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That's almost been done. UK TV 'Gadget Show' has someone who'd never flown a plane (real or sim) try to learn to fly just using a sim, then they tried to fly a circuit in the real thing. The video's here:

http://fwd.five.tv/gadget-show/videos/challenge?page=2

(it's 'simulator challenge' parts one, two, three) He did surprisingly well.

For those looking at doing this it's worth knowing that as well as iPlayer there is now 4OD, Demand Five and ITVPlayer for all your C4, 5 and ITV watching needs.
They've all ditched their paid for P2P based systems for advertising supported Flash players.

Modern cars don't crumple into passengers. They have a very strong core and crumple around that. So the impact site is torn to pieces, but the passenger appartment is mostly intact (although some panels can shift). A common safety feature is to use bars to transfer energy to other parts of the car. For instance if you are hit in the front left, the bar will also make the front right of your car crumple, dissipating much more energy. Another trick is make heavy solid parts like the engine move out of the way, usually under the floor board. That reduces the impact on the passenger appartment.

Here is a video where they crashed a Renault Modus (mini MPV) into an old Volvo 940 (big, heavy station wagon). The passengers in the old car would have been severely wounded, while there would have been only minor injuries in the new, much smaller and lighter car.

The crumble really makes sense for head-ons, but I prefer strength on the side.

A proper crumple zone will not reduce the safety from side impacts, but improve it. By using bars in the side of the car, you can transfer a lot of energy from the incoming car to the front and back of the car. The crumple zones there will slow the car down. The only downside to a crumple zone is that damage to cars is much more severe nowaways. That's the price to pay for more safety.

Pretty reliable laptop, huh. On a side note, how did you get the money to do this adventure?

Top Gear used to regularly review normal cars in a fairly serious way. 5 people used to watch it. Then they started testing Lamborghinis instead, building rockets out of Robin Reliants and racing to the north pole and now everyone watches it - even my wife who has no interest in cars. Some of the presenters from the old show moved to Fifth Gear where they mostly review sensible cars in a straight up way. About 5 people watch it...

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that run was done in an old Merc S Class by a movie director. I doubt he reached anywhere near 160mph.

http://fifthgear.five.tv/jsp/5gmain.jsp?lnk=401&featureid=790&show=s11e3&section=Consumer

Graceful degradation is quite possible with flash, once you discard those annoying scripts that try to auto-install it (nope. I have already have it thanks, but it's disabled by default - hello NoScript). Content inside the tag will be displayed if the plugin is not available - it's just that most developers can't be bothered to put in anything more useful than a message telling them to get flash.

This is an example of a flash site I worked on that passed WAI level 2. Try navigating it with javascript off.

http://www.five.tv/programmes/extraordinarypeople/ twininside/

Lydia Fairchild

Karen Keegan

http://www.five.tv/paulmerton/

Click on 'Beijing' then the picture on the right (with the robot in the picture).

If you mistakenly click on the one on the left, then you get something, er, *completely* different! Worth a watch too (if the stupid flash works for you - often cuts off short for me).

I hate this kind of look, tv.yahoo.com, BBC, ITV, C5. Something about the space, (widescreen aspect) images and boxing really irritates me.

Not to definitively say that it wasn't (as I don't watch a great deal of TV anyway) but I'm in the UK and I've never even heard of it before.

Me neither. It was made by channel 5, which probably explains why.
http://www.five.tv/aboutfive/press/pressreleases/2 0041011_murderprevention/

It's alright mate, don't be too impressed. At least here in the UK, people lap up American culture. The average dumbass in the street could probably do a good job of "I pledge allegiance...". A quote like the one you're talking about is less likely to be widely known, but a lot of that kind of thing is. One thing a lot of people seem to know is elements of the US constitution. Nothing specific mind, but "freedom of speech", and "they get to have guns".

Speaking of this, I saw a story on the news yesterday that scared the shit out of me. They were reporting on some crazy christian fanatics deep in America, who had said that they only wished the suicide bombers in London had killed more people (some such bullshit, 100% to get on TV). Anyway, the news was practically grumbling that under US law, their right to say these things is protected (this was the focus of the first half of the report), which was what scared me.

Link: Strangely, this anti-free speech ranting is absent from the online version., it's like it was typed up by someone with a different POV. The bit about sweden wasn't in the TV version either...

Also, I think it helps when things are foreign in these matters. My knowledge of our prime ministers is almost 0% past Thatcher (even just names), but I could probably list at least a quarter of US presidents that there have been (to be fair, a lot of this is offset by the amount of kings and queens that most people can remember, though this still isnt all that much). This could just be because between Thatcher and Churchill nothing particularly interesting happened... Great Depression? Sound interesting to you?

Note to mods - ignore this, I just saw an interesting comment and wanted to reply to it. This is in no way intended to be visible at higher thresholds.

Bear in mind that it costs a similar amount of money to enter the competition at the end of the program:

http://www.five.tv/home/frameset/?content=2278491

Personally I think that's too expensive for what is less than 25mins (bear in mind the ads). Top Gear however is easily worth £1.50.

Except that they don't quite seem to get it yet. They are offering here some videos from this car programme which apparently didn't quite make it to air,

Sounds like that UK TV show, Robot Wars.

Perhaps you meant Fifth Gear?
The Nov 1 2004 episode of Fifth Gear is the episode that involves a SMART car crashed into a concrete road barrier at 70MPH. The video that pyat posted is also shown in that episode.

Perhaps you meant Fifth Gear?
The Nov 1 2004 episode of Fifth Gear is the episode that involves a SMART car crashed into a concrete road barrier at 70MPH. The video that pyat posted is also shown in that episode.

In our defense. Fox is a television news channel. The Sun is a newspaper.

If you are going to compare the Fox News to something the UK, you should compare it to BBC News, ITN, Channel4 News, Five News or Sky News.

Even the trashy news channels here, Five and ITN stand head and shoulders above Fox "Bees That Kill!!! after these messages..." News.

five.tv

Yeah, the ads here in the UK on Five are pretty bad. About on par with Celine bloody Dion ('stsie) and the Dixie Chicks for all-time horrible-ness.
Can't get enough of the funny names of these American Football players either... Napoleon?! Please, give me a break!
Oh no! It's Shania now.. gotta go!