Gratuitous: i see 6 >. And no one can prove otherwise. Therefore, take this as an argument for IRRELEVANT: the transfer is specifying an ambiguous number of spendies, and is therefor invalid.
-- 4st putting jesters cap back on, it fell off while mobile On Thu, Jan 9, 2025, 4:37 PM Katherina Walshe-Grey via agora-business < agora-busin...@agoranomic.org> wrote: > From x > >From x > >>From x > > I transfer to Janet a number of Spendies equal to the number of ">" > characters in this message. > > CFJ: "I possess 16 Spendies." > > > Arguments FOR: > > In the message I sent to the list, there were four instances of the > character in question. I declare this under penalty of No Faking. > > I believe it is not in dispute that I possessed 20 Spendies before > sending this message, according to the most recent Spendor report. I > declare this under penalty of No Faking. > > Thus, I have transferred 4 Spendies and now possess 16. > > > Arguments AGAINST: > > The mailman server operating this mailing list stores messages in mboxo > format, which is an old-fashioned mailbox format that prepends the > character in question to any line beginning "From " (a process called > "From-munging"). This is done because the mbox family of formats stores > new messages by concatenating them to the end of the file, and a line > beginning "From " is used to recognise the start of a new message. > Unfortunately, this means a "From " line that already had the character > prepended as sent is indistinguishable from one that did not but has > been munged. > > (The slightly newer (1995) mboxrd format would fix this issue by > appending an extra copy of the character in question to any line that > already begins with it. That is entirely reversible.) > > Because it is not possible to tell whether the prepended character was > original or not, display tools will conventionally display it anyway. > Thus, all current message displays, including the web-based mailman > archive and the public archive at mail-archive.com, will display this > message with five instances of the character in question. I am sending > this message in full knowledge of that fact, and declare this under > penalty of No Faking. > > As a result, this message contains five instances of the character, and > I have transferred 5 Spendies, and now possess 15. > > > General arguments: > > Buggy From-munging like this could be regarded as a trivial example of > message corruption. Supposing I send a message to the public forum, and > a bug in some layer of the email stack somehow causes a different > message to be distributed to players, does the game in fact regard me as > having published the corrupted message? I don't think any reasonable > person would conclude that it did. > > It is, however, relevant that I am sending the message knowing this is > going to happen, because there is another similar example: the list > subject prefixes. When I sent this message, it did not contain "BUS:" in > the subject line; but the version of the message received by everyone > else will do, because the list will add it. So does this message's > subject line contain the string "BUS:"? > > Unfortunately, if the answer to the first question is "No" and the > second is "Yes", as seems intuitive, then the content of a message is > dependent on *the sender's mental state at the time it was sent*, and > cannot be perfectly determined from the text that was received by its > recipients. This would seem not to be in the best interests of the game. > > I don't know what the correct judgement is, and am keen to find out. > > ~qenya >
