On Thu, 8 May 2008, Alexander Smith wrote: > Goethe wrote: >> Once regulated, a quantity can only be changed by methods contained >> in the rules. > Can you give a citation for that? From my quick grepping of the rules, > the only effect that I saw regulating something had was to prevent that > something from taking place under rule 101(ii). You're confusing > "regulated" and "secured"; I don't see anything in the ruleset that > says that changing contestship of a contract is secured. I agree that > it is regulated, but you haven't convinced me that that's relevant here.
"Secured" is new and merely sets up a shorthand to prohibit Power-1 rules from claiming they can change some power-2 secured quantities (for example). Regulated is ancient. And you've got the presumption backwards. Nothing can happen in a game that the rules don't allow to happen, otherwise you're not playing the game. So to do something in Agora, it must be in the Rules of Agora, otherwise you're not playing Agora. R101, by stating "anything not regulated can be done at will" strongly implies "anything regulated can *not* be done at will." It's concisely but completely written. This is the current version of the Nomic "anything not regulated is permitted" that prevents Agora from extending to non-Agoran aspects of Players' lives. It's so fundamental we tend to forget that it needs to be specified and take it for granted. But in allowing the unregulated, it implies that permission is needed and mechanism must be specified to perform *any and every* regulated action. Anyone care to do the homework in the case law and Agoran tradition for this one? (It's worthy of a thesis). I'll grant that there's a slim to vanishing chance that you are right and "regulated" is currently broken somehow by the introduction of secured, but I don't believe so (and it would need far more than a grep to dig out arguments against the case law for that). The rules *don't* provide any blanket mechanism or permission for performing regulated actions (as they explicitly provide for unregulated ones), so exceptio probat regulam: no blanket mechanism or permission can be construed to exist. -Goethe
