Quote from danowat :

Hehehe, PS2 and SIM in the same sentence

I know what you're saying Dan, but be nice -- there's nothing inherently crap about the PS2 architecture. Similar spec PCs were used to play sims not so many years ago. And (IMHO) "World of Outlaws" was a remarkable little sprint car simulation for PS2.

Quote :

N2O has NO place in a realistic sim, period.

Hmm. Again, I am basically on side and have no personal desire to press any magic boost buttons in LFS. But I think we protest a bit too much about this issue. Let's be honest -- it's the idiocy of ricer culture we fear and despise, not the actual substance N2O. It's not as if petrol plus air is the one true mixture that can usefully power an internal combustion engine.

Quote from Funnybear :

he was probable one of us . . . .*Looks around in suspision*...

Yes, surely one of us. Did you give him the signal? You know, tap him on the rear quarter panel three times in quick succession and shout "BLUE FLAG, BLUE FLAG!!!!!". After that he'll realize who you are and you should get along famously.

Perhaps we need a brown flag, which means that you have unfairly called someone an arsehole and need to apologize at the first opportunity. Good to see Dupson responding to the brown flag without too much delay there.

And Jak, I agree with Mike on this issue -- what the hell are you doing mid-race joining and then allowing yourself to be in a spot where someone is on your tail?

Quote from Becky Rose :

With regards a rolling start the speeds are higher, but the speed differential through the pack is reduced. In real racing it works out much safer, despite the higher speeds.

Did you ever play Nascar Racing 2003? That game had very well implemented rolling starts, but sadly they did almost nothing to solve the T1 problem. Even on a T1 as wide and gentle as Daytona, the idiots remained.

Personally I really enjoy races of around 10 laps or so in LFS, as I feel that's long enough that I can take a super-cautious attitude to T1, even to the extent of pulling off the grid to let everyone through into the pile-up that a minority of them so richly deserve.

I want my 2:40.97 back.

Shoman, any other firsts you are planning to release to the world? First time alligator wrestling? First bullfight? First visit to Compton? I'd pay to see those.

Quote from Gunn :

I don't want to be the fun police, but it is imperative that people realise that regular and long term use can only be harmful. Perhaps you are having too good a time to admit it, but it is wise to take care of yourselves. When you grow older you will need your health.

Gunn, you seem like an intelligent bloke. I'm not going to argue with the specifics of what you've presented. But I do take issue with an unstated assumption behind this sort of argument. You seem to be working on the principle that we should all be leading zero-risk or bare-minimum-risk lives. Don't smoke anything because it has a deleterious effect on your health, full stop. You're right about the deleterious effect but you don't seem to want to acknowledge that there are potential benefits that could be weighed against the costs here. I'd be a lot happier with an argument along the lines of "here is the bad side of smoking one joint per week, here is the good side, here's a way of weighing up both sides, I conclude that the bad side wins and we should not do this." But all too often in this sort of debate I see arguments like your own, that basically amount to: "This practice has health risks, so don't do it."

A moment's reflection should convince us that human beings are not actually in pursuit of zero-risk or minimum-risk lives. And nor should they be. For example, some of the participants on this forum engage in motor-racing or at least track days. There are clearly risks involved in doing this, but I don't think any of us would argue that these guys should stop racing. (In fact I'm sure we're all jealous as hell.)

What about fried food? I'm sure there's an intake level of Kentucky Fried Chicken that approximately matches the health risks involved in a given level of marijuana use. Are you going to argue just as strongly for less KFC as well as less THC? If your answer is that you feel just as strongly about young people being made aware of the health effects of their dietary choices, then great. But it's hard to argue that a monthly KFC binge is some sort of crime against nature, assuming the person involved has a balanced diet overall and gets the right amount of exercise. Similarly, if somebody with all the facts available to them makes an informed decision to smoke a joint on a Saturday night, and is otherwise a sane and responsible citizen, I don't see that he or she has any moral case to answer.

I completely agree with you that ingesting smoke from burning organic matter tends to be crap for one's lungs. That's one of the reasons I'm not a smoker. But the method of ingestion can be a bit of a red herring. If THC was legally available in pill form, would your attitude to its consumption be any different?

I should probably put my cards on the table here: given my last few posts, you may think I am somewhere between Keith Richards and Hunter S. Thompson in terms of personal drug use. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. As a young person I experimented with various substances, sure, but I haven't maintained my use of any of them except alcohol and coffee. The reason I am pushing this argument is not so I can feel good about my own habits, but because I believe that many people are in the grip of a deep prejudice when it comes to thinking about drugs. Any moral position that allows us to tell someone flatly "You really shouldn't do drugs" would also have us telling people that they shouldn't: collect stamps, go rock-climbing, eat ice-cream, be gay, sit around watching TV, have one-night stands, etc., etc., etc.

In my view we should save our moral opprobrium for the stuff that really matters. We should think about drug use much the same way that we'd think about a holiday to Thailand: not without risks, not without joys, and not the sort of thing that calls for a moral judgment.

Possibly I'm going to get flamed for even mentioning a console game in a positive light here, but the PS2 game "World of Outlaws" (a surprisingly good dirt-track sprint-car simulator) did a nice job of this, although in a very simple way. As the various sessions passed over the course of a racing day (practice, qual, heat race, etc.) the appearance and grip levels of the track would change and this would mean that by the end of the day the fastest line was in a significantly different place than it was at the beginning. (This was a great way to make racing on a short-track dirt oval more interesting and challenging, although the really casual user might not have noticed it.)

Now of course this was all achieved through "canned effects", and what was really happening was that racing occured across five or six subtly different tracks as time went on. Nevertheless it was a cool effect and something similar could surely be done on an LFS rally-X track without the sort of CPU-intensive graphical issues that actual modelling of bumps and ruts would involve.

Quote from danowat :

How can you even attempt to put driving a car, and taking drugs in a similar risk bracket, one is an essential form of transport, the other has no real-world value, apart from getting you wasted.

Consider renting a sports car for an afternoon and buying a gram of cocaine. Both of these activities have risks, both of them are things some people will pay good money to do, and both of them are things that some people will argue are pleasurable. Why do you insist on there being a huge gulf between them? I don't get your argument.

Quote :

I would like to be told the positives of taking drugs, because I don't know of any, for the average human, I know weed can assist those with things like MS, but I am talking about recreational use.

Dan, why do you think people take drugs? Is it your theory that they are all just mad? Or do you subscribe to some Freudian idea that they're unconsciously trying to kill themselves, something like that? People take a drug the first time out of curiosity, peer pressure, or whatever. But they typically take a drug the second time because they enjoy what happened the first time. It's as simple as that. Why do kids roll down hills to get dizzy? Why do elephants eat fermented fruit? Why do people have sex? Why do we play LFS? In short, for fun.

I'm not saying there's no downside to drug use, nor am I calling on all able-bodied citizens to take LSD with their cornflakes. I'm just saying that the demonization of drug use is very puzzling given that it's something people have done for thousands of years and will presumably continue to do whenever they can get their hands on the stuff.

I believe you when you say you've seen friends and acquaintances make bad decisions related to drug use, and mess up their lives. I've seen friends make bad decisions to do with drugs, but I've also seen them make very bad decisions to do with relationships, cars, unprotected sex, non-drug-related crime, their finances, their education, their health, etc. People mess things up all the time, and the driving factor here is the person involved. If you banished every drug from the face of the earth tomorrow, all you'd be doing is slightly narrowing the range of methods available for making bad decisions. Dare I say it, you would also be taking a significant amount of fun out of the world.

PS: tailing, good guess.

Sadly we need James Allen or an equivalent. Who are you going to put Brundle with, someone competent? How could he get in his quota of disdain and snideness then?

Quote from tailing :

Take LSD for example, I think most people could benefit from doing it at least once in a controlled environment.

Good man, Tailing -- I should have known it would be an Australian who put in a good word for the psychotropics.

Danowat, as someone else said, your position on drug use has the virtue of being consistent (i.e., you're not the usual pint-drinking, cigarette-smoking hypocrite who tells his kids to keep away from drugs). But I'm concerned that you comment only on the very small body of research that suggests a link between heavy cannabis use and the triggering of psychotic episodes in people already predisposed to schizophrenia. I would argue that the research you refer to has achieved prominence recently for political reasons, and that a dispassionate review of all available research on cannabis consumption leads to the conclusion that it's pretty benign compared to many other things we ingest regularly.

(Sorry to jump on you about this, it's just that you used the phrase "well documented" in your initial comment, and one of my pet peeves about drug research is that a particular study's scientific legitimacy and its media exposure are at best uncorrelated and at worst negatively linked.)

In fact I'm slightly surprised to see how many LFS "users" are towards the puritanical end of the drug-use spectrum. Perhaps this has something to do with adrenaline being their favourite tipple, who knows?

And no, I'm not a junkie, I've smoked perhaps a dozen cigarettes in my life, and the last drug I consumed was a 1999 Rosemount Estate Shiraz Cabernet. But I will admit that society's deeply confused attitude to the inevitable consumption of mind-altering substances both saddens and annoys me at times.

Last edited by jtr99, Fri, 10 Mar 2006 01:05.

RCpilot, are they covering the concept of "response bias" in your sociology course? Sorry to be rude, but given this data collection method, you would almost be better off making your data up. Let's say that only democrats who hate ID and republicans who love ID respond. Suppose that there are many ID-loving democrats out there, and ID-hating republicans, but they feel too conflicted to respond to surveys. You see the problem: you will detect a correlation in your data between political affiliation and attitude to ID, without any such correlation necessarily existing in the real world.

And Mazz4200, your post made me want to start smoking.

Last edited by jtr99, Thu, 9 Mar 2006 03:46.

Quote from southamptonfc :

So PLEASE everyone get the F@CK off my back.

Do you play poker at all, SouthamptonFC? I think maybe I would really like to be in a poker game with you.

Fantastic stuff, Spankmeyer. I whine about poor driving standards, you do something about it. I take my hat off to you.

Quote from danowat :

F1 is boring, but there is something worse............. NASCAR.................

Now, now, Dan, there's no need for that! NASCAR has some of the finest crashes I've ever seen!

Quote from filur :

Them rule-knowing racers would probably say there's very few situations you can put in a video and show as an absolute rule

I know what you're saying, but I don't really agree. I can think of several scenarios that could go in a video that are absolutely clear-cut no-nos and conversely, several things you could show where a pass was unarguably clean. I think that would be a helpful start.

Will I be able to put NOS in my sausage?

Quote from Iron_Maiden :

I made the pass because I was traveling a lot faster than the other people, the 2 cars infront went slow though the chicane and took me by suprise, if you watch the video I dont spend much time in the lead car's "area"...

All this is true. They are indeed travelling a lot slower than you, and I admit that the whole "corner rights" thing is easier to think about when the speed difference between you and your opponent is not too great.

Basically I wanted to use your move as an example to see whether people agreed with my interpretation of corner-rights thinking here. Didn't mean to single you out as some kind of loon or anything.

Quote :

I think I'm pretty clean driver, I was never gona take either of them out.

I agree, I've raced you before and I'd say you were clean.

Quote :

as far as I could see they had taken a dodgy line into the chicane an there was enough room for me to drive past them.

It certainly looked that way.

You know, I think my motivation for questioning your move is based on something that keeps happening to me not on this track, but at Aston Club in the FOX. You know the high speed esses at the end of the back straight? I regard it as a one-car line through there. Trouble is, as you come out of the chicane at the beginning of the back straight, it's often possible to catch the draft of the guy in front of you, and gain just enough ground on him that you are threatening a pass just as the esses begin. When I'm the one drafting, I back off at this point (unless I've managed to get my nose in front already) as I don't want to cause a high-speed accident while trying to get through the esses two-wide. But when I'm the one being drafted, it ticks me off that the courtesy is rarely returned: people who've hardly established any overlap with my car by the end of the straight will just blast on through as we enter the esses, and typically my choice is either to lift and let the jerk through or to have both of us go sailing into the sand.

I'm definitely not saying that you are that guy, IM, but I'd be curious to hear what you and anyone else thinks about this example. Although there are some spots, like your move, where the opposition is so far off the pace that you are reasonably entitled to simply drive around them mid-corner, it seems to me that if two cars are reasonably well-matched, corner rights should be respected but all too often aren't.

I know what you mean Kev. But then again, a certain group of well-known Germans in the 1930s and 40s were also not much to look at as physical specimens, but certainly held a lot of power for a while.

No, on second thoughts, I think I want to just drop whatever point I was trying to make. The thought of you making Norbert Haug cry because he can't find a dancing partner is just too funny.

Wow to picture 1. Just wow. Is that Flugplatz? They were definitely the days for spectators getting their money's worth, but on the other hand I think I'd feel guilty watching a racing series where 20% of the grid didn't survive the season.

Loeb won.

Feel free to cut and paste the above and use it as necessary when you can't get access to news on the WRC site.

Quote from teaz-R :

Why post the pictures in the first place if you're not going to release the skins?

Hoping Ron Dennis will phone to offer them a spray-painting contract?

Clearly you want James Earl Jones for this. Not sure that he reads the forum.

Sorry, I was talking about IM's move. Haven't seen what happened between you (spyshagg) and the black FZR, sorry.

IM -- at the risk of really being a nit, yes, I guess it is one of those racing rules things for me. Be glad to hear your opinion on it though.

Before I quibble, let me say that your move looked very cool and it's true that you didn't hit the guy and you are clearly the next Alonso, etc., etc.

But I was just thinking about what I'd be thinking if I was the lead car going into that corner (and by corner I mean the whole left-right sequence as we go up the hill). If I had looked in the mirror and to the side as I approached the initial braking point, and found that I was not sharing the line with anyone (i.e., nobody anywhere near overlap with my car) I'd be assuming that it was my right to drive a normal line through the chicane. Brake over on the right, turn in, lift throttle as we start to turn and to climb, gently re-apply power as we float out to the left of the track onto the green run-off kerb at the top of the hill. Assuming I was doing a reasonable race speed (which we can maybe argue that your target guy wasn't) I would have been surprised and a little annoyed to find that someone had come barrelling up the left side of me at a point on the track that, to my mind at least, doesn't really have a two-wide racing line. Also, if it had been me in the lead car, we would surely have collided, as I would have been drifting way out to the left on exit and there would have been nowhere left for you to go.

It looks to me that either:

a) the second driver you passed just had a really crap line on exiting the chicane, and was content to stay well to the right, which you maybe anticipated or maybe got lucky with.

b) the second driver saw in his mirrors what was happening, and thought that he'd better give you plenty of room as you were coming up so fast. This was generosity on his part though, as I'd say that he had the line through that chicane (due to the basic rule about you not having been alongside him at turn-in point). Come to think of it, he wasn't being shown a blue flag was he?


Anyway, you see what I'm getting at. As things turned out, no harm done, but I'm wondering what led you to be so confident that your move was going to work out OK, and I'm hoping that the answer to that question isn't "I'm faster, he should get out of the damn way even if it is mid-chicane".

Regards,
--Jason.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Hey, I've played both "traffic" and "parked" in the past, and I received all manner of plaudits, especially for my portrayal of the parked car. It's not just the way I remain completely stationary for the entire performance, but the conviction with which I demonstrate the deliberate immobilisation of the vehicle. Audiences truly believed that the car was parked, and not simply stopped for some other reason, abandoned or what have you. It was very powerful. Many were reduced to tears.

Truly you are the Larry Olivier of South City.

IM, I don't mean to be a killjoy, but wasn't the second car you passed within his rights to use the whole track as he exited the corner? It looks like you were a bit lucky that he didn't move further left.