On Nov 8, 2007, at 1:08 AM, John Geiger wrote:
>
> --- Ron Notarius W3WN <wn3vaw@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> A solution that only a lawyer could love:
>>
>
> Ron,
>
> Since you mention lawyers, you lead to another
> potentially serious problem for the ARRL. In the
> legal world precedence is as important as anything,
> and the ARRL has already set a bad precedence. By
> publically stating that they don't care if you follow
> the check rule or not, in essence they have stated
> that they don't care if their contest rules are
> followed or not. The next time a contester is
> disqualified for violation of a rule, any lawyer worth
> his/her weight in salt should be able to get the score
> reinstated based on this precedence.
Nope, it's not a legal precedence.
>
> How can you disqualify people for violation of some
> rules, but not others-and people have publically
> stated on this list that they purposefully and
> willfully violated the check rule, with no
> ramifications from the ARRL for such an admission?
Because there are rules, and there are rules.
Running legal limit while claiming QRP is a violation of the rules
that puts the violator at a huge competitive advantage over those who
would stick to 5 watts or less.
Giving out a false QTH could be a big problem, esp. in V/UHF.
Reading down through the rules, it is pretty easy to spot which ones
are competitive edge issues, and which are just there to facilitate
the contest, such as exchanges in this case.
There is no competitive advantage no matter what the exchange chosen
in this case. It doesn't matter. If you got X number of QSOs using
the year you were licensed, you would get the same if you used some
fictitious number. No difference.
We might as well argue that people born on February 29th age at 1/4th
the rate as those of us born on any other day. Or at the least, they
could only have a legal birthday once every four years.
> It
> seems to me to be awfully discriminatory to say we are
> going to disqualify contester X for violating a rule,
> but that contester Y (who stated that they violated a
> rule) will not be disqualified.
>
This is the sort of thing that drives the rules makers up a wall.
When we get this, it is an accusation of corruption on our part. The
answer is no, we aren't going to allow people to run QRO and claim
QRP because say, we allowed someone to submit a log the day after
the deadline.
There are people in this world who sit around and try to find
loopholes in every rule they come across. They are joined by those
who have such a strict interpretation of the rules that they also
find loopholes. There is no possible way to design rules that will
satisfy them, there is always something. I've been involved in rules-
making for over ten years now, and its a fundamental law.
For the PAQSO Party, due to popular demand, I expanded the rules,
added definitions, and clarified a lot of things this past year. I
went from 1 page to 13 pages of rules, enough to make for a good
evenings reading. Guess what? No decrease in questions or disagreements.
I have taken to wondering if that is what people want. If the rules
become so precise, so every single person in the world knows exactly
what is meant, and no one would think of questioning any contest rule
because all the rules are concise, precise, no need to look twice in
nature, would the potential contesters bother to read them all? Given
the feedback and questions I've received from my efforts, I could
easily go to 50 pages of rules.
I would challenge people as a fun exercise for folks to pick a
contest, grab a copy of the rules, and rewrite them so precisely that
the sponsors would adopt them. Oh yeah - these new rules have to be
enforceable too.
-73 de Mike N3LI -
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