Team Oracle Penalized For America's Cup Rules Violations

whoever57 writes "On Saturday, Oracle Team USA and Team New Zealand will begin racing for the America's Cup in the amazing AC72 boats. However, the Oracle team starts with a significant handicap. It was recently discovered that members of Oracle Team USA made illegal changes to the boats used in the America's Cup Series (which is sailed in the smaller AC45 boats). After a hearing on Friday, the International Jury has decided on the penalty: Team Oracle will have to pay a fine and sail without some team members. More significantly, they lose two points before starting the America's Cup races against Team New Zealand. A tiny amount of weight had been added to the kingpost, in violation of the measurement rules for the class. This was reported to the measurement committee some weeks ago after its discovery by boatbuilders working for America's Cup Regatta Management (ACRM), not members of Oracle Team USA."

Explanation...

[wbr1]

A tiny amount of weight had been added to the kingpost, in violation of the measurement rules for the class.

So that is where Larry Ellison hid the pennies he hears from ask.com toolbar spam on the Java installer.

Re:"miniscule"

[whoever57]

it seems that all this hub-a-bub amounts to someone having nailed a few ounces of metal to some part of the ship and it would have next to no impact on the ship's performance. So from an engineering and sport performance perspective... it's a tempest in a teapot.

That is the most puzzling part of this: why? any advantage would be far too small to make any difference to the outcome of a race.

So why the angry rich people hating on Oracle? As far as I can tell, They're angry and running about calling it "cheating" over what appears to be a simple case of not understanding the horribly dense and overly-complicated rules, in a new ship class that just debuted this year.

Last year, actually. It was an AC45 that was modified. These boats have been racing for over a year and are effectively a one-design class. This wasn't an accidental rule violation. This was weight added deliberately:

The suspect forward kingpost appeared to have been filled with a resin/ballast slurry of some type. and weighed 3.744 kg. [sail-world.com]

And:

Oracle... you heard it here first: Build a U-boat and go sink those rich asshats.

In this competition, Oracle are the richest of the rich asshats.

Re:"miniscule"

[Anonymous Coward]

What a surprise, another horribly uninformed post by girlintraining.

Re:"miniscule"

[viperidaenz]

It's not really an international race though. Both Team New Zealand and Team Larry are skippered by Kiwis.

It's more like Auckland vs Wellington.

Re:Wow

[MightyYar]

The irony is that a NASCAR team has a lot more in common with an Americas Cup team than with anything poor, trashy, or stupid.

Slashdot - the painful downhill slide

[Anonymous Coward]

Another off-topic and boring article from Slashdot.

Neither news for Nerds nor Stuff that Matters.

Re:Wow

[Solandri]

While it's regarded as a rich man's sport, the race has been a major driving force behind research into the use and manufacture of carbon fiber composite structures, and methods for determining computational solutions for the Navier-Stokes equation [wikipedia.org] (which is still unsolved, and is not even known if there is/isn't an algorithmic solution). The race creates an incentive for the super-rich to become early adopters of these technologies. Without the race they'd probably piss their money away on gold toilet seats or who could make the biggest megayacht. At least this way they're spending money on advancing the state of the art for technologies which will eventually benefit you and me.

Re:Explanation...

[SeaFox]

Can someone please explain why people say there's a toolbar in the Java installer? I have always gotten the JRE/JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html [oracle.com] and have never encountered such a thing. Am I the only one who knows these even exist?

Most people just get it from the home page [java.com], and that's a different installer.
Remember, a large number of people who get Java only do so because Pogo tells them to. For those people this [lmgtfy.com] is "surfing the internet". And they're going to click the first search result, which is that same installer. Yeah, your page is the third result, but they will ask "Is 'Java SE' the same as 'Java'?" and they'll skip it.

When the consumer version automatically notifies you of an update, the updater has the same type of installer (with the tag-along software), so you have to uncheck the option every time you update Java now.

Sometimes I wonder if people have making life more difficult for themselves just to give them something to rant about.

More difficult like digging through a tech-net website looking for a installation program, and coming to this page [oracle.com] (which would intimidate any non-techy person)?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

the top four F1 teams each spend in excess of 200million euro, Ferrari close to 250million. 600 million tv viewers each year

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure where you get your information about funding for Formula 1 from, but its bollocks, whilst the teams do not publish specific breakdowns at line item level, they spend a LOT of money every single year.

Even six years ago the teams were spending a fortune each year, See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One#Revenue_and_profits for some sort of general idea,

The current estimate of Red Bull racing is they are spending in excess of $295M/year every year.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/motor-sports/topstories/The-bonkers-business-logic-of-Formula-1-teams/SP-Article1-968466.aspx

A simple Google search shows more details.

So in conclusion, the Americas cup is run every three years and costs around $100M to mount a challenge, a top F1 team spends approx $300M per year every year so spends $900M in the same timescale.

Simply put F1 costs around 9x per year than the Americas Cup. Yep you were talking bollocks.

Re:Wow

[argStyopa]

America's cup is watched by millions....barely.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/08/21/tiny-audience-for-americas-cup-tv.html [bizjournals.com]

The semifinals are averaging 50-80,000 viewers.
The races just off San Francisco with the most effete/trendy/hipster crowd imaginable, averaged 800-900,000.

This is somewhere around the ratings received by NBC's "Last Call" at midnight.

This is a marginal sport irrelevant to 99.9999% of the population, and in which the only participants are giant conglomerates or kajillionaires. Granted, formula one racing, etc are likewise only for the big-money teams, but pretty much everyone drives. Sailing as a regular activity is already a marginal sport performed only by the tiniest rind of enthusiasts, that 'pro sailing' is like the margin of the margin of the margin. I don't doubt that it takes tremendous ability, intelligence, and teamwork. It's just that the bulk of us can neither see it nor appreciate it if we could.