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                              CFJ 1145
                              
    The changes to the scoring Rule announced in message 740 in the 
    egroups archive of agora-official are to be used for the current 
    round which began June 1, 1999. 

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Called by:           Lee

Judge:               Crito
Judgement:           FALSE

Judge selection:

Eligible:            Crito, elJefe, ELysion, harvel, Kolja, Michael,
                     Morendil, Murphy, Peekee, Vlad, Wes

Not eligible:
Caller:              Lee
Barred:              -
Had their turn:      Beefurabi, Blob, Chuck
Already served:      - 
Defaulted:           - 
By request:          -
On Hold:             -

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History: 

Called by Lee:                       02 Jul 1999 15:18:19 -0700
Assigned to Crito:                   02 Jul 1999 16:51:30 -0700
Judged FALSE by Crito:               09 Jul 1999 13:06:05 -0400
Judgement Distributed:               As of this message

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Caller's Arguments: 

<none>

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Evidence: 


Relevant dates in header of message 740 as sent by Vlad: 

     From scd27-@mizzou.edu Tue May 25 04:22:31 1999 
     Received: (from majordom-@localhost) 
             by gecko.serc.rmit.edu.au (8.8.5/8.8.5) id LAA09230 
             for agora-official-list; Tue, 25 May 1999 11:19:18 GMT 

Rule 1878: 

     "Once per Round, no more than two weeks and no less than one week 
     before the end of the Round, the Scorekeepor may act to change 
     the Scoring Rule Without 3 Objections. The Scorekeepor may only 
     propose changes to the basis of Scoring, otherwise the Action 
     automatically fails. If the action takes effect, the Scoring 
     Rule is changed appropriately at the beginning of the next 
     Round." 

Rule 1875: 

     "The Grand Agoran Tournament consists of a series of Rounds. 
     These Rounds begin on the First of March, June, September, and 
     October of each year, and last for three months." 

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Judge's Arguments:

When I first looked at this CFJ, I thought the outcome would 
depend upon the interpretation of when the announcement was 
actually made in the PF - an interesting and important issue. 
Unfortunately, the statement turns out to be trivially false 
due to failure of Vlad to conform to the Rules for changing 
Scoring.  Note that R1875 requires the Scorekeepor to post 
an intention to change scoring "no less than one week" before 
the beginning of the next round.  R1875 specifies that the 
relevant Round began on June 1.  Without further specification, 
it must be assumed that this means at 00:00:00 GMT on June 1.  One 
week prior to this is 00:00:00 GMT on May 25.  The header 
in Vlad's original message indicates that e attempted to post 
eir announcement 11 hours, 19 minutes and 18 seconds too late. 

As to the more interesting issue, it is this Judge's opinion that 
the CFJ should have been judged false even if Vlad's original 
message was sent prior to May 25 00:00:00 GMT.  Although, IIRC, 
there is strong game custom that a message is considered posted 
to the PF when it "enters the technical domain" of the PF, the 
more recent Without Objection Rules put pressure on us to re-examine 
this custom.  Common sense and the best interests of the game now, 
IMO, dictate that a message should not be considered sent to the 
PF until such time as the message is routed to the subscribers of 
the PF list.  It would not be appropriate for the entire Agoran 
community to be deprived of the ability to Object within the 
required time period because of technical difficulties, negligence, 
or malfeasance on the part of a PF list administrator. 

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