DrVertigo

The link doesn't specify which Murcielago version. My count for LP640 Roadsters is somewhere between 208 and 414, ~360 being the most likely figure. Plus another 50 for the LP650-4, if you want to include that. The uncertainty is over which units built in 2007 were 6.2s and which were LPs.

Thing is, if the buyer is just itching for an SVJ, what are they going to do, cut up a Miura? They're too valuable at this point, even the P400. I agree that an original SVJ would likely command a particular premium, but there has to be a demand out there for later cut jobs too (which is all the original ones were anyway). Looks like the Jota conversion on this car was done no later than 1974, and from the factory. I'm betting 3.6m.

Didn't care about the model, just so long as it had neon lights under the body. I'm getting a major F&F vibe in this thread.

*Painfully and shamefully cracks open the geek vault.* Stormtroopers in the original trilogy were supposed to be regular Imperial citizens who trained at evil soldier school. It was just that first wave of Republic troopers who were clones, they didn't keep making them. I think they were all supposed to be dead by the time Luke picked up a lightsaber. As for "ditching the goofy shit" - can that also include the original's seeming infinity of camp robots fcuking around in the desert, and pretty much the entirety of Return Of The Jedi that didn't involve Darth Vader? The original trilogy wasn't short on dumb rubbish, they're ultimately kids' films made palatable for adults.

Hah, I grew up 20 minutes from there. Must have been a bad influence on the squirrel.

One of us must be orbiting a black hole, because I make that 5 years.

That's a really good feature. Not a whole lot of positives about the car though...

Did they end up making that limited run of megabucks track-only Sestos they were threatening for years?

Miura over any other Lambo if I could actually fit into it...

You guys, always thinking about how to fit in colons.

*Shrugs* It became a totally different company the moment Feruccio gave up his stake. For its first ten years, Lamborghini was a pioneer, using cutting-edge technology and outside-the-box thinking to create exceptional cars in a wide variety of niches. It was never a company about supercars, the Miura and Countach were just products of an unusual approach to the business. After Feruccio sold his last shares, the company lost all its drive, and floated along on the old models the big man had overseen. The minimal investment meant most of the model lines petered out, and Lamborghini's current state, as a two-model supercar producer, is the legacy of a great company spending years circling the drain.

Meh, personally I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, yeah, an atonal drone isn't a remotely exciting thing to hear. On the other hand, I find it easier and less draining to sit through the full race with so little high-frequency noise. Very happy to see Lewis and Ricciardo doing so well, but I'd be happier if the teams were more closely matched. These two backmarker teams dropping out does make you wonder if it's time to revise the way prize and/or advertising money is distributed across the paddock.

That is scary as hell. Those guys wrangling Sutil's car are very lucky to be alive. Was strange how the news about the crash took so long to reach the commentators on the BBC feed, I think they thought the graphics system was bugged when it listed Bianchi among the DNF.

I think you must be eligible to win some sort of prize for managing to attach a negative connotation to the Alfa Montreal. (Possibly a strait jacket. )

My opinion, that is a very cool car. Love the shape, love the details, love the idea - and there's no other car that looks like it, or has a similar ethos. Just a shame they'll never make it.

Assuming it is a 4-seater/2+2, I'm glad it has a different window configuration to the Estoque, as the C-pillar was one of the very few things I didn't like about it. Rear passenger visibility's probably going to be terrible (again, assuming it has rear seats), but who cares. Interesting that it's such a different configuration to the Aventador and Huracan, too. Whichever platform it uses, it's going to look very different to the existing cars.

Tagline doesn't suggest it. Lightning's probably just there because of current Lamborghini's "raw aggressive uncompromising fighter jet passione". Probably missing a few similar buzzwords there.

It's been the best tournament I can remember. Ridiculously dramatic, so many stories, so many brilliant players making a name for themselves - and others falling far short of their hype. Lionel Messi seems to be the new Wayne Rooney, all club and no country. I don't like Germany or Argentina so didn't go into the final with much interest, but both of them played much better than most of their previous games (main exception obviously being Germany's last match) and ended fairly perfectly with a magnificent goal from a footballer barely out of his nappies, and Messi summing up his tournament by punting the last-minute free kick miles over the post.

Only a few teams/players frequently dive to create an opportunity out of nothing (cough, Cristiano Ronaldo, blrurghbearhhsplutter). In other cases - the majority - it's an exaggeration to bring the ref's attention to the fact they've been fouled. As anyone with 5 minutes' experience watching a football match will know, referees are the most stupid, short-sighted and routinely wrong group of people in existence. Solution to the problem: genetically engineer clairvoyant referees. (Though on a serious note, I like Cap's idea of post-match review suspending the most blatant no-foul divers.)

I've been thinking this for at least six years, but he was actually quite good in the support role for the first half. Changing positions seemed to make him (and Welbeck for that matter, our MotM in first half in my opinion) spontaneously vanish into a parallel universe. Italy did a great job of marking Sterling, he could have been very dangerous if they didn't shut him down so well. They must have been reading the English headlines after last week's training session... And generally, it was a pleasingly clean, flowing and respectful match. Polar opposite to Brazil's opener.

Not off one bad call, no. However... Croatia scored a goal which was disallowed due to a striker getting close to the goalie. Brazil's last goal happened immediately after a rugby tackle in midfield for which play was inexplicably not stopped. And then we have that infamous penalty. Those were by no means the only odd decisions, but the ones which most directly affected the final score.

Shouldn't the ref be Brazil's MOTM? Wasn't just that penalty, there were quite a few ridiculous decisions. And some dreadful behaviour from Brazilian players too, they reminded me more than a little of Portugal when they were under Scolari's leadership. Anyway, getting back to the picks, I like to be awkward so I'm going for Portugal.

Not really. Very little survives from that long ago, it's doubtful much of what we build today will be standing in 5500 years. But here in Britain, we have evidence of earthworks, wooden and monolithic construction, mining, trade, roads, spirituality and jewelry-making going even further back than that. There are examples of primitive writing in the Middle East appearing quite a bit before the flourishing of Sumerian culture. The earliest known agriculture is from 10,000 years ago, with stone architecture around this time. Metallurgy goes back around 7000 years. Weaving, forestry, sculpture, hut building and animal domestication go back tens of thousands of years. And the basic underpinning of it all, education and tool-making, is widespread among higher primates. The point being, the progression of the technologies and principles that underpin civilisation go back a LONG way, and in a visible progression, even though the surviving evidence is so sparse. There's no need to suggest that any non-human entity gave us a shove along the way, the evidence is there that we worked it out, piece-by-piece, for ourselves. Same goes for the technology of the 20th century, which by and large is a linear progression of advancements stemming from the industrial revolution, education reformation during the Renaissance and our innate curiosity.

Modern German cars that don't have a Porsche badge.

There's pretty much zero chance of aliens existing on any star system we can see with the naked eye, or with most telescopes. The probability of acids and proteins coagulating into a DNA strand is astronomically small, and it probably took very specific environmental conditions to form the first cellular life. Even then, it took 3.2 billion years for microbes to evolve into multicellular lifeforms. And there's no preset formula to say it had to take that long: on another planet with the same conditions, it might have taken 2 billion years, or it might have taken 5. It might never have happened, or it might have happened very quickly. But even if we find a planet with the right basic conditions for complex life, and even if life is fortunate enough to have started there, the chances of it having life of a similar grade to us at a similar time are just unbelievably miniscule. If it had taken 10% longer to develop the life we have on Earth today, there would be no animal life on land at all, and the seas would generally be packed with trilobytes and placoderms. If it had happened 10% quicker, we'd likely have made the planet unlivable hundreds of millions of years ago. Also, sentient life is not an inevitability. Human evolution relies on an extraordinary string of coincidences, even if you just look at the last five million years; let alone the sixty-odd million years of primate evolution, 200-odd million years of mammalian evolution, etc. If the ice age hadn't receded the African forests at the same time that a subgroup of apes developed bipedalism, there would be no us. I'd be shocked if life doesn't exist somewhere outside our solar system, because as others have said, the universe is very big, and has had a lot of time for shit to happen. But the only way of finding it, or it finding us, would be some form of communication which isn't affected (at all) by distance. I don't believe we've ever been visited by ship-building aliens (though there is some credence to the suggestion of microbial life being of extraterrestrial origin), because how could they possibly find us?