[dlavery]

To avoid even the appearance of west-coast-bias, as well as the real potential for west coast teams to avoid having a four-hour advantage during the entire build season, FIRST has undertaken certain measures to compensate for the differences in game-release-vs-ship-deadline schedules. FIRST has worked with InnovationFIRST to add some special code into the default software that every team will be required to use. The code includes a special "geographic detection and compensation" (GDC) algorithm that will determine the time zone of the team, and the difference between the team time zone and MST (Manchester Standard Time). At apparently random times during the last week of the build season, the IFI controller will automatically shut down and disable itself for 30-minute periods. These periods will actually be carefully selected to be at the most inconvenient and frustrating moments, such as during a critical testing period or operator training. These random blackout periods will continue until the total disabled time equals the time difference caused by the team location. Once the GDC algorithm has determined that the team no longer has any possibility of preferential timing due to their location, the code shuts down and automatically removes itself from the system.

Note that due to one minor bug in the software that has not yet been resolved, locations of teams in the southern hemisphere are not properly identified. Due to an unfortunate sign-inversion error that has not been tracked down, the software calculates that these teams actually ship their robots before the kick-off. To compensate for this, the GDC software actually generates a small singularity, and the associated team is sucked through the resulting black hole back in time a number of hours equivalent to the time zone differences. IFI is trying to fix this before the kick-off, but there are no guarantees...

-dave