Re: Impossible Database Design?

Marshall wrote:

> Bob Badour wrote:
>

>>Marshall wrote:
>>
>>>Regardless, a discrete representation is the only kind of
>>>representation
>>>possible with digital computers. You play the cards you're dealt.
>>
>>Marshall, if you are going to interact with the self-aggrandizing
>>ignorants please take the time to call them on their bullshit.

Cutting out the context of what I wrote does not make your response any more valid. You have assumed a number of things that are not necessarily true.

First, you assume people will read beyond the first part of the exchange where you conceded Joe's alleged argument.

Second, you assume that those who read your arguments will understand them sufficiently to recognize them as crushing refutations of some of the remainder of Joe's bullshit instead of perhaps seeing them only as establishing a second reasonable view on a controversial issue.

Third, you assume Joe is a sincere discussant of the topic instead of the someone manipulating you for his own self-promotion.

He manipulated you into not only accepting him as an intellectual peer, which he is not, but into granting him an intellectual high ground.

You implicitly accepted his assertions that Zeno's paradoxes exist in the first place, that a discrete representation of time leads to a paradox, and that this leads to a problem one must somehow 'shake' in order to justify using a discrete representation.

By then accepting the paradoxes and failing to 'shake' them, you actually concede his whole argument whereas the appropriate response is to note that his assertions are not only false but farcically so. At that point, it suffices to note that his whole position is absolutely incoherent and to cite Date's Principle of Incoherence.

'It is very difficult to respond coherently to that which is incoherent.'

Zeno's paradoxes are not paradoxes at all. They are fallacious reasoning that was refuted millenia ago. Not only do the paradoxes not stem from a discrete model of time, but they absolutely depend on the assumption of an infinite number of points between any two points in both time and space. Whether countably infinite or continuous, that assumption is decidedly not an assumption of finite and discrete.

Joe mentioned Zeno as a ploy to manipulate you. He doesn't care whether it is right or wrong or even relevant. He mentioned Zeno because Zeno is sufficiently obscure that he could count on you not having a response at your fingertips and on your being too lazy to compose the effective counter.

Even if you had composed an effective counter to all of his bullshit, he would just respond with a block of random nonsense that from 50,000 feet looks like it might have some relevance but doesn't have any at all.

He might even respond with a reference that directly and explicitly contradicts his assertions. He has done that many times.

Once you get to know Joe better, you will recognize that everything he contributes is such a ploy. He is an absolute ignorant who has made a career out of manipulating people just like yourself into giving him the reputation he wants but in no way deserves. Stop giving it to him! Received on Sun May 21 2006 - 20:28:36 CEST