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It is common sense but, in the end, the person who tried to do this ended up being fired!

Keep in mind that the situation is way worse for the sailors, who will be competing inside of Guanabara Bay. This is what the water looks like. It is not unusual for sailors to get in contact with water - particularly, in the case of windsurfers. Check out what happened to this German sailor in a training event last year.

...and then, of course, there is the security situation.

The whole situation is absolutely ridiculous.

There has been talk about about sail-assisted cargo ships for some time.

http://www.sail-world.com/crui...

Shanking with a rusty spoon? No, now the correct way to describe unfairness on Oracle's side is that you're adding weight to a kingpost.

Isn't this the same country that technically cheated with the advanced hull micro line hull treatment that won the cup back in the 1980s?

Well, it was the same team that was found guilty of cheating for getting too close to their competitors during practice.

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.

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.

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

Ironically, TFA has an ad on the sidebar that exhorts the reader to install a "Customized Toolbar for Serious Sailors" by the site that is hosting TFA. The ad seems to move around, so if you're having trouble locating it, here's the gif itself. I wonder if Ellison has this toolbar installed... being a serious sailor and all.

Or maybe put the brainpower into exposing the global warming farce. So far.. ZERO of their predictions have come true, they have been found guilty of egregious perversions of the scientific method (cherry picking data, transforming data to fit their models, etc.), perversion of the peer review process, and of course, just making stuff up (Himilayan glaciers, anyone?). Remember the melting Arctic sea ice and all the poor drowning polar bears? This year, a whole bunch of boats that thought they were going to cruise through open sea are now caught in the ice in AUGUST. Arctic ice block Whenever I see the line "3,000 scientists agree with the IPCC report", I start ROFL. More than half of them have no training in metereology - they were anthropologists, sociologists, etc., who haven't done arithmetic, let alone math, since grade 10. David Suzuki, who is making millions of dollars a year from this nonsense, made his bones studying the mating habits of FRUITFLIES. Clearly, that makes him an expert on climate. (I note that the hypocrite has 3 homes, and insists on limousines for his paid appearances, which he naturally jets to.) Global warming folk can get back to me once they have a model whose predictions for the future, as opposed to the past, come close to matching what is measured.

Don't forget to re-enforce the bow in case you come across one of these.

According to this article:

One of the MSS (mobile satellite service) bands involved is just below the GPS L1 band used by commercial GPS units. The FCC has authorized use of this band for terrestrial cellular services since 2003 .

Now there is some dispute about details of the early FCC decisions and how many base stations were allowed under them, but it is clear that base stations were allowed next to the GPS band since 2003 and that the civil GPS supplier community paid little attention to the fact that GPS would be having a new neighbor with much stronger signals in some places than the original MSS signals.

The GPS industry has not pressed the filter manufacturers for the latest technology as the cellular systems in nearby bands have. As a result many GPS receivers have a lingering vulnerability to strong adjacent band signals that results from GPS manufacturers ignoring policy changes made in the US almost a decade ago!

Must have been a windy day on planet Earth!

http://www.sail-world.com/USA/New-World-Speed-Record---Macquarie-Innovation-breaks-50--hits-54-knots/55222

--jmike