> Sometimes you end up reduced to "Well, just implement it then if it's so easy and amazing." This should be the standard answer, along with some probing quest

> Sometimes you end up reduced to "Well, just implement it then if it's so easy and amazing." This should be the standard answer, along with some probing questions like: - "So if you can always compress data, what happens when you compress the compressed data over and over? Surely you see this can't always work or everything could be compressed down to 1 bit?" - "Do you realize that there are 2^N strings with N bits, but fewer strings with less than N bits? Surely you don't think you can always represent N bits in fewer than N bits?" (i.e. something along the lines of the pigeonhole principle) If that doesn't convince them or they're unwilling to think through those fundamental questions or the implementation, it's a hopeless case that is best left alone.