That puts me in mind of a lesson I learned about 30 years ago. A group of us were partners in a commercial radio station, and one of the other partners had an acquaintance visiting the station.

Dann (the other partner and chief engineer at the station) was and possibly still is the smartest person I've ever met. (No, make that second-smartest, I met Patrick Arnold at one of the empeg meets!) He used to make the company that provided our business software crazy. He got hold of a strictly unavailable uncompiler for the software, which was written in a proprietary language used only with Datapoint mini-computers, and he used it to fix software bugs and then send the fixes to the software company. Anyway... this acquaintance of Dann's came by, and I got to sit in while they talked about computers, both hardware and programming.

Now, anybody who has spent any time reading my posts on this bbs knows that I am NOT a computer guru. But what I know now dwarfs what I knew back then. And back then, even I could tell that this acquaintance was sounding off, pretending to know things he obviously didn't, and telling Dann things that I knew were flat wrong. I couldn't wait for him to leave, so I could ask Dann why he didn't straighten the guy out.

Dann looked at me, and said words to the effect that "Why? All it would do is embarrass him, it wouldn't do anybody the least bit of good. I knew he was wrong, but there was no need to prove it at his expense."

I have thought about that discussion many times over the past three decades.

Lesson learned.

tanstaafl.