DrTodd13

At one point in time, David Stevenson was working on creating a course / certification program for tournament directors. If "we" are seriously interested in this type of thing, he would be a natural person to talk to. You mean only for online tournament directors or f2f as well? Stevenson would be an obvious choice but in addition to simply educating, there are some decisions to be made. The WBF addendum for online play is pretty lacking in things like tempo/disconnection issues. Like the other thread going on now is discussing, we need to decide how to deal with breaks-in-tempo online before we can educate people. I say that we lead rather than follow. Get some good people together and decide and publish our own rules for online play that compliment the WBF laws.

If everyone were ethical would we need laws regarding BIT? Would you also suggest that the rules regarding insufficient bids be withdrawn and replaced with a rule that states insufficient bids may be replaced without penalty? After all, most people are ethical and make insufficient bids accidentally right? Why is it that the rule about insufficient bids is written the way it is? Why would they choose to punish people for accidents? Most of the rules are designed not to punish but to restore equity. Some of the rules (perhaps the most obvious is the extra trick for a revoke) do punish. Even there, however, punishment is not the intent behind the law, but it is recognised that some loss of equity is a price worth paying for increased certainty in the ruling. Why do we need laws re. BIT? because no matter how ethical the player, (1) a break in tempo is not, by itself, either illegal or unethical and (2) whether or not there is an LA is often a debatable question. In face to face games, most of the disputes over BIT that I encounter do not revolve around a dispute over whether there was a break in tempo, but around the subsequent issues when the BIT is a given. Have you read ACBL appeals manuals from ACBL nationals? A good percentage of the time, the non-offending side will claim the BIT was 3 or 4 times longer than the offending side will admit. I don't know what you mean by "increased certainty in the ruling." Why don't the revoke rules simply restore equity rather than penalizing? It is sad to admit but if all bridge laws simply sought to restore equity then there would be no reason not to try to manipulate the system for your own benefit. If you get caught then no one can prove you did it intentionally and all that will happen is what would have happened had you donw nothing. I contend that if the laws were not designed to be punitive that they should have been because otherwise there is no way to catch and punish people who misuse the system. Sure, if they do it constantly then maybe you can prove a pattern but if they are smart about it then you couldn't prove it wasn't an accident.

I think we need to create a website with educational materials for online directors and provide a certification quiz. You pass the quiz and you get to put that you're a certified XYZ online director on your profile. In addition, people could file protests against a director to the website and we would look at the situation and decide if the director goofed or not. If he did goof then we determine whether he has to retest or not. If the protest has no merit then you refuse to listen to further protests from that user against any certified director.

I've had 3 or 4 people that I don't know and have never played with or against spontaneously start messaging me every time I login. They'll call me friend and start trying to ask a bunch of personal questions often interspersed with seeming hero worship with statements like "why don't you have a 'star?' you're the best player on BBO." If they believe this they are clearly crazy. I just make them an enemy and that is that.

If everyone were ethical would we need laws regarding BIT? Would you also suggest that the rules regarding insufficient bids be withdrawn and replaced with a rule that states insufficient bids may be replaced without penalty? After all, most people are ethical and make insufficient bids accidentally right? Why is it that the rule about insufficient bids is written the way it is? Why would they choose to punish people for accidents?

So if I'm accused of thought crime I'll have to prove that I wasn't thinking? This is even more scarry than I ... ehhhh ...... thought ..... You are not accused of a thought crime for thinking since thinking is allowed. The only thing is that your partner has to make sure to take the normal action if you pass. BIT is not an automatic penalty but like the other poster said, you look at the result of the BIT on partner and not at the BIT itself. Your partner is just banned from taking a flier if there is a BIT.

Personally, I think that all long hesitations should be treated as thinking unless the player has a red dot. Your doorbell rang? Sorry. I think this is consistent with the spirit of many laws. You spill coffee in your lap and drop a card on the table? It's a penalty card. It doesn't matter if you intentionally dropped it or not. Since we can't read your mind (or know whether you were thinking or not) then the benefit of the doubt goes to the side that certainly did not offend.

US Mind Control Not that this has to do with 9/11 but it illustrates the level to which people will do things in the name of nationalism. Maybe it is another Pearl Harbor where allegedly they knew about it and intentionally didn't prevent it.

In the tinker toy system I implemented, this is how I did it. There is no such concept of an individual sitting down at a table. The first thing you do is find a partner and once you have a partnership you can find a list of other partnerships to play against. In my system, you could disband the partnership at a MBC table anytime you wanted but the system would stop you from leaving in the middle of a hand. This is a little bit of an improvement but what you really want is an established partnership and it is difficult to implement something with that kind of requirement.

I don't know why GW is going to predominantly hurt the poor. The rich tend to live on the coasts and they are the ones who will be inundated if sea levels rise. It would seem that more CO2 and slightly higher temperatures would be good for food production. Productive regions may shift slightly but markets will adapt and cheaper food is good for the poor. I find this whole discussion very disconcerting. People don't seem to understand the difference between intentional misinformation and simply being mistaken. I don't know whether Bush really thought there were WMDs in Iraq but if he did and there weren't then that is a mistake and not a sin/crime/etc. If he knew there weren't and he lied to get us to go to war then that is the evil we need to destroy. If someone legitimately believes humans are not causing global warming then they may be mistaken but they shouldn't be labelled a criminal. Another article I saw today was by a pro-GW scientists who still lamented that human-caused global warming appears to be the only scientific theory for which it has become anathema to even question it. As such it has passed out of the region of science and has become a faith. If you won't even review a paper suggesting humans aren't causing GW then how can you ever falsify GW and if it couldn't conceivably be falsified then it isn't science. Anyway, basically all climatologists are paid to express their opinion. If they accept GW they get paid by people who want to believe in GW. If they don't accept GW then they get paid by oil companies or whoever. Everybody has some motivation here and there are ample funds to be had whatever your inclination so I don't believe that many people are lying about their opinion to get money.

First off, individuals share culpability for burning fossil fuels. Companies provide them knowing they will be burned but individuals are the ones who buy them with the intent to burn so you can't lay all the blame on companies. So what you are saying is that anyone who happens to have coercive power is responsible for failing to prevent the tragedy of the commons?

Opinions are crimes in many countries and people are put on trial all the time for them. See Italy and what they list as hate speech and who they arrest. :P I am not sure are you saying they should be or that it should be a crime and they should be put on trial for putting opinions on trial? Or we do nothing and just put our heads in the sand? ;) My understanding is that holocaust denial is a crime in Germany. In the article, they talk about how the people advocating this GW thing are using terminology reminiscent of holocaust deniers and thus in some way linking the two beliefs. As you might expect, this is ticking people off to in any way equate these two things. What would I advocate? Certainly I wouldn't advocate that any opinion should be a crime. People who prosecute others for their opinions are evil and they themselves should be penalized.

This caused my first chuckle of the day. Good one. ;)

Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics. The above link says that some people are proposing "Nuremberg-style" trials for people who are skeptical about humans being the cause of global warming. The link goes so far as to claim that human-caused GW skepticism is a "crime against humanity." As opinion is soon to be a crime, I just lobotomized myself. I am a sheep now.

Again, this depends on the purpose of the rating. If the rating is supposed to be visible to others then it must include all boards. If the rating is purely for personal use then let people track their performance however they want to. If they drop boards to prove themselves better than they are then they delude themselves but nobody else is hurt.

The world of warcraft episode was truly hilarious. I haven't seen the 9/11 south park episode but the south park guys are libertarians which are probably more likely to believe in a conspiracy so we'll see what they have to say about the issue.

Also need to weight the review based on number of boards played together. You could get that from myhands I suppose. Big problem is that any external website wouldn't be used enough to matter. It really has to be integrated into BBO or it won't be used enough.

All this depends on the purpose of the rating. Some people might want a rating to track their own progress as an individual or their progress as part of one or more regular partnerships. Some people might want others rated individually for the purpose of finding a reasonable partner or opponents or teammates. A rating that includes some measure of friendliness or stick-to-it-ness would be useful for finding a partner or opp. You want someone who is nice who isn't going to bolt the first time somebody does something a bit odd. Conversely, a rating to track your own progress should not include such features. For rating your own progress you might even like the ability to selectively exclude boards where partner took some ridiculous action. I suspect that people are most interested in finding potential partners, then tracking their own progress, then tracking partnership progress. So, while partnership ratings may be easier than individual ratings, there are so few regular partnerships playing against each other right now that I fear the graph would be so disconnected that even getting a partnership rating would be difficult. I still contend that peer-rating is the way to go to solve the first problem of finding matching partners or opponents and it doesn't suffer from the problems of the Lehman system.

In tourneys you may play against all comers but in the MBC I would venture to say that most play is within one self-rated level. Any rating system cannot possibly be accurate unless it takes into account the skill of the people involved and the expected outcome. The Lehman system used on BBO does it this way. The Lehman system isn't perfect but it is reasonably accurate. The problem with this rating system is not how accurate it is but the effect of having a rating system in place on how people behave.

Blah blah blah...same paternalistic crap. Government knows better how to run your life than you do. They want to keep you maximally efficient to extract maximum tax dollars from you. Sure, gambling can be addictive and people do suffer as a result but the same is true of big macs. Be consistent, either ban everything potentially hurtful or let people decide for themselves and let their families intervene if there is a problem.

A while back, I posted my implementation of a peer-reviewed ratings system. In it, I weighted someone's rating of you based on the number of boards you had played together up to some maximum. So, if you played 3 boards and quit then your rating would count only 1/30th as much as someone who had played 90 boards with someone. I think this takes care of the problem of somebody getting pissed and leaving. If everyone who plays with you gets pissed and leaves after 3 boards then you really must be terrible or an asshole or both and as such their rating of you is fair.

It will have to become truely terrible before people will revolt. As long as people accept the duopoly, government power will expand indefinitely. It doesn't matter whether the executive wields it or the legislative or if they collude with one another. Given time, the supreme court will always follow the mindset of pres/congress with perhaps a bit of a time lag. No one can force them to interpret the constitution correctly. Fighting the duopoly now is impossible. People are too fat and happy and willingly surrender their rights.

Sorry Winston, Abraham Lincoln decided that declarations of independence are not American. Nevertheless, I don't think we are quite as far along this path as you seem to think that we are. What does worry me is the construction of FEMA detention centers. They must anticipate the need for them but who are they planning on detaining?

I went to a pairs event at a normal night at my local club. I saw a lot of people I didn't know but I did know who were undoubtedly the best pair in the room. Head and shoulders above the rest. Their result? 46%. It just so happened that all their good decisions turned out wrong on this set of boards thanks in part to trying to draw inferences from people who didn't know what they were doing. Put these people in an all expert tournament and they would do very well but if you have an all-expert tournament, no one will score 70%. This doesn't sound like a way to define expert to me. You are an expert if people consider you an expert. As far as I'm concerned, there is no objective definition of "expert."

I think somebody made the point that the WBF doesn't have exclusive rights to the term bridge and therefore people get to define for themselves and their tournaments what it means. If someone offers a game of "bridge" then you can have no expectation of what that game will be like. If it is on BBO then you can know certain things but the tourney could allow people to openly discuss their hands as BBO can't prevent that. I find this belief pretty silly and I agree with blackshoe. If you say bridge, it means the laws as promulgated by the WBF. This is because there is only one worldwide group promulgating such laws. If there were two games called bridge with equal participation then the use of the word "bridge" would not be that helpful and would need more clarification but as it is, there is only one such game that dominates any others that might exist. If you said you were hosting a bridge tourney, took people's money and then when play started it deviated in major ways from the official laws and people complained and filed a lawsuit demanding their money back, I'm pretty sure those people would win. The argument would be false advertising. You advertised "bridge" but what you provided was not "bridge" but something else of your own creation. In short, if you ban psyches, it isn't bridge.