Herbert Rodney Vaughn, a/k/a tanstaafl, states that he wants to file a
300 page long ethics complaint against me.

Actually, I am looking forward to seeing this document he says that he
has created. However, he says that he wants to submit it on CD, not on
paper.

The Committee Chairman has already rejected this, and rightly so,
because a CD costs one dollar, but submitting it on CD would put the
office staff and the individual members of the committee to the
trouble and expense of printing out this 300 page document.

Already, Herbert Rodney Vaughn is complaining about the expense TO HIM
of printing out this 300 page document. But there is more. He wants
the USCF office staff to make COLOR COPIES of this entire 300 page
document and distribute it to each member of the Ethics Committee.

Obviously, this cannot be allowed. If Herbert Rodney Vaughan seriously
wants to create a 300 page ethics complaint and have it considered by
the Ethics Committee, he needs to make at least one copy for each
member of the Ethics Committee, one copy for the office and one copy
for me. This must be done at his expense, not at the expense of the
USCF.

What Herbert Rodney Vaughn obviously intends to do is download 300
pages of Internet newsgroup postings. I doubt that the Ethics
Committee would be willing to read and consider an ethics complaint
created in this way, but that is their concern, not mine.

Sam Sloan


tanstaafl wrote:

I will of course supply the material in whatever form the
committee prefers. I would think it would be much easier to for the
committee to go through the material in electronic form. I don't want
to be argumentative here -- the last thing I'd want to do is irritate
the group of people that will be considering my complaint -- but I'd
really like to ask you to reconsider.

Note: I'm not suggesting that the committee should be required
to follow a bunch of links to web pages. The hyperlinks I referred to
were for INTERNAL links within the documents. This will make it much
easier for the committee to follow the references within the
documentation.

Are you really sure you'd like to see a nearly 300 page
PRINTED complaint? Also, unless you're ready to make copies IN COLOR
of 200+ pages, some of the information will be harder to see. How many
copies will the committee need? If it's not too many, I suppose I
could provide (print) more than one color copy of the originals --
though this starts to get rather expensive.

All of the committee members can have identical CDs with all
the information easy to locate. As an alternative I could e-mail the
information to the USCF for them to forward to the committee members.

I don't object to supplying this information in hard-copy --
I'm just trying to offer alternatives that will make it easier for the
committee to work with the information.

I'm not sure why the committee would want to restrict itself
to PRINTED evidence only. What would you do, for example, if there
were video tape or audio tape evidence of cheating at a chess
tournament? Would you require transcripts? I wonder how it is
different when the evidence consists (in large part) of a bunch of web
pages. Why require that those pages be PRINTED? It is a common
principle that the BEST evidence is the original material, not copies,
transcripts, descriptions, etc.

Would you object if I suppied CDs in addition to the printed
material with the same information on both?