Quote:
Originally Posted by fox46
I should have known this would spin off into a "who art more gracious than thou" debate. Face the facts- there are individuals in FIRST who do not follow the rules or intend to bend them to their advantage. People like us who abide by them cannot implicitly expect everyone else to. If so, then why even have a bag? Why not just agree that everyone will stop work on a specific day? The fact is that not everyone is 100% honest, gracious and rule/law abiding. If you debate this then you are in for some serious disappointment later in life outside the protection of the FIRST community.
I've been involved for well over a decade in FIRST and have yet to win a regional. You think you need to tell me this?
It is however, about preparing students for their futures and lives. I can assure you that as a high school student struggling to get a drill motor to power a wheel I learned a lot more than one would when they are given a kit chassis. It taught me about every facet of machine design. The environment in which we are currently operating is breeding a flock of catalogue engineers who are completely dumbfounded when their solution doesn't exist on a website. You cannot deny that it squelches innovation - why would a team build a multi-speed gearbox when they can buy one off the shelf? (This of course is not a generalized statement- obviously).
With respect to the liberties with stop-build-day, you remove some of the challenge of the entire process. No longer is there a brick wall at the end of build season. This is very unlike the real world! It is no longer representative of if a company misses a delivery date they lose the contract. Instead teams could entirely legally continue building all the way up until their competition, disassemble their robot and walk in with a 45lb frame and pre-cut wires and assemble their entire machine. Why even have a stop build day?
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I wrote out a long response to this, but I'm not going to post it because it is too off topic.
However, my original post wasn't adressing your comments about COTs parts or the witholding allowance. It was adressing your comments about out of the bag time for demos. If these demos are done appropriately, which I believe they will be most of the time, then that isn't really hurting the integrity of the deadline (if you insist that the integrity of the deadline is important). Its just making it easier for teams to achieve FIRST's goals. Teams gain no advantage by showing off their robot for a little bit, as long as they follow FIRSTs guidelines. But I will admit that there will be some teams that use this as an oppurtunity to practice while demoing. However, why should we care? If those teams want to do that, then let them. They are only hurting themselves. The only reason that anybody else needs to care is that it makes things unfair. But like I said, fairness only matters if you care about winning.
But I do want to apologize. My post was very rash, and somewhat disrespectful. I just get very passionate when people start accusing other teams of not teaching their students enough, and that is basically what I see you doing. I do have some personal reasons for being this passionate, but those aren't an excuse. So I'm sorry.