From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Mon Mar 04 2002 - 12:50:03 CST
Clive D.W. Feather (clive@demon.net):
> I was actually
>saying that this is the one place where I think John is *correct*:
That's why you called it "stuff". Yes, I always made snide references to
things I believe, so I guess it was my mistake not seeing it when you do
it.
>Secondly, I did not say that '"entity" cannot be a human being'.
That is exactly the effect of your words. Entity does mean any of a list
of things. When you say you want to remove one of the things from that
list, then you remove that possibility.
> If John
> goes back to "the tape" he'll see what I actually wrote.
I see what you wrote, and your failure to understand what you wrote is not
my fault.
Let's think this through, shall we. The "entity" when I post is me, a
specific human being. But you want "entity" not to mean "a specific human
being". Now, 6.2 says that the sender header contains the "mailbox of
th entity which caused this article to be posted". Hmmm. If entity does
not include human beings, specific or not, then I cannot be the sender.
But I am. What a quandry.
And what a quandry this causes for the injector. If it wants to insert my
email address in the sender header because it cannot verify my From
header, what does it put there? It cannot put my address there because I
am not the "entity which caused the article to be posted". Hmmm.
>Rather, John's arguments - to me - appeared to be based on the assumption
>that the draft was referring to a specific human (see comments on
>"magically" above).
My assumption was that the word "entity" was the english word "entity" as
found in the dictionary, which includes human beings, either explicit ones
or otherwise, as a member.
>My request is that, whatever term
>the draft uses, it should be made clear that that term is *not* a textual
>macro for "a specific human being".
Where did you say "textual macro" before today? "Entity doesn't mean a
specific human being" is not even close to saying "is not a macro for".
"Entity doesn't mean" is striking one possibility from the list of what it
does mean, and if you cannot understand that, then I'm sorry, you've not
understood the problem well enough to have an answer.
>I did not use the word "defined", true, though I though it was clear in
>context.
Sigh. "Oh, I didn't write what I meant to say, but I wanted you to guess
that I meant something else...".
So you don't want "entity" to be a "textual macro" for the string "a
specific human being". That's a nice straw man. Nobody has said it is.
What's your next problem?
>Once again, please do not paraphrase or misquote me.
It is not misquoting when I quote exactly what you say and then you claim
you meant something completely different.