It's not a number. It wouldn't even fulfill the three criteria that your quasi-scientific text established; It cannot really be tallied (whatever that essay may claim), it cannot actually express the cardinality of the sets of natural numbers, either (since it is easily proven that those are, well, infinite, and cardinality requires a set with a finite ammount of numbers, so infinity cannot by its very definition express cardinality). And lastly, and most obviously, it cannot be an indicator of quantity. Infinity can not, and must not, define a quantity. Anything that has an infinite quantity, however insignificant it might be, is automatically and by definition required to fill heaven and earth, the whole universe up to its borders and beyond, and would therefore instantly kill both you and me and pp0u20e8 and would thus solve this debate by itself.
And as your text correctly stated, Infinity has none of the properties that numbers have: You can't add to it or multiply it, you can't divide it by itself to get 1, and you can't do any mathematical operations with it. (Note especially, that wherever infinity is used in mathematics, it is not used itself, but rather as a part of a limit, requiring an actual number to get close to infinity, never to actually reach it.) And the comparison of properties is by all means an adequate way to discern membership in a certain group of objects. If an object had none of the properties of a book, what would you call it? Not A Book, problably. I leave it to you to answer what you would call something that has none of the properties of a number...
Edit: Back on topic, was the guy trying to modify EV into FL or the other way around? Because if he was trying to mod Freelancer, that would be a bad choice. The only 3d games that are suitable to be modded into EV would be X3 and Vegastrike (which seems to be a pretty accurate copy of EV in 3d...)
This post has been edited by bmac : 21 July 2008 - 08:43 AM
, but nonetheless they are numbers.