RE: spoon-discuss: Re: spoon-business: Proposal: Bandwidth Limiting That Works?

["Jonathan Van Matre" <JVanMatre@xxxxxxxx>]

If it will make things easier, we could just pad the number a little
more and say something like 7000 or 8000 characters including whitespace
and HTML markup.  My preference is for non-whitespace only, though,
because I want to encourage the use of whitespace to make the rules more
readable.  I'd hate to see people submitting big, unformatted, 500-word
block paragraphs as rules just to squeeze in under the limit.

In any event, I think delimiter characters should count, since it will
encourage use of the standard delimiters, while permitting (but mildly
discouraging) creative delimiters like @@WORDTOYOMOTHA@@.

Overall, providing we can implement this (and fairly), I think it does a
decent job of closing the proposals per nweek loophole, enabling the
proposal of non-interdependent concepts as separate ballot measures, and
still providing a reasonable limit on ballot bandwidth (which still
encourages cooperation if vast systems of rules on the order of 236 are
being proposed).  

I'll leave the prop as is for now, but remain open to friendly
amendments as our esteemed Admin tinkers with the methodology and gains
a better sense of what seems doable.

--Scoff!


> -----Original Message-----
> From: David E. Smith [mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 1:46 PM
> To: spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
> Subject: spoon-discuss: Re: spoon-business: Proposal: 
> Bandwidth Limiting
> That Works?
> 
> 
> 
> [[ max 6000 characters per player per ballot ]]
> 
> > [[I welcome input from the Administrator on how this might be
> > implemented, or if it's impossible.  There are any number of
> > freeware/shareware/bloatware editing programs that count 
> non-whitespace
> > text (e.g. MS Word, UltraEdit).  But the most elegant 
> solution might be
> > to make all proposal submissions via a web page that would 
> automatically
> > count the characters and automatically notify the player 
> whether it was
> > accepted or rejected.  Saves everyone having to find their 
> own method of
> > counting.
> 
> The counts will never be precise, since I have to add at 
> least a little
> HTML to each proposal/rule/whatever. Just linebreaks and so 
> on, but that's
> 4 characters per linebreak and 8 per blank line.
> 
> http://www.nomic.net/~g6/sizer.php is the two-minute prototype. It's
> broken, but it shows that it sorta kinda works. It counts 
> whitespace and
> HTML because I'm lazy. Here's all it does:
> 
> // first a quick SQL query, then...
> 
> while($row=mysql_fetch_array($res) {
>   $playersize[$row["owner"]] += strlen($row["ruletext"]);
> }
> 
> Writing a function to only count "real" characters wouldn't be that
> difficult, but it does border on the "takes more than five 
> minutes to do"
> category, since it has to track at least a little bit of 
> state internally.
> (And do I count the Standard Delimiter characters or not? The fun
> grows...)
> 
> For reference: player 6 is Iain, player 16 is gritter, 17 is 
> Scoff!, and
> 21 is Bean. (The Web page mentioned above only lists player 
> numbers. Like
> I said, it was a quickie. I've spent more time on this email 
> than on that
> page, and I'm not even done with this email yet.)
> 
> Personally, I like Bandwidth Rationing, for two reasons:
> 
> 1. It keeps my workload down. I know that right now, in the 
> worst possible
> case, I'll only have to deal with about 48 proposals (assuming all 16
> players submit all three proposals). That doesn't count the 
> fact that some
> people hold theirs over through an (unintended?) loophole in Bandwidth
> Rationing, but it's still vaguely tolerable.
> 
> 2. In a backhanded way, it can encourage player cooperation. 
> If you have
> some sweeping change you'd like to implement, but it's too 
> complex for one
> big omnibus bill (236 just leaps to mind here), you can 
> always work with
> another player. You can submit part of the changes, and 
> someone else can
> submit the other part of the changes. Yeah, you have to share 
> the points
> and the glory; it's called compromise (or, "playing nice with 
> others"). If
> we look at Nomic in general as a microcosm of real-world 
> government, this
> sort of thing is almost necessary.
> 
> ...dave
> 
>