After some consideration, a ski trip, and the Lone Star Regional, I think I'm ready to dive back in....
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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
You are simply wrong whe you assume that our competition parts get modified after ship. They don't. If a part gets modified it is no longer a competition part and on our team it doesn't get used during any competition.
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I apologize for impugning you and your team, Ken. That was not what I was trying to do. I realize that you do follow the letter and spirit of the rules as they are now written.
The point I was trying to make is not that teams are breaking the rules (which we can't do much about), but that the rules are structured so as to be meaningless (they are, as the title of the thread says, broken). What is the difference between having a spare robot in the arena and having it in the back of a truck in a parking lot? How does it make sense that one would be legal and the other illegal?
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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
We resoldered some PWM cables to a switch in a case where the ONLY thing that was not pre-ship was the SOLDER.
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This follows both the letter and the spirit of the law. But it also proves that the letter of the law is really stupid. What sense does it make to have a component that was built legally, then modified after ship, to have to be de-modified and then re-modified at the competition? It's ridiculous.
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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
As to the "appearances" complaint, I respectfully disagree with you. I think you are letting the lawyers win when you start nitpicking about appearances in a case where someone has actually followed the rules.
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I think that the reason "the lawyers" have gotten such a bad image (apart from Dave Lavery's
famous post) is because (of the unfair stereotype that) they don't care about
appearances of wrongdoing, and therefore don't
appear to care about right and wrong, and focus entirely on the written law and its many unpluggable loopholes.
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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
FIRST has so many instances where the thing that keeps us within the rules is our own conscience - my guess is they WANT to trust us and want us to trust each other. Its part of the FIRST culture isn't it?
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I'm not sure about the other regionals, but at the Lone Star regional last weekend, all robots in the elimination rounds were weighed before every elim match. This was, according to our head inspector, because during some random re-inspections, robots at other regionals had been found to have gained as much as 4-5 pounds since their initial inspection. The reason I bring it up is not to say that we're all crooks and need constant supervision to be kept in line, but to show that the culture of trust and sportsmanship is slipping. There are hundreds of new FIRST teams every year, and it will be a battle to make sure that every participant on every one of them knows that the rules are something we take seriously. We don't look the other way when a rule is bent or broken, even for established teams.
In order to accomplish that, we need to limit (in the rules) what can be brought to the competition to raw materials and OTS parts. Everything else either comes in the crate or stays at home.
/An edit - excerpts from codes of ethics
The IEEE code of ethics includes:
[We agree] to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible...
The NSPE code of ethics includes:
Engineers shall disclose all known or potential conflicts of interest that could influence or appear to influence their judgment or the quality of their services.