I spent about an hour today reading all 115 pages of the transcript of the September 13th WMSC hearing on the McLaren/Ferrari spy saga. I think the most abundantly clear thing is that McLaren have completely lost their minds.

One of the key arguments the McLaren lawyer tries to make is that the WMSC must hold the evidence to an extremely high criteria of lack of any reasonable doubt. He actually goes so far as to compare it to a capital crime such as murder. Except the difference is its not murder, its cheating in sport. The evidence provided makes it pretty clear something untoward was going on, and in my humble opinion is plenty to prove that there was cheating going on.

Ron Dennis’ comments are utterly nonsensical and ludicrous. If they don’t prove the case that McLaren management wasn’t aware of the cheating, his comments certainly prove that he has lost his mind along with his hair.

Paddy Lowe goes so far as to say that a dossier of data on a competitors car would be of little or no value to another team. This is in the same hearing that Paddy Lowe and Pedro de la Rosa both confirm that teams routinely analyze video footage for visual data and sound data. They also basically look at any angle they can get from TV or photos to analyze a competitors car. And a 800-page volume of data would be of little value? Are you guys fucking nuts? Or just lying cheats?

The lawyer and some of the McLaren engineers try to argue that no actual parts have been copied that can be identified on the McLaren chassis. There are a few problems with this line of argument:

1) The McLaren engineers themselves point out that its virtually impossible to directly copy a part from a competitor’s car. Since the cars are built with completely different design philosophies, you can’t just graft a part from another car onto yours. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get an idea from another team and built a similar-acting component on your car. This happens ALL the time in Formula 1. This therefore shatters the “you can’t find an exactly copied part on our car, so we must be innocent” line of reasoning.

2) Who would actually be able to analyze the McLaren chassis and determine if anything had been copied? McLaren says they have offered to let the FIA come and inspect everything, but is the FIA really qualified to analyze the car and determine similarity to the Ferrari chassis? If the FIA isn’t qualified then the next most likely candidate would be Ferrari. However if Ferrari would go over the McLaren car with a fine-toothed comb to see if any unique parts had been copied directly, they would be then gaining intimate knowledge of the MP4-22 which would kindof render this whole process moot. So really, McLaren is full of shit here too.

Paddy (Patrick) Lowe actually tries to make the assertion that he is so intimately aware with the MP4-22 and the design process that no FOREIGN (ie: from another team or another team’s data) idea could have been introduced into the development of it without having risen a red flag with him. Yeah, right Paddy. So your engineers never come up with the off-the-wall ideas that get at least tried or tested?

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the 115-page transcript:

Patrick LOWE: The value of the dossier is overstated. I have 780 better pages which I do not have the opportunity
to read. I don’t know why Mike Coughlan took position of the dossier, as is alleged. I can only
think that he had some sort of collector’s mentality. I have come across engineers who like
collecting things, like people collect stamps. It is of so little use, genuinely.

Patrick LOWE: I see what you are getting at. We do not know, ultimately, where we are going to stop. The
prediction is not precise. Teams want to save fuel wherever possible. That is why my first answer
still applies. Hypothetically, it would be useful, but practically speaking, it is never sufficiently
accurate to be useful.

Pedro DE LA ROSA: Yes, we are interested in all of our competitors, especially after qualifying, based on the delta in lap
time, between the Q2 and Q3. We deduce from this – as do all participants – the expected pit stop
strategy arrivals. We do this for everyone.

Pedro DE LA ROSA: Had it been an interesting figure, I might possibly have at least tested it. Unfortunately, at that moment, I did not think that it was interesting.

Ron DENNIS: Is that not a double-negative? How can we assume what someone did or did not do? Either it
exists or it does not. The forensic nature of those processes, as I understood, was not only very
detailed, but could reconstruct most of the material held in a computer. That is why they are
experts. They did reconstruct a great deal of material, as I understand it.

Huh?

Nigel TOZZI: It strikes me as odd that, to stop someone from contacting him, the best method was to fly to
Barcelona. What is wrong with sending a letter, making a telephone call or sending an e-mail?

A month ago I read a post (watched a video?) from 1938 Media that popped up in my reader. I thought it was kinda funny, and moved on with my life.

>>> Fast forward 1 month. >>>

Today Loren did a video begging Podtech to take down his videos. I knew he had split from Podtech distribution, but I didn’t know why and I was curious. So I did a little using of The Google and I came across this post. OK. Where the hell was I in August? How did I miss this whole thing? Wired links to this absolutely vacuous droning drivelous response that I was only about to watch 12 seconds of before my bullshit filter kicked in and I stopped caring.

Seriously. Who cares? If you don’t find it funny, move on. If you find it funny, share it with your friends. Had SNL done the exact same sketch no one would have cared. Why is Feldman any different? We’ve got this fixation on scandal in this country and it has to stop before it devours us from the inside.

If you’ve never heard of Loren Feldman and 1938 Media you’re missing out on one of the Internet’s gems. You can thank the idiots who turned 1 goofy video into a big scandal for bringing him more attention.

I was just reading some news before crashing, when I made the mistake of clicking a Forbes.com link. The next thing that happened in my mind was the antagonizing feeling of annoyance that I had forgotten that Forbes.com has those stupid god damn pre-site interstitial-type splash-screen ads. After clicking “Skip this ad” I settled in to reading my article. No sooner had I read the first paragraph was I blasted in the face with “WHERE SHOULD YOU BE INVESTING YOUR MONEY RIGHT ..” before I was able to hit the pause button. A fucking talking ad on Forbes.com? A talking ad with auto-play enabled. A talking ad hocking some get-rich quick program. Remarkable.

The solution:

echo "127.0.0.1 www.forbes.com" >>/etc/hosts

Now even if I make the stupid mistake of clicking on a Forbes link, at least I won’t have to suffer through looking at that pile of shit web site.

Arbitrage this. Arbitrage that. If you’re really cool, you call it “arb”. I’m sick and tired of seeing the word arbitrage every time someone makes a profit. It is especially prevalent and poorly used in the online marketing world. Arbitrage is the practice of buying and selling something when there is a price discrepancy between markets. Buying corn at the farmer’s market and selling it on a street corner is not arbitrage. There are costs involved, and more importantly for the pure definition of arbitrage, there are risks involved. Maybe no one on the corner will buy your corn, then you’re stuck with it. However, IF you were able to sit in front of a computer and notice that corn futures on the west coast exchange are selling for more than corn futures on the east coast, and IF you were able to buy and sell those between the 2 exchanges at basically the exact same moment, THEN you would be doing arbitrage. More examples:

Buying cheap AdWords and getting users to click high-priced AdWords (via AdSense): Arbitrage

Buying Google/Yahoo/MSN PPC traffic and directing to affiliates: Not Fricking Arbitrage (risk, not a direct price difference between markets)

Buying computer parts online online (Sorry, Shoe) and selling them locally: Not Fricking Arbitrage (risk, additional costs, timeframe)

Taking out a loan at 5% on Prosper.com, and then re-lending the same money at 8%: Arbitrage

Buying (and converting to A) Berkshire Hathaway B shares when the price of 30 of them would be less than an A share: Arbitrage

Buying anything and selling it on eBay: Not Arbitrage

I know this post isn’t going to cause some fundamental shift in how people use the word arbitrage, but at least I got it off my chest.

Over six months ago, everyone’s favorite online marketing “radio” station switched their content delivery to Akamai. They gave various public reasons for the switch, but the reality was that Limelight was sucking at it. I’m not sure how it can be that hard to stream out the 3-4 listeners that WMR has, but apparently Limelight couldn’t hack it.

So they switched to the #1 fastest growing tech company who also happens to be the #1 content delivery company in the world. Akamai basically invented the CDN and they do a god damn good job at it. So good are they that Amazon, MTV, Apple, Fox, Clear Channel, IBSYS, Adobe and countless others use Akamai. Apparently they aren’t good enough to figure out how to stream to 3 or 4 listeners for Webmaster Radio.

Since the day of the switch, all Mac and Linux users, and PC users who use Winamp were unable to listen to Webmaster radio. At first WMR claimed they were working on it. Then they started to blame Akamai saying that support wasn’t helping them. They even issued a press release asking for users to help figure out their issues. Now they’ve gone so far as to run commercials on their own shows begging people to tell them what is wrong. Now it seems they’ve switched to some no-name company called Mediacast1, yet they run a commercial touting that they use “AKAMAAAAI”.

When you have to run a commercial begging your users to help you fix your stuff, you suck.

Listen you idiots. You were streaming Windows Media 9 streams. Macs don’t support Windows Media. Neither does Linux, or winamp. All along, it was your fault, and I tried to tell you that but you didn’t want to listen.

You guys aren’t that big, in fact its probably much better that you switched from Akamai. They’re too big for YOU half-wits to figure out. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to host your own content in-house. I know how many listeners you have, and its not many. All you need is a $60/mo hosting machine.

Stop acting like you’re Clear Channel and fix your system. You have the head start, but your competitors are going to decimate you.