I live in the USA, about 50 miles SE of Los Angeles, and here street racing almost always means drag racing. I don't know how popular street racing is these days in my area. The last I heard of street racing other than news shows was near where my wife used to work, back in the 1980's in a manufacturing district that was virtually deserted at night. The only street racing I ever witnessed occured in the late 1960's. It was a large group, and occasionally at around 2:00 am, they would setup road blocks (the kind with the yellow flashers) at both ends of a somewhat long straight stretch (about 1 mile) of road with no side roads near the LA airport, completely blocking it off from any traffic (either the cops ignored this or it was just dumb luck the guys never got busted). Sometimes they setup a timing tree. The 1/4 mile point was also marked off, and there was 3/4 miles to slow down before hitting the road blocks (the road continued straight for several more miles though). It generally lasted about an hour and occasionally some real drag racers would bring out alcohol dragsters to these events. I doubt underground street racing was ever that organized again.
I've seen a lot of videos of 2 or more drivers doing rolling speed pulls on open sections of freeway, and yet I can't recall any new reports relating accidents to these. It seems the plannned runs rarely result in accidents.
Almost all of the accidents I do see reported are due to impromptu drag or speed runs on streets where the combination of adrenaline and testosterone kick in. For example, a Porsche driver decided to drag race against a motorcyle, and continued increasing speed in an futile effort to catch up, lost control on a turn, and ran into one of the trees that are used in the divider on this road. I personally saw the aftermath from a distance. These are small oak trees, but apparently very strong. The car was split into multiple pieces, I could see pieces of the red 911 scattered (body was already removed by this time), and the windsheild stuck up high in a tree. The motorcyclist was long gone and never caught, but I'm sure he has trouble sleeping over this.
This pales when compared to the 10 or so fatilites that have occurred over the last 24 years at an intersection close to my home. The main issue is that the approach from the south and west are uphill at a slight grade, so somewhat limited visibility, combined with the fact that it's near a senior community, and configuration changes that occurred over the years. Originally the north and south bound left turns lanes were awkwardly placed, making it easy to assume an approaching car was in a left turn lane when it wasn't. This was fixed early on, but accidents continued to happen (probably the visibility issue). Even after the intersection was "fixed", had controlled left turn signals, there were still a couple of accidents, but involving seniors. One was a case where a senior turned left onto the 55mph northbound road, but in the southbound lanes, and the road immediately turns to the west where he had a head on collision with another car.
Personally, I will speed up a bit when oppurtunity presents itself, such as a large section of open freeway (no traffic) appears, or a "rabbit" passes by in open section, meaning that if I let the "rabbit" continue to gain on me, there's little chance of trouble or a ticket (my last ticket was for 65mph towards the end of the Carter mandated 55mph speed limit on previously 70mph roads, back in 1984). Otherwise, I just go with the flow. Morning commuters seem to be the fastest local drivers, speed limit is 65mph here, but most are going around 70mph to 80mph (slow lane to fast lane) on a local freeway in the morning. In the evenings, there's too much traffic (shoppers added in to the mix), so it's pretty slow going.
The highest speeds occur on roads where it's known that the highway patrol most tolerates the speeds. There are isolated sections of interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco where it's not uncommon to see traffic doing 85 to 90mph. On the other hand, the speeds from Los Angeles south to San Diego, or north east to Las Vegas are slower (more tickets issued).
My last comment for this post is about Nordschleife. Why do they let motorcycles run there? This is basically a pay to play on a complicated race track, 13 mile, 70+ turns, and there are a lot of accidents, and many of the motorcycle accidents are fatal, due to having armco instead of run off areas, even for very experienced riders like Joerund Seim.
Another issue is I don't have a movie or picture in mind much less ready, so please go ahead Mazz4200, as I don't want to hold up this thread, as it's bedtime for me here in west coast USA.
This thread has gotten off-topic, but might as well join in.
One thing going for some of the NFS and a few other arcade games is their sound. I'm pretty sure that their best sounds are algorithmically generated, and not sampled. With or without a sample base, you need algorithms to tweak the sounds, and these algorithms can be a science in itself, similar to the old days when sounds for Yamaha's DX7 analog synthesizer were being created.
Regarding anti-aliasing, if running a monitor at 1280x960 or higher resolution, what's the point? The stair stepping effect you get at higher resolutions is minimal. I play games at 1280x960 or 1600x1200 (at 85hz) on a 20" CRT (maybe I don't notice anti-aliasing effects because a CRT can adjust the analog beam rate and width as opposed to digital up or down conversion to native resolution).
Since I rarely play LFS, I get out of the way or join the race just after the start, then work my way up past the slower or crashed players, still managing an occasional win when the fast guys have mishaps. It's more relaxing for me this way, and I'm there more the fun of it, since I don't put in the time or effort it takes to become an expert racer, especially after I did put some serious time in to GPL, improving over time to get within 5% to 7% of the world record times, but still obviously slower than the truly fast players.
You avatar doesn't include the country you live in. In the USA, there are places like EZ-Lube or Jiffy-Lube that will do oil changes while you wait. You should get the oil filter changed as well.
Since I don't know where you live, I don't know if it's very hot or very cold. In the USA, 10W-30 is usually the cheapest multi-grade oil, but you could use 5W-30 for colder climates or 5W-40 to handle colder and warmer climates.
Unless you live where it's extremely cold, there's no point in getting a synthetic oil.
And don't put anything into your gas tank other than gasoline. There are already additives to help clean the engine.
Ok, since Mazz4200 properly picked out "Three days of the condor" from my last post, he should get to pick the next movie.
Note "Three days of the Condor" is a movie I'd definately recommend for anyone, it's that good.
If you decide to find it a video rental store, it will be most likely listed as "3 days of the Condor"
instead of "three", so look for "3" and not "T'.
We have a winner. The studio added a prologue and epilog with Miles in a hosptial, and the original movie becomes a flashback of the story he's telling at the hospital. Not wanting to spoil anything here, I won't go into more detail.
In the second picture, the costume on the far right is similar to what "Q" of Star Trek Next Generation wore in the initial episode (as a judge of humankind).
I added this somewhat off-topic trivia question regarding the BadSeed and a similar thing done to another movie.
A bit of trivia, after the initial pre-screening of another horror / sci-fi movie also made in 1956, additional footage was added to the beginning and ending of the movie for a happier ending, anyone care to guess what movie this was?
Wow I'm impressed, since that was the primary one you get to pick the next. I added both the color and black and white pictures of "Rhoda Penmark" to give a clue that the movie is one of the colorized Turner Classic Movies. One noteworthy thing about the movie was the credit ending, which was similar to a play. The actors appear one at a time in an open doorway with the announcer noting their real and character names, and the final credit scene is the little girl getting a proper spanking by her mother (apparently the director was concerned about leaving the audience with the actual movie ending). A bit of trivia, after the initial pre-screening of another horror / sci-fi movie also made in 1956, additional footage was added to the beginning and ending of the movie for a happier ending, anyone care to guess what movie this was?
Three days of the Condor pic was provided in case no one could figure out "Bad Seed" but xaotik figured it out.
Classic line from three days of the condor: "do we have plans to invade the middle east?" (to get the oil, seems prophetic now). The picture is when Robert Redford is in Faye Dunaway's characters apartment. He's analyzed her pictures and noted that there's no people in them and figured out the time of year in the pictures (can't remember if it was just before fall or just before winter).
SCCA is not the only racing organization in the USA. What I would recommend is finding out what race tracks there are within reasonable (you determine what is reasonable) distance from where you live, and then investigating what clubs or sanctioned racing events occur at those tracks. Most racing tracks will have a web site with this information. If not, you should be able to phone someone from the track. If this doesn't work see if there are any local areas where "car guys" just like to get together and chat about cars, and ask them. Only after finding out that information would I consider what type of "track car" to buy.
You might just want to start with track day events, where you're not really racing other cars, just running fast laps (the rules for passing vary based on the skill and experience level of the drivers in a club event).
Yes. As previously stated, for the time and even to this day, it was the most impressive movie car ever (in my opinion), and the movie is impressive considering when it was made. It was a modified Lola T70 race car. The car to the left is rumoured to be some type of Ferrari. There are a few web sites dedicated to THX 1138. It was George Lucas first full length movie and was made in 1971, and more recently updated for DVD (2004), but it's makes a run on cable tv movie channels every now and then. Although there's dialog mentioning the car going 235mph, it's clear that it's not going that fast. The tunnel is really two different car tunnels near San Francisco, Caldecot tunnel, and Posey Tube. Later there's an unfinished Bart (bay area rapid transit - small train) tunnel made to appear as if it's a very tall vertical shaft.
Since that movie, George Lucas manages to get 1138 somwhere in most, if not all of his movies (THX-1138 was his college phone number). For example, In Star Wars Episode IV, Princess Leia is in cell block 1138.
Enhanced DVD version of the Lola in THX 1138 (the out of tunnel stuff was added with CGI, which is why it's not as realistic looking as the in tunnel scenes).
Disco, both old school (from the mid 1970's) to the more recent stuff that uses different name, but basically is still disco. For example, "Blue" by LaTour was used in Basic Instinct, and in it's trailer. The only example I have is of "Blue" I used as the background music used in a video of a player named Tifo doing a "canyon drift" at Gold Valley Run in NFS Carbon:
Ok, so "drifting" in NFS Carbon isn't realistic (ProStreet is much closer) but if real world drifting was done at 120 to 200mph as in this video, it probably would be a lot more interesting. In the meantime, I have to settle for Tiff 100mph power slides in in a Z06 in the later half of this video. (There must be a huge tarriff on the Z06, 60,000 pounds in the UK, but just 70,000 dollars in the USA (back in 2006)).
Rumour has it that if iRacing fails to meet it's market goals, it will be sold to Electronic Arts and relabeled as Need For Speed: Nascar Underground. The release will be timed to coinside with the failure of the real Nascar series due to the once again re-unified IRL / Champ car series, when Nascar drivers will be forced to do their racing back on the streets. The game will include not only racing, but free-roam, outruns, drifting, drag races, and of course the always popular police pursuits, somewhat styled after the popular daily high speed pursuits that help define part of life in Southern California. Unfortunately, the planned post race fist fights for Nascar 2009 won't be a part of Nascar Underground.