twg wrote:
Rule 869/44 indicates that a dead organism is not a person, because it is not capable of thinking. So if an organism who was a player died, e would cease to be a person and COULD NOT be a player any longer. But this is not the same as "deregistering", because that is the act of flipping a Citizenship switch to Unregistered, and non-persons do not have Citizenship switches. Are there rules that would malfunction if this happened?Non-persons also cannot have Patent Titles, Ribbons etc, so we have a potential loss of historical information in Herald, Tailor and Registrar reports. Not to mention that dying could cause someone to cease to be a party to a contract that would otherwise prohibit em from doing so. R2350 says:Creating a proposal adds it to the Proposal Pool. Once a proposal is created, nether its text nor any of the aforementioned attributes can be changed. The author (syn. proposer) of a proposal is the _person_ who submitted it.(emphasis mine) If the organism that was once the author of a proposal dies, then that proposal's author is now undefined, which is a change in one of the aforementioned attributes. So the rule is self-contradictory! Same for co-authors. Regulations Promulgated by an organism cease to be Regulations when the organism dies. And what if an Auctioneer or vote collector dies? Perhaps Rule 869 should be amended to state that any people continue to be people in perpetuity even if they stop meeting the definition of a person.
We've previously defined classes non-biological persons (contracts and
such), and then had a specific instance cease to exist while the class
was still defined. I don't remember this issue coming up then (but I
might be forgetting something), and those were situations where we
specifically expected to knowingly encounter the issue at some point.
In any case, the simplest idea that comes to mind is interpreting
"person" as "entity that was a person at the time in question". And if
that didn't work, then we would presumably legislate whatever legal
fiction ("X was continuously a person during time period Y") was needed
to patch the gamestate, similar to the Annabel Crisis (for new players:
Annabel presented emself as a new player for a couple years before
revealing that e was actually a returning player, we eventually
legislated the legal fiction "there actually was a new player Annabel
who sent all those messages").
