RedGTS

Hahaha. BTW changing authors but in somewhat the same vein, I was driving south almost at the GA/FL border on I-95 at Christmas and saw a giant billboard that said "Who is John Galt?" I'd never seen anything like that on a billboard and it was awesome! If I had seen it in time I would have pulled over and taken a picture of it.

You are familiar with rain, right? And the presence of water vapor in the air (by far the largest greenhouse gas on the planet), and the process by which water is transferred from the seas to the air and back again? Are you saying that process always leaves sea levels static? I'm familiar with Cook's site, and I actually think he tries to deal with things in good faith. But it's still just his take on things, and there are definitely many studies and opinions out there that contradict his take on things (you could say debunk his debunkings if you want to look at it that way). And Cook is not a climatologist and doesn't claim any special expertise in the field AFAIK; he mostly collects studies and data points etc. that he thinks are important and presents them as "shooting down" the "myths" about AGW, as he sees them. Um, what happened to the "highest CO2 levels in 15 million years" argument? If you believe that study the CO2 levels back then were essentially the same as today, and that was long before we burned any fossil fuels. I think you'll also find that CO2 levels have varied a good bit since then, although 250 ppm may be a good rough average over the last few thousand years.

Vroom, I think we probably agree on more than we may disagree on when it gets down to some of the most important issues (particularly the "what to do" issues), but there are a number of problems with this type of statement IMO. One is that sea levels rise and fall for reasons other than melting or freezing ice. Another is that short term trends do not necessarily equal long term trends. I don't claim any technical expertise on these issues either (although I have followed the issues with some interest), but let's say sea levels are in fact currently rising. I can tell you that there are studies out there which say that rising or falling sea levels have been occurring regularly over various intervals for the past couple of thousand years, but that the various upward or downward trends do not predict future variations in sea levels. One of the major problems inherent in the subject of AGW generally is humans' inability to come to grips with the time intervals in play. That is, the same scientists who will tell you AGW is occurring will also tell you that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. That is one hell of a long time. Whatever has been going on the last 2 or 3 thousand years with the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, etc. might as well have been a minute or two in the grand scheme of things. Even if one assumes the "Highest CO2 levels in 15 million years" from the UCLA study is true (and I don't), it is a whole lot less alarming if you can put it in perspective with how old the planet is. I think virtually all climatologists will also concede that they believe that over the vast majority of the Earth's history, it has been much colder than it has been over the last few hundred years. Humans happen to have progressed at an extremely rapid pace during one of the Earth's more pleasant interglacial periods, which is not the norm. Personally, I think there is a growing body of scientific thought that ties the changes in our temperatures to changes in the Sun (doh--wouldn't that be a surprise!). The absence of sunspots and certain other solar activity recently may explain the absence of any overall warming the last few years, and may signal the start of a significant cooling trend. Which as I mentioned before, would be something to really worry about, as an inability to cultivate large swaths of currently fertile land would be a major problem. And the politicians and scientists will pivot on a dime and go right back to saying what they were saying in the 70's. Oh and BTW, the 70's was only the last cycle before the current one--the media and various scientists have been alternately warning of global warming and cooling, with a little overlap as they changed gears, since the turn of the century (1895-early 1930's: coming ice age); (late 20's to 60's: global warming); (50's to 70's: coming ice age); (70's to today: global warming). Now I'll grant you that the science has advanced a lot over that time, but predicting the climate is still a very, very difficult task. Far more difficult than predicting the weather a couple of weeks out, and you know how accurate we are with that.

Please. To address just one alleged fact, do you really think we "know" how much CO2 was in the atmosphere 15 million years ago because some chick and her pals at UCLA studied the ratio of boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae and then published a paper on it? And even if you assume everything in the paper is true, it provokes more questions than it answers. Why was the CO2 level higher 15 million years ago (with no humans emitting CO2) than today? Why was the planet a "huge amount" warmer back then compared to today (according to the paper) with CO2 levels similar to today's? Do higher levels of CO2 cause higher temperatures, or is it the other way around (or is it neither)? Women wear short skirts on sunny days but women wearing short skirts doesn't cause the sun to come out. I'm all for science, but science in this particular field has been horribly corrupted by the political process, and even at its best (that is, carried out in good faith), science involves asserting hypotheses which are then tested, and which are frequently found to be erroneous and revised. Even under the best of circumstances, this process would be very difficult in the context of AGW because it involves predicting the distant future based on understanding things from the very distant past. How do you test the AGW hypothesis accurately, except over the passage of time (a LOT of time)? But alarmism is usually more about politics than science--remember the over-population crowd and how millions of us were going to starve by 2 or 3 decades ago due to over-population? None of the above is a reason not to take sensible environmental measures to keep things as clean and green as we reasonably can, but it makes no sense to severely restrict our economy over a government funded hypothesis that is far from being proven. Your last point is a good one, but the eco-fanatic crowd is already in charge of the issue--they have their President and other like-minded officials in place (Energy Secretary, EPA head, etc.). Fortunately I think the current administration has already shot its wad on health care, so tackling cap and trade anytime soon looks unilikely.

Looks like the link didn't work--here's another one: 1975 Newsweek The Cooling World

Take a look at this article from Newsweek in 1975 about "climatic change" (one of many articles from that time period warning of the coming Ice Age), which mentions as one solution "melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot." 1975 Newsweek article "The Cooling World" Now of course we're supposed to be up in arms because the ice caps are melting. The interesting thing to me (aside from how gullible people can be, even many who read articles like the one above in the 70's who have jumped on the AGW bandwagon with nary a second thought) is that I'm not so sure we'd want to try to stop global warming even if it were occurring and we could stop it (two very big "ifs"). There would be many positive effects from it, unlike major cooling, which would indeed be a big problem. And based on Earth's history, the cooling is undoubtedly coming at some point. When that happens many of the "scientists" will say they've been warning us about it all along, and the politicians will come up with new "solutions" that involve them taking more money and control from the population. But we've always been at war with Eastasia, right?

As far as the legal issues go, the problem is it looks like these guys are manufacturing in one of the Asian countries, and most of them have virtually no means to enforce IP rights. If they were in the U.S. it would be no problem to shut them down, and my guess is Lamborghini would do so. I know Ferrari is aggressive about this stuff because they hired my firm 15 or 20 years ago to shut down a guy who was making knock-off Testarossas (he was the same guy who made them for the Miami Vice television series so they could do the wrecks and stunts with them, and Ferrari had either tolerated or signed off on that but got major PO'd when he started selling them to people). Replica makers are always going to be out there to some degree, but these guys aren't going to be around long claiming that they're offering "perfect" replicas blah, blah, blah for 40k. I can imagine what they look like up close.

One of my favs:

I don't think he was worried about the block, literally. I think "stock block" meant stock compression and stock internals, which are obviously different on a NA car than on one with OEM turbos.

There is no reason to avoid an '04-'05 E-gear car assuming it has had fairly recent clutch and software updates, which most of them have.

I thought it was molded into the airbag cover rather than produced separately and then attached, but I haven't looked at mine that closely.

Hey I didn't say he was fast. He'll get back to you.

Does the Pope know any Catholics? You PM'd the right guy.

You don't owe anyone an explanation. Congrats on the new car, and enjoy it!

Not in the hard top version (black series). But I gotta agree on the cabriolet. My wife drove one (although not a 63) until just recently. Scotty, that's not a garage, that's a f'ing warehouse! That's like calling the Queen Mary a boat. Looks great! Is that Racedeck you're putting down or what?

It can vary some from state to state but in general it's a fuzzy area, and how much help the victim gets from the criminal side of govt. will depend on the specific facts and how willing the local law enforcement authorities are to get involved. If the guy accepted the money intending to use it for personal use rather than order parts that is almost certainly criminal, but most of the time there is room for the offender to argue that he didn't intend to do so at the time but only did so later, and even then he planned to order the parts or whatever using some funds he was expecting to arrive from somewhere else, etc. A statute specifically making it illegal to use customer funds in this manner would be a big help, of course. But as joebiz said, law enforcement generally hates to get involved in anything but the most clear cut cases of theft/fraud because they don't want to be inundated with these kinds of problems, but sometimes you can find a sympathetic detective or DA. And if the lawyer Charlie has working on it has good connections with law enforcement so much the better. You can't get blood out of a turnip, but it is also amazing how quickly some previously penniless people can find some money once they're faced with going to jail. No way to know how this one will pan out, but good luck.

Awesome. You guys are gonna have a heck of a spring.

So did the truck make it?

No problems here. I put around 2k miles on it before winter set in but haven't driven it much the last several weeks.

I'm gonna try that one on my wife.

I wasn't going to beat a dead horse but you are exactly right. Since the boost numbers were already known and there was no change in the tune, the race gas really has nothing to do with the power numbers (but does make things safer at the higher boost levels). In fact, the pump gas run is making more hp per psi than the race gas runs. As I said, the compression is what makes the power numbers higher than one would expect for such low boost levels.

Compression has a lot to do with the numbers on a stock block. It takes very little boost to make gobs of power at 11:1 CR. But there is a reason tuners lower the compression when they build a motor for boost as well, i.e., at higher power levels it's much safer to run higher boost on a built, lower compression engine than to run lower boost on a stock, higher compression engine, especially on pump gas. That's why I don't run around at 8 or 10 psi very much, and never on pump gas. So those numbers are real (or at least real on that dyno on that day--obviously there is always dyno variability), but if I wanted to make 900+ rwhp every time I was in the car I would send it back for a built engine and make it with higher boost/lower compression.

That is the same car that ran 241 mph at the TX Mile recently, and it's capable of 1,400+ rwhp and 26 psi or more. I don't know if it was running that much boost on that run, however, or if so how much power it was making--as noted, that run may have been before the last upgrades to the car.

The bottom line is both cars are absurdly fast and we still don't really know which one is faster as they never got a clean run in that day (traffic was a problem which is why the video is so short). I talked to both of them within a day or two of that run (and there were actually 2 or 3 more attempts but it was a spur of the moment thing and conditions just weren't right), and neither of them was claiming it proved anything one way or the other. I think that may also have been before Kyle's car (the G) got its last round of upgrades. Would love to see them go at it again with a clear road and get the start and shifts right, etc.

Very sweet--love VI on all G's, and the 560 is the best of all!