these plants were harder to maintain than the American and British plants. The Italians in particular would be close to their bases, and thus could afford to have more cramped machinery spaces because repairs would not have to be carried out at sea as often (this is a characteristic of many more 'coastal' navies, including the modern Russian navy). American vessels (and British, too, I would suspect) tend to devote more of their internal volume to repair facilities and accessways, which makes for a less compact, but more maintainable vessel. Second, ships like King George V and Vittorio Veneto are penalized here for sea-keeping, which isn't completely fair. King George V (and indeed all British capital ships until the post-war Vanguard) were designed to allow zero-elevation fire of the main battery over the bow. It isn't surprising that the lack of sheer forward that such a design requirement entailed resulted in her being a very wet boat. Vittorio Veneto was designed to fight in the more confined waters of the Mediterranean, and thus didn't require the sort of sea-keeping abilities of her blue-water foes. Bismarck, too, was not as good a seaboat as her size and beam might have suggested; she was wet forward, probably due to her being overweight. Iowa, for all her speed, had a very long, fine bow structure, and tended to bury her nose in rough seas. As far as combat radius is concerned, Italian vessels generally would not be fighting at extreme distances from home, meaning that their relatively low radius of action was understandable. For their part, the British counted on their vast worldwide network of refueling stations to compensate for King George V's shortcomings in the fuel efficiency department, although operationally this may have been a greater liability than the British had anticipated, particularly when more of their capital ships began to operate with the Americans in the Pacific near the end of the war. By contrast, American and Japanese vessels were designed to operate in the vast reaches of the Pacific, although you wouldn't know it by looking at Yamato. She was a fuel hog of monumental proportions, due to her very conservative propulsion plant design, and this greatly hindered her usefulness in wartime because it was hardly ever worth the fuel to drive her out of Truk. Iowa, on the other hand, was possessed of tremendous endurance.