Rifor, I see where you are coming from and as usual, a misunderstanding has occurred.
As I said in my initial paragraph: “On an entirely technical standpoint”, I was not disagreeing that water is “practically incompressable under normal conditions”. The thing that I did not like was that you were saying things such as “water held at a constant temperature cannot be compressed at all”, which is inequivocally incorrect, with no ifs or buts about it. I was arguing the point that water is technically compressable. An important detail which you did not seem to acknowledge.
Maybe in one of your engineering exams, if you answered that in a multiple choice, you would be correct, without a more correct answer available, but in the overall scheme of things it is entirely incorrect for the simple reason that everything is compressable.
The reason I felt the need to counter this kind of statement is that I find things like it are the origin of ignorance and misunderstanding. If textbooks were this definate, yet technically incorrect, with all the little pieces of defining information missing, we would have a whole heap of professionals who did not truly understand what they were doing in all fields of science. That is something that we cannot afford to have when people like you who will be designing cars, buildings, space ships, etc.
E.g. a few seconds before: “Woops, I didn’t realise that water actually is compressable, but only at high temperature/pressure! My textbook told me it wasn’t! Too late….” And then the first Mars colony explodes, killing 3.7 million people. Woops indeed!
Also, on the same point, I find it really freaking annoying when I come across some misinformed body (not you) who “heard form somewhere/someone” some particular “fact”, which is either totally incorrect or has some flaws to it, and when you try to explain to them those inconsistencies, or correct them in a technical way they get all shitty because they believed the first thing they heard without critically evaluating it.
If you had stated “it shouldn’t be arguable anyway - not under the conditions for pumping anyway!” in your first post, or if bt had said that to begin with, I would not be posting this right now.
So long as you understand where I am coming from everything is good. :D