Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument

In a post I find very inspirational, Crackmonkey and Mr. Bad have put together all the technology you ever need to know in order to stump your opponent in a technical argument.

Here's my abbreviated version. For the record, I tried to do a trackback but there seemed to be various export limitations on that technology.

These are definitely desperation tactics. Use only when your back is against the wall:

1. There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
2. That won't scale.
3. Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.
4. That can't be generalized to a cross-platform build.
5. Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.
6. If we go with that idea, we're going to have Don Marti camped out in the front lobby with 300 angry software jihad supporters.
7. Yes, well, that's just not the way things work in the real world.
8. I like your idea. Why don't you write up a white paper and we'll review it at the next staff meeting?
9. I think you need to stop taking this so personally. We need to think about what's best for the project, not about our own little pet theories.
10. Oh, I played with that approach back as an undergrad. Got a D, too.
11. Yes, I believe that's the approach Windows NT is taking.
12. That's totally inefficient on modern hardware.
13. Well, yes, but it really reduces to the knapsack problem in that case. Do you have some kind of heuristic, or are we dealing with an NP-complete case?
14. Have you LOOKED at the number of I/O requests that will create?
15. We can't afford the transaction overhead.
16. Yeah, or we could all just plink away on Amigas or something.
17. What? I don't speak your crazy moon-language.
18. Hmm. Didn't they just go bankrupt? It's OK, I guess -- there's some German company who's picked up the existing service contracts.
19. No, that would break object encapsulation.
20. How is that going to impact the schedule?
21. RAM is cheap and all, but...
22. It would probably be best if we deferred that until version 2.0.
23. I like it, but it is too point-oh for my tastes.
24. Yes, yes, we've all read DJB's RFCs on the subject.
25. This really doesn't jibe with our core competency.
26. We need this to fit on a single floppy.
27. Yes, but can this be embedded in a toaster, for example?
28. We need something that my mom can use.
29. The packaging costs will be prohibitive.
30. That's a good idea -- you should do that on your home page.
31. Ho, man! Are they still AROUND? That's so cool. I thought that whole idea was discredited years ago.
32. There is no hope for the widow's son, Boaz.
33. Well, they're going to do that with the next version of Perl, so we should probably wait.
34. Well, they're going to do that with the next version of OS X, so we should probably wait.
35. I heard that the only real application for that technology was child pornography. How did you hear about it?

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