Quote from theirishnoob :

i agree, postal 2 is classic also.... Gary coleman Ftw.

Hi there! Would you like to sign my petition?

Spyker...

Baawawawaw

Quote from tinvek :

well i just spent 10 mins in a mazda pactice trying to explain to an american the difference between when something is "a load of bollocks" and when its "the dog's bollocks". felt like i was robert carlysle in the 51st state with samuel l jackson

Hahaha, nice one

Quote from Intrepid :

Also consider Button/Rubens. Last two years absolutely NO WHERE. In your assesement that makes them BAD development drivers. Suddenly they have probably the best car by far! Now correlate that?!?!!?!?

The Brawn car has been in development since halfway last season though

Quote from tristancliffe :

McLaren are great at refinement engineering, but obviously less good at blank sheet design from scratch. That means they'll catch up though, so don't be too surprised to see podiums by the European races and wins by mid-season.

Here's what I think happened:

2007 - Alonso tests/develops the McLaren to new heights of performance.
2008 - McLaren continues on the basis of Alonso's input of the year before, and the car is further tailored to Hamilton's needs/driving style.
2009 - Starting from scratch, McLaren had problems building a new car because they didn't have a true car-building driver in the team such as Alonso, nor the framework set by such a driver.
2010 - McLaren fades into obscurity and Hamilton becomes the next Button?

Personal insult directed at me in 3...2...1

Quote from dougie-lampkin :

BTW, buy the PS3/360 version. Much better fun. You can always...acquire the PC version afterwards to look at nicer graphics during SP

Inferior controls are fun? I've played some COD4 on the PS3 and it nearly brought me to tears

Quote from BigPeBe :

But it was as unrealistic as the 4 was, it just featured a more interesting era of war, the ww2. For me at least.

Yes, but so did COD1, COD2 and COD3, and 90% of every other shooter made between 2000 and 2007, I feel like Modern Warfare was a step into the right direction, finally leaving behind almost a decade of first-person shooters which were nearly exclusively set in a WW2 setting, and then Treyarch comes along and dumps it right back into old habits.

Anyway, I hope Modern Warfare 2 offers the same increase in gameplay quality as the first one did. The next logical step up from bullet penetration is the crumbling down of walls under heavy machine-gun fire, but maybe that's too much wishful thinking

Dutch RTL GP has a short article, posted today, in which Hamilton states that he doesn't expect to leave Melbourne with points. "If we're very optimistic, we could score a point" - That's quite interesting

Jobs always have their ups and downs. All I want is for my future career to have more ups than downs. As long as I can get by and still have some money left for fun/saving up I'll be happy.

Quote from Dajmin :

But you realise it'll have been 3 years since CoD4 came out by November, right? That's a perfectly reasonable timescale to release a sequel.

Yes, I realise this and agree that the timeframe from one infinity-ward game to another is alright. It's just a bit of a bother because COD5 was so similar to COD4 in terms of gameplay, so it just feels like they're endlessly pumping out COD games every year now.

My solution is to have Activision denounce COD5 as part of the series

Too soon.

COD4 was a fantastic game, and the only COD game besides the first one that had my full attention (and I still play multiplayer regularly)

Then COD5 came along, in which Treyarch basically decided to try and regurgitate the brilliance of COD4, but with some added WW2 cash-cow milking and going back from the realism and gritty nature of COD4 to glorifying the second world war for the latest generation of kids that will have no sense of the horror their grandparents (or great grandparents) went through.

Now COD is back in the far more capable hands of Infinity Ward, but the series just doesn't appeal to me anymore when they start releasing a new 'version' every year. I would rather see one great, fresh COD per generation (4-5 years) than a whole bunch of titles with slowly degenerating quality.

Ah, a thread on religion. I was trying to cut back on posting in those actually.

Like Don Keightley or not, he's right about one thing and that is:

If you get wrecked, don't complain on the forums about getting wrecked and how it's not your fault that you got rammed from behind etc etc; PROTEST it.

There are two reasons for this in my mind:

1. Before you send a protest you need to take a careful look at the incident in a replay from all angles before submitting it to Nim. (meaning you might get to see Shannon's golden rule in effect and change your mind, as it happens nearly 100% of the time)
2. If you really did get wrecked, then the person responsible is going to be warned, and if it continues to happen on his part, he'll get suspended. If the incident was severe enough, then so will the consequences.

In this case, #1 is ten times more important than #2. Contemplating a protest and having a critical review of the incident gives you a good insight into what went wrong. Not what the offender did wrong, just what went wrong. It really does take 2 to have an incident.

You also shouldn't be afraid of contacting drivers after an incident and having a chat. It's everyone's responsibility to create a good clean racing environment, and if you two are on the same pace you will meet again in the future. So if you look at the replay and see someone was impatient with you and didn't realize that your braking point is 10 meters sooner than his, send him a PM and explain to him that he needs to spend a lap to assess his competitor's speed instead of chasing without keeping distance.

If you continue to have incidents in T1 regularly, then assess your own driving first and make compromises if you have to. Also prepare yourself for the start of a race better: look at your direct competitors and if you've raced them before, add into the equation what you know about them and their driving styles. On some occasions I've let aggressive alien drivers go at the start to relieve pressure on myself and then tuck in behind him hoping he would force the faster driver ahead of us into a mistake better than I'd be able to with him on my tail.

I'm lucky to be in a situation within the Skippy series where I almost always know the guys starting around me (hopefully at the front ) and I can use that knowledge to anticipate how they go about starting the race. I know I'm very consistent during races with very few errors, but it takes me a lap or 8 to get into a fast rhythm unless I'm behind someone that gets into a rhythm right away, so I'm not too afraid of letting drivers go at the start and taking back the spot later.

Anyway, rant over.

Quote from Dalibor79 :

Zeitgeist

No.

Here's another loooooong shot I'm not sure about:

#10 - Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag?

Quote from (SaM) :

7. Spin Doctors - Two Princes (Go Ahead Now)

I was just about to post this as well, but I guess it's wrong then? :>
Some of these songs are just 0.2s too short for me to figure them out precisely

#16 is Little Green Bag by George Baker
#15 sounds suspiciously like the Feeling with Fill My Little World, but the little sounds before the first note are unfamiliar to me.

Quote from Jakg :

Yes, but it wouldn't install in Vista x32 - So I doubt that it'd work in 7 x64.

Uh, I have Warcraft 2 installed on Vista 64 and it works just fine. You're looking for Warcraft 2: Battle.net Edition (BNE) and definitely not the original DOS version.

Quote from Becky Rose :

No they just blunt you to movies with violence, the fear isnt real, there is no smell, no swett, and no instinct. It is entertainment and it is fantasy and it is plot point. It is nothing at all to do with adrenaline and the disregarding of cause and effect.

You're comparing them directly, which is not my point or the point of any decent researcher for that matter. The issue is that frequent exposure to virtual violence may make the step up to real violence less shocking or traumatic. Sounds like the same thing? just isn't.

It doesn't mean that killing in GTA takes away all fear and inhibition, people need to stop taking this extreme and blowing it up out of proportion. The idea is that a person that has been exposed to violence in movies and games for 10 years has less trouble or dissonance when experiencing violence in real life than a person (considering similar situations and personalities) that has never seen violence before in any form. Note how I used the word "less" and not "zero" - the difference varies greatly per person.

Having said that, please do take my posts as a whole, because I do have a structure to my arguments that is now getting destroyed in fractions. ;>

I'll rephrase my previous statement it into this: a person frequently exposed to violence, with a troubled background, access to guns and sociopathic tendencies (yes, he could be a nice guy before the rampage) can cause a dangerous situation, but none of those factors alone make much difference.

PS. I truly hate to revolve to Wiki as a source, but I'm short on time and can't find the book that describes it, but Sociopathy and Psychopathy are certainly different things.

Well, violent videogames and violent movies do 'blunt you', and I don't see how anyone could possibly argue against that. Being exposed to violence makes you less sensitive to it, it's a basic principle that can be applied to nearly everything in life: exposure to anything leads to gradually decreasing responses.

Being exposed to violence, however, does not cause you to go on a rampage, nor does being goth or being bullied. These factors (minus the goth one, since that has f*ck all to do with anything) might weigh in on the matter, but they're never solely the reason for such events to unfold.

You have to remember that people are basically animals, and everyone (yes, every single one of us) has primal urges to kill, maim or otherwise harm others. Healthy people have the ability to surpress it though, but it's well known that psychopaths have entirely differently wired brains, where the area responsible for cause/effect and fear is pretty much inactive once they get such primal urges. The difference? when you think "damn, that person pisses me off so much I could kill em" a psychopath might actually do it.

Combine a person with sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies with bullying (is it even proven that this was the case in this shooting btw?) and frequent exposure to violence and access to guns and you get a dangerous situation. Anyway, whose to say anyone is right about the situation that occurred and the background stories? Until there are hard facts speculation is a bit pointless.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Drop History and add Ecology. After all, we're living for tommorow, not for yesterday.

People that only live with the future in mind will unknowingly end up in the past.

Quote from Jakg :

It just seems to make no sense that even when my bank said "no, **** off, you aren't getting his money", iR "accepted" me even though they had no way of taking any more $ from me - but had i not of had a card I wouldn't of been accepted...?

I'm not a banker, but to get it clear once and for all:

iRacing just sort of 'pings' your credit card. If it receives something back it's happy and goes away. The $1 is not taken, requested or reimbursed, it's a symbolic value for an action that has nothing to do with the transfer of money, at all.

Your bank spazzing out because of such a verification puzzles me, but I'm going to assume that it has an automated system that is not synchronized for a global market in which such verification processes are commonplace.

Change banks/cards or alternatively don't use it to buy anything out of the UK, or don't play iRacing

Have you mailed support? If you haven't then please do, and stop the speculations and conspiracy theories.

How did you guys get a 3 month deal for $25 by the way?

Oh, and as for the season start; I would not worry too much about it if you are not active in the service yet. The rookie seasons just take 4 weeks these days, and even in one week you can gain the stats needed to promote to D-class. I think a new rookie season starts in 3 weeks. (the 23rd of this month)

Quote from danowat :

Played the demo, and I still prefer Ace Combat 6

Same.

Besides a simply better flight model, Ace Combat 6 just has the cheese factor that makes it so much better.

The strength of HawX is supposedly in its 3rd person side/view thingy, but although that looks really awesome it's about as intuitive as holding the joypad upside-down. I got a smile when I first backflipped a plane into what looks to be a 30g+ turn in order to come up behind another plane and volley 2 missiles into his back, but most of the time it just seems like blind luck because of the odd controls.

In basic control mode, the plane goes from side-to-side when pushing left/right, and up or down when pushing down/up, so there's no rolling involved. To me this felt incredibly difficult for manouvering because I'm used to rolling a plane to its side, then pulling back for a quick turn, but this just causes the plane to go up again in basic control mode.

Advanced control mode does have the regular rolling and pitching, but it feels immensely wobbly as it's hard to keep track of the enemy plane(s) and their missiles, all the while keeping a close eye on your own plane so you don't over-roll and end up diving straight into the ground when pitching to turn.

I'm sure with more than 30 minutes of playtime I could master the funky dogfight-view and have lots of fun, but the basic flight-model (rear-view) is still very meh. The planes feel static: they go wherever you point them and gravity doesn't seem to exist; it's like you're flying in zero-g with friction. You can go upside-down and the handling is exactly the same, roll out of turns and instantly straighten out... it just feels as if there's no momentum involved, like in Ace Combat 6.

I'd pick it up out of the budget-bin without thinking twice though, I love jets and backflipping planes to dodge missiles is fun

"Trauma Centre - Under the Knife!" is insanely good fun, and extraordinarily challenging near the end. Very underrated imo