Brief notes
1. What do you do when your helicopter breaks down in Snowdonia? Call in the RAF to airlift it back to base for repairs. I think this qualifies as “amazing footage of the week”.
2. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton for winning the British GP this weekend; he’s now back in the running for the championship. Commiserations to David Coulthard for crashing out early in his last ever home race. And well done (!) to Bernie for finally doing what he’s been trying to do for years and taking the GP away from Silverstone. Given that one of his objections has always been the lack of facilities at Silverstone, I’m not sure how he thinks that Donnington is a suitable replacement, when it needs even more work than Silverstone.
I don’t know who it is at the BRDC that Bernie doesn’t like, but there’s obviously someone! Or perhaps it’s just that the BRDC told him where he could stick his outrageous demands for money. The sooner that the premier class of motorsport is not controlled by such a devious, manipulative and two-faced person as Bernie Ecclestone, the better that it will be. Between him and Max “not a Nazi, but definitely the son of a fascist” Moseley, the sport long ago descending into farce and it needs to be stopped.
3. You’ve probably seen much talk of this around the Net over the last few days, but in case you missed it a judge in the US has ruled that Google must hand over a log that contains details of the videos that You Tube users have watched. The log, which “contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details” has to be handed over to Viacom in an argument over copyright infringement.
Quite rightly, privacy groups are up in arms that this information is to be handed over, as it contains data that could allow individuals to be identified and is a massive breach of privacy. But what worries me, additionally, is why this information is being kept in the first place. Yes, I can understand you want to know which videos are popular, etc, but why do you need to keep personal information? Isn’t it enough to know that a video has been watched 100,000 times? Why do you need to know which 100,000 people watched it?
There has been some speculation that Viacom may use this information in an attempt to prosecute individual users, so I’d recommend that if you’re a You Tube user you only watch non-copyright infringing clips from now on.
4. In a related issue, Virgin Media is warning file-sharers that they risk being taken to court if they illegally download music. It’s part of a BPI initiative to stop the illegal downloading of music by making the ISP’s responsible for it. Years ago we had “Home taping is killing music (and it’s illegal)” stickers on LPs and cassettes; now we have its online equivalent. But the “Home taping” campaign back then was based on a fallacy, and it’s the same today; music was never at risk. What was at risk was the strangle hold that the music industry had on it, while they milked it for every penny they could. They can’t (and never have been able to) move with the times and want to protect a profit margin that really doesn’t belong to them anymore. If it was all about protecting the artists, as people like the BPI would have us believe, I could give it more support but it isn’t; it’s all about record label profits.
If I download an album through iTunes or any of the other online music stores, rather than buying the CD, why should I have to pay the same price as the CD? There’s no physical product that has to be manufactured and shipped to a retail outlet, after all, and my consumer experience is reduced because there’s no cover artwork or inlay card, etc and no handy CD to enable me to take my music on the road with me. Why, then, was my recent purchase of Melody Gardot’s Worrisome Heart only £0.30 more for the CD than it would have been for a download version? (And, in fact, at the moment it’s actually cheaper for the CD!)
The music industry needs to wake up to reality and rather than going after people who illegally download music, they should be making it much easier to download music legally. Which must also include getting rid of DRM completely, and making artist’s back catalogue’s more readily available.
All the excitement is off the track
There’s lots of flak surrounding Max Moseley (FIA President) at the moment, over allegations that have been made about events in his private life. He’s called a special meeting of the FIA, after four of the major teams in F1 called on him to explain himself, and apparently he’s been asked to stay away from this weekend’s Grand Prix in Bahrain.
I’ve no idea if the allegations (supposedly about “a Nazi-style orgy in a torture dungeon”) are true, and even if they are it is his private life so shouldn’t have any bearing on his job, but for me the best part about the whole thing is the only comment I’ve read from Max himself is to deny any Nazi connotations. Which seems to imply the rest of it is true.
Ewwwwww.
Update: there’s even a video. Although – as is the way of these things – it could be anyone. And thankfully it doesn’t go into detail.
Formula 1 2008: the season starts here
And let’s hope its a better one that last year. While the racing was at least slightly better than in 2006, especially with Brit interest at a height with the amazing debut season of Lewis Hamilton, the whole sport became mired in what can only be called farce with the “Spygate” scandal involving McLaren and Ferrari.
This year, hopefully, the FIA will allow all of that to be laid to rest (they’ll have to think up some other ruse to make sure Ferrari win) and we can get on with some proper racing.
There’s been some moving about in the off-season; former champion Fernando Alonso has moved back to Renault – who had a bad season last year without him (and were also found guilty in the off-season of spying, but escaped punishment due to the inadequate nature of the FIA) but good things are promised for 2008. He swaps with Heikki Kovalainen who says that he expects to be treated as an equal to his new team-mate Hamilton at McLaren. Time will tell. Meanwhile Alonso is joined at Renault by Nelsinho Piquet – bringing back one of the all-time great racing names to the Formula One paddock. You can see the full drive line-up on the F1 site.
Not too many of the cars have shown their colours yet, but Hamilton’s been out in the new McLaren and says that “It was fantastic to get my hands on the MP4-23 this morning in Jerez” and he thinks good things will happen. Meanwhile, Alonso called his first drive of the Renault “encouraging”.
BMW Sauber have thrown down the gauntlet to the big two teams, saying that they “are confident we can turn the battle in front into a battle of more than two teams” and challenge for race wins. They scored points at every race last season, but were over 100 points behind false champions Ferrari at the end of the season. It remains to be seen whether they can really do it.
So as usual all the pre-season feather-ruffling is in full swing; lets hope that this year we get some decent races and honest results to bring some credibility back to the sport.
And the saga continues…
I’ve written before about Formula One and the near-farce that was the 2007 season. I’ve also written about Lewis Hamilton, rookie challenger who so very nearly won the Championship this year – missing out in the final race, to trail eventual champion Kimi Raikkonen by just one point. Well, things are moving again today.
Max Moseley, president of the FIA and pretty much boss of Formula One, has been talking to the BBC about the season just gone and the 2008 season to come (check this link for the BBC’s story). I’m not a big fan of Mr Moseley for two reasons; first, I don’t think he really has the best interests of the sport at heart and second, he and the organisation he controls, seem to be inconsistent and biased with their rulings. Let’s take a few examples from the BBC report:
He thinks that Lewis Hamilton being successful will have a negative effect on the sport: “It will start to be negative because we’ll get the Schumacher effect where people start writing to me saying can’t you do something to slow him down”. I don’t remember hearing him making such a statement when Schumacher was racing, or when Alonso won two Championships on the trot, or when Ferrari were winning the Constructors Championship every year. There is well-known ill-feeling between Moseley and McLaren boss Ron Dennis – is this perhaps why he feels a successful McLaren driver would have a negative effect?
Surely if one driver or team is consistently successful, it’s up to the other drivers and teams to raise their game to compete. Formula One is supposed to be the pinnacle of motorsport; it is a competition for supremacy. That supremacy can only come from being the best, consistently. Is Mr Moseley suggesting that (as with schoolchildren now) there should be no winners or losers – everyone is equal?
He goes on to suggest that if it wasn’t Hamilton who was drawing people to F1, it would be one of the other new young drivers like Nico Rosberg, Robert Kubica or Sebastian Vettel. Perhaps if they’d been driving the McLaren they might have been more successful this season, but these three have not lit up the scene in the way that Hamilton has. Strangely, as he appears to be a big Ferrari fan, Moseley makes no mention of Felipe Massa, who surely has made more of an impact on F1 than any of the other three drivers he did mention.
Making reference to the McLaren-Ferrari “spy-gate” affair, Max Moseley says “although the behind-the-scenes stuff was annoying for us and the people concerned, for the public it really adds to the general interest.” Not sure I agree on that one; what the spying affair did was really throw into sharp relief the inconsistent way that the FIA applies its decisions. It was shown that there was two-way flow of information but it was not proved that McLaren had used Ferrari technology on their car. Ferrari do not appear to have been subjec to the same scrutiny. McLaren were robbed of their points and the Championship was basically handed to Ferrari who, up to that point, were completely out of the running. Yet Ferrari ran an illegal car in the first race of the season and escaped any punishment.
For 2008, McLaren will be “closely scrutinised by the FIA to ensure the team had not included any Ferrari ideas on it.”. Quite how they’re going to be able to determine this is not stated, but Moseley says “Finding something will not be easy. On the other hand, there are sources we are going to deploy who will give us as good a chance as its possible to have to find it.” Which seems to be saying that they’ll find something even if there isn’t anything to find.
When asked about Hamilton’s involvement in the spying row (Alonso and test driver Pedro de la Rosa were shown to have been involved, from email evidence they submitted), Moseley says “He’s not a known quantity to me. It would be surprising if he didn’t know something of what was going on, but I’ve got absolutely no evidence that he had. On that basis it would be wrong of me to suggest that he had.” Even though that’s exactly what you’ve just done, Max.
Formula One is supposed to be a development sport; it’s for prototypes (like MotoGP is with bikes). That development will inevitably lead to one team having new kit, or new ways of working, that give them an advantage. The other teams will then try and find out what those are. The recent row is perhaps a little more direct than its ever been before – with two top designers swapping information over the phone – but its part and parcel of the sport. Of course, the fact that they’re talking about a 10 year ban on engine development from 2008 rather makes spying a waste of time.
Formula One used to be a must-watch sport but no more. The ridiculous amount of new rules (especially the utterly stupid “two types of tyre must me used in the race” rule), the inconsistency of application of those rules and the boredom brought to the track by the stifling of technical development just make it an expensive irrelevance. I’m not so sure I will be paying any attention in 2008.
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