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Unread 20-02-2009, 04:43
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Cory Cory is offline
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AKA: Cory McBride
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs)
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Re: What's going in your Withholding Allowance?

This is the most ridiculous rule I have seen in my 9 years of FIRST robotics.

For the last 9 years I could walk into the event carrying 10 batteries with leads attached and nobody cared. Now this year suddenly this is different and we need to cut all our heat shrink off our terminated batteries, remove the leads, weigh them as part of our 40 lb witholding allowance, and then spend 30 minutes and $10 of heat shrink on Thursday morning in the pits to re-terminate our batteries?

I fail to see any universe in which this makes sense. It's a complete and total waste of time for a rule which is basically unenforceable anyways. How am I supposed to explain to my kids that they can't practice until they re-terminate all their batteries (unless we ship all our batteries event to event...which means we can't practice, and costs a ton of money).

Now we're all screwed anyways, as the crates are already gone and there's no way to even comply with the rules without de-terminating all our batteries (Let's not even mention the fact that based on the GDC's response to use the "would I want to return this item and get my money back if I bought it and it looked used" test, our batteries would not be COTS even with the leads removed).

There's really no way that teams are gaining a competitive advantage by coming in with pre-terminated batteries. This ruling is absolutely baffling to me.

Give me the old rulebook back with 100 more rules any day. At least you could understand them without a law degree.
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