On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think the timing of truth values and disclaimers is in fact "more
> complex and less clear." For example, if disclaimers work immediately
> forward, it would imply they could work immediately backwards, with
> connotations that a "message" never leaves a technical domain of
> control because we'd never be able to tell if it were "finished".
ais523's judgement in CFJ 2227 is relevant:
* One final issue is about whether Warrigal's statements
immediately presumably-after the presumed pledge constituted a
disclaimer that prevented it being created. I suspect probably
they do, because there was very little time involved in between
the messages. For email messages, sending a message and then
disclaimering it in a future message would obviously not be
valid, as convention is that the entire content of an email
message is in one email. On IRC, however, there is a convention
that messages can be split over multiple lines. For instance,
#ubuntu at high-traffic times sometimes has a rule that messages
have to be written in one line for pragmatic reasons (during
high-traffic, the parts of the message may end up very separated
and hard to read otherwise); for email, this rule would be
pointless, because nobody splits up messages anyway. Due to a
multiple-lines convention, it seems reasonable that a purported
contract and the disclaimer that it's only a proto ("Oops, I
didn't mean to agree to that.") are really part of the same
message in this case, especially as there were no intervening
lines and a very short timeframe. (As such, it's also plausible
to conclude that no contract is created via IRC until a few
seconds after the message arrives, so as to be sure that the
message itself is actually finished; the same presumably applied
to game actions in #really-a-cow, but I don't believe anything
happened for which this would make a difference.)
