On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, Geoffrey Spear wrote:
> Maybe I'm misreading this, but it seems to me that the context of the
> process of making a statement contained in a message is the
> publication of that entire message. While the ordering of actions
> announced in a message can be significant, we should in general take
> the published message as a whole to take effect at the moment it was
> published, and non-action disclaimers should be applied to what they
> claim to apply to, regardless of where in the message they occur. I'd
> argue for a ruling of TRUE in 2086/2087 based on Zefram's arguments,
> and clearly you think the same arguments point to FALSE.
Followup: The old Rule 1527 has been repealed. Nothing has explicitly
replaced it and so the Rules are silent on how to deal with those
situations now. It is perfectly in keeping with custom and precedent,
then, to use R1527 as a method of resolution. Under R1527, the back-and-
forth referring would constitute an ambiguous ordering and thus the
attempts would fail leading 2086/2087 to be false.
Rule 1527/3 (Power=1)
Timing of Multiple Events in One Message
Whenever a message contains more than one action -- such as a
notification, report, or other communication -- on which the
Rules place some legal significance, the actions in that message
shall be taken to have been sent sequentially in the order which
they appear in the message.
If a message attempts to perform multiple actions simultaneously
without explicitly stating a specific order for the actions,
then the attempt shall be considered ambiguous and without
effect if the gamestate would be substantively different for any
two orderings of the actions. For the purposes of this test, the
actual order the actions are performed in is not considered
substantive, but other differences may, at the discretion of a
judge, be considered substantive.
-Goethe
