sennheiser always get good reviews and since the price drops are as cheap as a lot of cheap and nasty stuff

plato's very infuriating for me, hate his driving but have to admire his guts ever since i saw just how heavily bandaged he was racing after that fifth gear fire

i'd justlike to congratulate freddyalek90 for resisting the temptation to say that his third picture from the history museum http://www.lfsforum.net/attach ... mp;stc=1&d=1271940035 was of a non apple user


seriously though isn't it amazing how vociferous people get about the iphone and apple in genral (on both sides).

personally i've never considered an iphone in the past for the simple reason an O2 contract would have meant having a phone that would not function as a phone when i was at home or in work. now the iphone is available on orange i'm considering one. not because it's an iphone but for the same reason i have a PC rather than a mac (or whatever they call them these days) namely that there are more apps / programs that would be of use to me available on it than on the competitors.

if nokia etc want to compete then they should control the third party "apps" on their products a bit more, a personal hate of mine is the BBC iplayer from the ovi store that only works on my nokia for 3 days after instalation before locking everytime it's used and then has to be reinstalled to use it for another 3 days.

yes the battery life would be short but since i charge my phone everyday anyway whilst i sleep it's not insurmountable, the camera / lens is good enough to take those spur of the moment / scene of accident / crime pics, anything special like from day trips etc, i use my pointy clicky digi cam or the DSLR

anyone else catch the anouncement of the competition to race (online)against an F1 driver in june ?

may be alter the system so it rewards the first 12 cars, effectively you have to finish in the thop half of the field to score, just don't end up with a points system which like NASCAR's results in huge points totals, it's a hell of a lot easier to tell instinctively if someone is close to the the leader if they are 15 points away rather than 527 points away

whilst cost is a variable for everyone in relation to their disposable income, for me the current subs are very cheap, certainly a lot less than what i would spend on car mags if i didn't get a chance to read then in work. sure content is still fairly costly, but it's cheaper now than it used to be and the fact they don't change the schedules as much as we'd like means that after an expensive season with a new car, the following ones are pretty cheap. add in the fact that the racing is a lot cleaner than most on LFS since CTRA went away and a certain something it has which somehow makes it feel right and it's worth it for me.

interesting haven't tried patch yet but two days off work after tonight so i'm looking forward to it. re m95, must admit i've never been totally convinced by it's use on a lot of maps, the gol seems to do the job just aswell on hardcore unless the range is very long and to me has better ballistics

whilst it's not multiclass as a lot of us wanted it should be pretty good and help keep the participation high for those cars, pity they didn't chuck the corvette in as well and run the races 7 days a week.

if you're going for another fairly balanced mulitclass i'd love to see the lotus and indycar together in a road circuit, lap times can be very close between them on some circuits but achieved in totally different ways.

must admit the schedule has me seriously wondering what to run next season, i was going to do the lotus as i like the tracks but the radical / DP intrigues me and of course there's the V8 aswell

it's very hard to make any passes when you are in first place, though i do take the point about being passed by hamilton twice but tris also has a good point in that button hasn't been in a position to need to make a lot of passes.

what is significant is that his two wins have been as the result of very astute / brave tyre choices, also that despite having 2 wins to hamiltons 0 and the new points system being designed to favour winners, button is not that far in front of hamilton which could be interpreted as when button's good, he's really good but when there's a problem he's not able to make the best of it. given that luck etc tends to balance out (unless your webber as he must be due a season where every other car breaksdown every race) it'll be intersting to see if button retains his advantage strategically over hamilton or if hamilton will benefit from some good calls.

edit: the first lap stats don't prove sod all either as vettel's must look pretty poor on that score

you're always going to have some issue or other with drivers from all over the world racing against each other, even with 2 drivers with a ping of 99 then you're talking a total of 198 between one moving and the other seeing it, if it's for example 2 uk drivers on an australian server, you can have a combined lag of 3/4 of a second even with reasonable connections. i tried an experiment with another member who lives 5 miles form me where on an australian practice server we talked to each other via voice chat whilst being on the phone as well and the delay was very noticable. by making the collision boxes abit large, we hopefully learn to give each other a bit more room to help with those times were the prediction code ends up having to correct itself regarding a cars position, if the boxes were smaller then those little corrections would be more noticable. the only alternative would be to make the collision boxes smaller tha the actual models so you had a margin when your eyes told you there was no space but people would start trying to push into that space and you'd get complaints about cars apssing through each other.

As has been said here, and in autosport, we've all been asking for some excitement and racing and then, when drivers start challenging each other hard, people get all stroppy and start asking for penalties, no one ever moaned about weaving durring the 70's or forcing people over the curbs and back then you could race down a generally much narrower pitlane at race speeds whils there were far more journalists etc standing there.

whilst we obviously don't want to go back to some of the wild driving from back then, we shouldn't go over the top when we get two drivers who actually want to challenge each other, same as webber in australia when he hit hamilton, he thought there might have been a chance of grabbing a place whilst the other two got tangled up and got sucked in, if he had held back and the others had been very slow out of the corner he'd have been slaughtered for not getting close enough to take advantage. if you do decide to restart penalising rather than warning then where do you draw the line, could alonso have caused a crash by passing in the pit entrance before the limit line ? if so then what if he did it at a circuit where the pit entrance doesn't give you the space and you run the risk of cars making contact and loosing control and hitting marshalls etc?

at china alonso's move was safe, similarly hamilton and vettel was safe enough, they were released almost at the same time and the "fast lane" in china is wide enough for 2 cars, vettel should have given hamilton room but his reason to hold towards the right was understandable as hamilton wanted to be in a position to take the inside lane into turn 1, hamilton should have given up on his move earlier but hey they, and alonso, were racing and trying on a circuit with room. if they or alonso had tried the same things at monaco then they would have deserved severe penalties, button's move with the safety car could have caused chaos at monaco and i'd expect a penalty if it was done there. as it was he needed to make space before the run to the final bend as the safety car line was before the bend and he could have been vulnerable, as it was, vettel moved on hamilton which resulted in webber being pushed wide but once again they were racing and if people try to pass then you will get contact etc, just watch any of the 70's races and see how often contact resulted in races, anyone else remember the hunt - andretti incident and the " we don't pass on the outside in F1" comment ?

personally i think that this season with an exdriver sitting with the stewards has seen a welcome change in attitude with drivers being given the equivilent of football's yellow card rather than the over zealous showing of the red card equivilent of stop and goes, drive throughs, grid penalties etc. keep the penalties for when a drivers actions results in another driver's race being damaged, when a driver cuts a corner repeatedly, jumps a start or speeds in the pitlane or when becuse of the nature of where an incident takes place there is a risk of injurry to marshalls, mechanics spectators etc.

anyone know what the "maintenance" is for today ?

the question is how do you define an old driver? these days 65 isn't really that old yet may well be counted as an old driver in this survey, similarly what's a young driver? under 20, 25 30 ?

my own sweeping generalisation would be:

the most dangerous drivers are those within their first 5 years of driving or their last 5 years of driving

when you are starting out you haven't the experience, when your nearing the end you don't appreciate how your facilties / body may be letting you down. also from personal experience (as a non motorcyclist), people who ride motor bikes are generally very safe car drivers because they are aware how dangerous the road surface, other vehicles etc can be.

medic and engineer are so easy to pick up points if you're in the right situation. if your an engineer all you need is a tank driver that uses his brains, hangs back far enough to keep you safe and stays put so you can repair all the time, then he can pound away and you clear up any damage he gets and if a tank gets close you switch to a missile and help him blow it away.

if your a medic, find a busy battle field where you're teams defending a position, drop your packs and watch for fatalities. if you've got the 2 differing medi pack specialisations the packs can rack up stupid amounts of points, i had one that gained 300 + in about 15 seconds

thats a nice explanation, don't know why the hell i never thought of it to explain in work to the guys that read tabloids. they should write it into the rules, if the driver following is reacting to the car in front then it's ok to move repeatedly , if the car in front is reacting to the car behind then only one move per straight. (obviously in a lapping situation the car that appears to bein front is actually behind in the race)

hydrogen is actually pretty safe to be involved with in a fire, far safer than petrol as it effectively creates a fast rising flash fire, a lot of those killed on the hindenberg were as a result of either falling / jumping from too high or from being crushed. most serious serious burns came from the fuel / structure etc that had caught fire, of the 97 people on board only 37 were killed (+1 ground crew member) some actually escaped without any injuries or burns at all and a dog on board escaped serious injury.

the cost of class D is a real probelm for iracing. if they make it so it only introduces a couple of tracks over the rookie class then people complain that the circuit's are boring and repetative, if as currently they use a more new tracks then it becomes a costly move, infact it's currently probably the biggest single expenditure of any promotion level as the c and higher classes introduce less new tracks ove rthe preceeding level.

personally i think the answer would be to have one of the class d series to just use maybe 4 or 5 tracks,2 of which, for the road series, would be lime rock and laguna, that way expenditure would be limitted to a car and maybe 3 tracks. if the right ones were chosen then for the road side, they would still have multiple configs to use to add variety. that way those that wanted 12 different venues could choose one series and those ona tighter budget would still be able to compete in a series. closest to this at the moment is the spec racer series which uses 6 venues

Quote from Becky Rose :

Americans are not the only one to shoot the wrong people. Any nation who ever employed someone to fire a gun at someone, or even poke a sword into someone, has had a case of collateral damage.

The reason there are more cases of American friendly fire is because there's a lot more Americans running around warzones with their safety catches off than any other nationality.

I'm not condining it mind you, or the war, which i'm very much opposed to on account of being a humane person with moral values and being something of a lefty liberal.

Still, Brits and Canadians have had plenty of "oops" moments whilst in the process of killing people for the monetary gain of the ruling classes, I mean being patriotic.

+1 for most of that, in the aftermath of the napoleonic wars the french army concluded that 25% of it's casualties were due to friendly fire, one of the first aircraft shot down by a spitfire was a hurricane, the RAF almost shot down the Dutch royal family when they were fleeing to britain and the luftwaffe managed to damage 2 german destroyers so badly that they spent over 12 months being repaired. unfortunately with the distance between shooter and target getting larger the likelyhood of mistakes grows, when you had to insert a piece of metal in your opponent whilst still holding on to it and moving on foot, there wasn't too much difficulty in telling who was who, when the piece of metal can hit an opponent over a mile away and you may be travelling at high speed
then mistakes can and will happen

playing rush last night and i must have had the worst team ever, inside 2 mins they had somehow managed to land the helo at the enemy base and loose it and then abandon the bradley at the enemy base and loose it, add in that most of the team thought that looking an an mcom though a telescoping sight was sufficient to win the game and it was no surprise that we never even managed to plant a charge, let alone detonate one, before we lost the game

Quote from JCTK :

then screw them~

but I guess running Michelin would at least sound better than having some Korean Handcock tyres...

the problem is that with bridgestone still apparently commited to pulling out F1 is currently without any tyres for next year, they could run on the rims but i suspect that will make aero grip even more important

well that was interesting. what worried me is that if this turns out to be exciting then we might get some stupid idea that the grid whould be decided by a lottery or even by reversed championship positions to make the races more interesting i can't wait to see if we manage to run the whole race tomorrow, BBC may have got the right idea by switching their coverage half way through to BBC 2, that way all the racing is on BBC1 and then all the boring standing about waiting till the race is abandonded will be on BBC2.

whilst i love mixed up grids and unpredictable weather i can't help feeling that if we get another fiasco like last year with heavey rain and then failing light a few of the tv companies will start moaning to bernie. whilst the idea of a later start to bring the program to a better time for europe is ok in principal, it's a bit pointless if you haven't a race to show people and whilst the top teams are stupid with their decissions not to get banker laps in, the powers that be are even more stupid to try and hold a race right in the time of day when you get thunderstorms and at a time of year that is still in malaysia's rainy season

little tip i've learnt when defending as a medic in rush.

stick a medi pack in an mcom station as it gives your team more chance of staying alive when diffusing and brings in lots of points

Quote from tristancliffe :

I loved the look for the 458 in the press photos. But since seeing it in other road test photos I've decided it's actually a bit of a minger. Shame, because I really did think it looked stunning.

+1 i started going off ferrari's when they suddenly decided that they couldn't actually make the rear lights fit without having half of them protruding above the rear pannel line. when companies start doing that then they start to look to me like they are borrowing lights off other cars or are cheap kit cars, some of the late TVRs had the same effect, the lights looked like the fit was bodged rather than following the lines of the car.

ironically the aston DB7 used lights off the scirrocco and 928 yet managed to make them look like they were purpose made, same with the TVR that used inverted cavalier rear lights or the original shape esprite with either x1/9 or SD1 rear lights.

also the little flips on the rear quarters of the 458 and those air intakes at the front just look like afterthoughts almost as if the original shape didn't cut the mustard in the aero stability or cooling depts.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Which won't help the racing. If anything they'll look worse because of the small brake discs. Or they then allow bigger discs, and then the brakes become too good, which hurts the racing, and the drivers will have to be even smoother than before (low profiles preferring smaller slip angles, generally), rather than allowing the cars to get out of shape (which is often a good way to improve racing).

I'm dead against it.

whilsat i agree it's not needed and won't on it's own help, i doubt it will make much difference to the brakes as even with their current size the discs have more than enough heat capacity since they went carbon, it's the pads that usually fail (excluding manufacturing failures)

maybe they're thinking that by going low profile they can achieve a few things, low side walls may allow softer compounds and also reduce rolling resistance and it will force teams to actually use the suspension for the car rather than the tyre sidewalls. one further effect maybe that a lot of the cost to bridgestone is in the construction needed to support the aero loads on such a large sidewalls. it may also be a partiallly marketing sop to whoever supplies the tyres as to joe public the tyres look very old fashioned compared to the modern low profile tyres on road cars despite the opposite being true

Quote from Mustafur :

whats the point of having engine manufactuers if there trying to make it equal.

thats why it shouldn't be.

i agree but as i said if you're going to have a freeze you have to allow some method of balancing it, if not then you could face the situation where one engine is unbeatable and no other manufacturer wants to be involved and then you have at best effectively a spec engine with every team using the same engine or at worst only 2 or 3 teams as thats all that manufacturer will supply