Nah, it was always the same. The lack of overtaking is commonly blamed on high downforce, carbon brakes, and super short braking distances, but it actually wasn't any better before they put wings on cars. Same thing: the rich, fast teams qualify and start at the front and stay at the front and get richer and faster...with the occasional fall from grace (Mclaren) or rise from obscurity (Brawn->Mercedes). As cool as they are technologically, development series like F1 tends to result in boring races.

ed: Oh, and using ground effect has been banned since 81(?). Interestingly, Indycars use the ground effect (though without the skirts so it's not as effective as the F1 ground effect cars), and by virtue of being a (mostly) spec series, has much better races.

Back to the Future.

Married with Children.

The Simpsons.

Ferris Buehler's anarchist ideology towards his and Cameron's upper class parents. Handing over the car keys to the lower class joy riders.

The Goonies going on adventures to prevent a golf course from overtaking their upper class lifestyle.

Was Mikey about to become middle class?! Holy shit. The Goonies is about retaining your social position in order to fund misadventure. And the rise of the middle class Hispanic family! i.e. Rosalita discovering the jewels in the marble bag.

Everything from the '80s involving a family was about -- Anyone? Anyone? -- Voodoo Economics.

The full coverage explains that. This is a handicap series, where professional drivers and faster cars compete against amateurs and slower cars.

As a professional driver in clearly the fastest car in the field, Jono Lester was awarded a whopping 57 second pit stop.

He might even have still managed to win, except that there was a safety car just as the pit window opened and although some cars pitted straight away he didn't.

It was still fairly close

One other thing to point out is that the series format did help with the overtaking, since some of the drivers weren't used to such long races on a street circuit and would have been getting tired at the end (and therefore didn't put up much of a fight).

Technically I think the cyclist was in the right. After all they can legally use the whole lane if they wish and block traffic - so trying to overtake them is the risk of the driver.

But as ghark says having one road for cyclists, cars and HGV's is insane and kills thouands each year.

Your video, Boeing 747 overtaking a Boeing 737 over Bagdad, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

So, I am an auto liability adjuster. I do this for a living--I take statements from drivers and witnesses, review damage and, when it's available, I watch videos of car accidents to see where fault lies.

In this particular accident, it seems pretty obvious that both parties contributed to some degree or another. The VW's driver was obviously making an unsafe lane change. However, the trucker had the last clear chance to avoid the accident, and from the audio in the cab was clearly distracted by a cell phone. The truck thus contributed by failing to maintain driver attention.


So we're going to need to assess partial negligence on both driver's. So, how much will we need to assess, and what does that mean for how much each person might or might not get paid?

In terms of negligence law, Texas is a Modified Comparative state under the Not Greater Than rule. What this means is that in order to recover money from the other party, you cannot have more responsibility than they do in order to recover any money. But you can only recover the percentage that the other party is at fault. So if it's 50/50, each party gets half of their costs from the other party. If it's 51/49, one person owes the other guy 51%, but the other guy doesn't owe a dime.

In this case, 50/50 would be a likely and attractive option for the insurance companies. Both parties clearly contributed, and each party had equal opportunity to avoid the loss, so each insurance company would pay the other 50%.

The gross negligence of the driver of the pickup is such that I don't see less than 50% negligence on that driver. However, I can see the car's insurance company arguing for a higher responsibility on the truck.

When the car puts on the signal and starts moving over, there is clearly room to move over without striking the truck. The car starts moving over, and the truck starts to overtake the VW. The trucker was closing the distance with the traffic ahead. The VW appears to hit their brakes as the traffic ahead is slowing down--but the trucker doesn't, and appears to be accelerating.

Moreover, as the driver of the larger vehicle, the trucker has a greater duty to maintain driver attention and avoid accidents, as a mistake on his part has greater likelihood of causing more serious physical damage, and severe bodily injury or death.

I believe that it would be justified to put a slight majority on the truck, 60-70%. This would be my preference. So they would owe for 60-70% of the VW's damages. The trucker will have to go through his own insurance or pay out of pocket for his damages.

A couple of points.
1) several people stated that the truck driver sped up to keep her out. There is no proof of that. There is proof of a decreasing amount of space between the truck and the vehicles ahead of him.

2) The truck in which the video is being shot from appears to be a semi and not a pickup. You can not expect them to speed up or slow down like a passenger car.

3) The vehicles in front of the truck appear to be slowing down due to conditions in front of them, causing the decreased distance between the truck and traffic in front of him.

4) Even though the audio is not that good, there does not appear to be a change in the engine noise to indicate that the truck driver was speeding up to keep her out.

It appears to me that several vehicles in the slow lane saw that there was a semi in front of them that they wanted to avoid. They saw the space in front of the semi in the high speed lane and decided to occupy it. They then passed on the right hand side of the truck.

*warning legal mumbo jumbo*
Straight from the State of Texas Statutes and Legislation web page
http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/TN/htm/TN.545.htm

Sec. 545.001. DEFINITIONS. In this chapter:

(1) "Pass" or "passing" used in reference to a vehicle means to overtake and proceed past another vehicle moving in the same direction as the passing vehicle or to attempt that maneuver.
------------------------------------

Sec. 545.057. PASSING TO THE RIGHT. (a) An operator may pass to the right of another vehicle only if conditions permit safely passing to the right and:

(1) the vehicle being passed is making or about to make a left turn; and

(2) the operator is:

(A) on a highway having unobstructed pavement not occupied by parked vehicles and sufficient width for two or more lines of moving vehicles in each direction; or

(B) on a one-way street or on a roadway having traffic restricted to one direction of movement and the roadway is free from obstructions and wide enough for two or more lines of moving vehicles.

She was passing on the right by their definition and she did it illegally The truck being passed did not meet the requirements to legally allow passing on the right.

Seeing the video and having read the appropriate law that applies in this situation, It is my opinion that the driver of the passenger vehicle was at fault.

No, he wasn't passing the semi, he was already in the left lane. "passing" would imply that he had changed lanes to overtake the semi.

And given that I've been driving for over 20 years (often on dangerous mountain roads) and never had any kind of serious accident, you can drop the fucking ad hom.

I understand the emotion especially when someone else's inconsiderate, selfish douchebaggery is putting your children at risk, but you can't allow it to overtake your behavior.

Don't let emotions turn into actions, at least not uncontrolled rageful actions. (It'd be better to take down his license plate, find him later, and take your time teaching Homes the error of his ways with the help of some hard pipe-hitting motherfuckers, a pair of pliers, and a blow torch.)

To the father, two words: Dude, maintain.

To the long-hair pink jacket and green beanie wearing Kevin Smith wannabe who finds amusement in endangering other people then watching them get upset, I hope you encounter someone who will wipe that fucking grin off your face in a way you'll never forget.

It's wind resistance, it makes a massive difference. When they're really far apart the rear driver is just driving better and shaving time off the lead, so he catches up, but once there it's down to drafting to get the little burst of speed to get alongside. The carts are probably approximately equal in power, so he reaches level from the draft position easily enough, but can't keep the momentum to get a lead with the new air resistance on him, just draw level. So they're level, but obviously there's only one sweet racing line to take to keep your speed up and lap time down. You can either pass on the outside (in which case you have to go faster into the turn to stay ahead) or the inside (in which case you have to turn sharper at speed to stay ahead) both of which are risky, or you can return safely to the racing line - i.e. not by swerving into him, but by conceding the lead to him and dropping in behind him. If you do that, you take less risk and give yourself the chance to try again because you're in draft position again. He needs to stay as close as he can and find the right place to overtake so that his superior driving can give him the lead into the racing line of the next corner, at which point he gets right of way and the position advantage the lead gives. Sometimes that's not even possible and lead to what some would call boring races (Monaco Grand Prix) where the leader is decided on the first corner and doesn't change unless they crash out.

I'll draw two parallels:
1. DRS in F1 racing, where a tiny part of the tail opens up for a small part of the track, which drastically increases speed and allows for more interesting races because it almost ensures overtaking. You can also see the same application of the racing line and people conceding position or trying to take different lines and spinning out or locking up.
2. In cycling, the commonly quoted figure is that you can save 40% of your energy by drafting behind a leading cyclist. The Tour de France and every other cycling road race is defined by drafting, cos no lone cyclist would ever be able to keep pace with the peloton which 'cycles' riders in and out of the wind-protected bunch throughout a day. This should convince you more as cyclists are not streamlined objects but still offer significant gains. Go and watch a cycling sprint finish - it's a case of whoever gets behind the fastest guy wins by conserving energy in his wake until it's time to burst out alongside and pass.

The Gist:

Guy in business suit looking thoughtfully out of window.
(Doubtful anyone who designs fine consumer goods, *actually designs consumer goods*, wears a suit). Maybe its supposed to be you! You avant-garde millionaire, you!

Person sketching watch designs. This is probably semi-close to reality, though they don’t show the hundreds of designs the visual designer creates that are dismissed at whim by the aforementioned, assumed (but inevitable even if not shown) suits.

People fiddling with plastic representations of what one would assume as the model for said watch design. Maybe realistic, though with the caveat that two people are sitting there going over said physical design, in any serious discussion concerning the actual physics of the end product. I can *not* imagine that nearly the entirety of this process today, both visual and mechanical design, are not done digitally.

Okay, there’s some CG. Because CG is the next step, rather than the first, least expensive step in any design process today. Who wants to quickly model everything in a matter of hours when you can fabricate expensive, physical material for iterative testing?

Holy shit, was that guy just looking at a wood cutout? I can’t even think of a shitty, sarcastic/realistic remark about that one. I might have misunderstood that shot.

Alright, now we’re machining shit. You can’t really fake that with a few grand for marketing. That’s the real stuff. (1.5m in)

No, they don’t sand/polish things by hand during the fabrication phase. That’s entirely too inaccurate and subjective to the assembler to leave up to human hands. (But hey: it’s a 2.5 million dollar piece of metal, so lets make those buyers feel good about their money spent).

Oh look: gemstones! (???) That's kingly.

More faux machining that is veritably inferior to quality mechanical assembly.

Oh shit, someone just turned a nob!

3.5 minutes in, and we see some actual hand-polished work that is legitimately viable to perform by hand.

Hey lets sand those nodules off the finished pieces, and micro-inspect those printed markings, because nothing about us says “accuracy” without a fallible human to do it. Also: what are they printing shit on there for? Was it pushing the price to $3mil to engrave the timestamps on the faces? That better be the highest quality electroplated coating, but even then I can't imagine that's superior than a tactile, physical representation.

Now they’re hand-engraving the sculpted ornamentation, but it’s one more point I can gladly give them because those kinds of human touches let you know at least some sort of artisan was involved. I can appreciate that, though realizing what I just said causes me to reflect on the inaccuracies of mass-production, and why we would take one over the other…

More microscopes. (Because if one notch is off, it’s back to the furnace for you!)

Awe shit, payday. A guy in a suit looking confident is walking towards your building!

Finally, the gear assembly. It certainly looks fantastic, photographically speaking. I can’t help but notice that all that detail is lost to hundreds of textural indentations or are due to stylized alternating polish/grinding. However, I’m confident that spending $2.5mil on this product would get me the absolute, most accurate, unnoticeable details (hand-made!) within a micro-millimeter of accuracy. Those indentations are like chrome on a street-racer in the 90’s: the more you have, the greater they perform.

@~8min, I’m pretty sure no one works like that at their desk. That posture would kill you in a month.

They know you can’t spin the head of a watch while it’s on your wrist, right?

Awe! It’s got 5 ringtones! That’s way more than any other watch I’ve even heard of! Except everything that doesn’t cost $2.5mil.


If I can take anything away from this that’s even remotely positive, it’s that at least millionaire shitheads are now being just as suckered as the rest of the consumer base. Let me sell ONE of those watches, and I would have enough money to overtake their business within a year, except for that I don't have the greed, dishonesty, and overall lack of morals that it would take to set up a quality factory, and trick such dickheads into buying (even superior BS) products.

Interesting article regarding Ferguson:

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/12/in_defense_of_black_rage_michael_brown_police_and_the_american_dream/

Why are police calling the people of Ferguson animals and yelling at them to “bring it”? Because those officers in their riot gear, with their tear gas and dogs, want a justification for slaughter. But inexplicably in that moment we turn our attention to the rioters, the people with less power, but justifiable anger, and say, “You are the problem.” No. A cop killing an unarmed teenager who had his hands in the air is the problem. Anger is a perfectly reasonable response. So is rage.

Violence is the effect, not the cause of the concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together with no conceivable way out and no productive way to channel their rage at having an existence that is adjacent to the American dream. This kind of social mendacity about the way that racism traumatizes black people individually and collectively is a festering sore, an undiagnosed cancer, a raging infection threatening to overtake every organ in our body politic.

don't these people watch sci fi? Any time some planet implements some sort of "racial purity" plan, they always end up coming up against some disease that wipes them out and they would have survived because the species they wiped out had some sort of genetic resistance to it so had they integrated and inter-married, they would have survived.

joking aside though. We're just seeing remnants of tribalism here, in the grand scheme of things, equal rights is still a VERY relatively new thing, so old ideas just take a long time to die. Each new generation is going to be less racist then the last one. Sure, racist parents will try to teach their kids to be racist, but the odds of that teaching sticking will be less and less.

racism just isn't sustainable over the long term. when tribes were divided by large land masses and large oceans and we didn't have fast means of travel, it was easy to maintain the illusion that your group was superior to everyone else. but now that the planet is a much smaller place, it's harder and harder to delude yourself.

in any case, economic discrimination will overtake racial discrimination soo n if it hasn't already. won't matter if you're white or black, but by how much is in your bank account.

Where exactly is tailgating involved? I see a Peugeot stopping in the middle of the road for no reason causing a major hazard whilst another car (not watching the road) smashed into the back of the recording car.

Edit: Guy is definitely not tailgating the Peugeot. Firstly the guy is easily able to see the brake lights (and he can see over the Peugeot from his cabin) and slows down safely when the Peugeot stops. There's more than a car's distance between them, from the start right down to the impact. I have a 40 min drive to university every day and you'd be lucky to get that much room behind you from someone with a baby on board. That's not counting the fact that the Puegeot is abusing the overtaking lane from the outset.

So as a point of pedantry....he could have totally made that corner if he had stayed off the brakes kept a steady throttle and leaned harder to the left (he was on course to make the corner if the car hadn't startled him). Braking is almost never the right thing to when in or leaving a corner, it just stands the bike up and sends you wide.

Target fixation is a bitch!

However, solid white lines mean no overtaking/crossing to the opposite lane for good reason (the entire manoeuvre was technically illegal here in the UK because of said solid lines). It was foolish to even attempt what he did there and doubly so if you haven't mastered proper corner control/reactions to be able to deal with the unexpected effectively (which he clearly had not as evidenced by the vid).

All of that said, we all make mistakes. This chap might normally be a better rider than he appears here and simply made a poor judgement call entering that corner which resulted in him panicking and having to bail. (He may also have been a retard with too much power and a death-wish. Those guys are definitely around)


Also Re: @Darkhand and @bcglorf

Bikes very rarely kill car drivers. It's generally only a side on collision with a door that can do that and even then only at serious speed. Bikes rarely weigh over 250kg and most sports bikes are sub 200kg. They simply don't carry anything like the kind of energy a car would even at 100mph+.

I'm not saying it's impossible but it would be very unlikely here. He however could have easily broken his neck if he'd hit the car head on. My brother had a head on with a car about a year ago at 60-70ish (combined) and fractured his (fortunately made a complete recovery since).

Bikers are almost always a far bigger danger to themselves than anyone else. This was reckless but mostly for himself.

I suspect however that lessons were at least learned!