--- Sheplyakov Alexei <varg@theor.jinr.ru> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 07:42:59PM -0700, Richard Haney wrote: [...]
and could possibility be misconstrued as to being of any general significance by sufficiently ignorant people. ... but instead of writing such an offensive phrase you could have modified your PATH before running configure to not contain that directory.
Sorry, no offense was intended. I can only guess that perhaps the phrase "sufficiently ignorant people" may have seemed offensive because I have sometimes, but not frequently, heard people, when speaking of ignorance, to speak with much distain and arrogance as if there is shame in ignorance. And in so doing they show personal and/or social and/or cultural attitudes/values apart from any fact of ignorance itself. But it seems to me that there should be no shame in _mere_ ignorance. It is a fact is that everyone is ignorant of a great, great many things, and it seems the totality of human knowledge is extremely miniscule compared to what is potentially knowable. Moreover, it also seems severely impossible for any human to even be knowledgeable about everything humanly known and humanly important (sometimes even in a rather limited context). There seems to be some "truth" to the idea one sometimes hears in a jocular context of someone "having just barely enough knowledge (about something) to be 'dangerous'". That is approximately the sense in which I intended the phrase "sufficiently ignorant people". I suppose encyclopedias could be written about the idea of ignorance (just as much has been written, especially by philosophers, about ideas of "knowledge"). And it seems there is probably a great, great deal of unwritten "knowledge" (or at least cultural and social attitudes and values) about ignorance. Best regards, Richard __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com