The question is whether maybe some people need more stress.

Even if it were illegal, you could have done it by releasing anonymously (on edit, and reworking the code to remove Fable's fingerprints)... if you hadn't first blown it by publicly posted a traceable question.

... and you can write your own alternative software.

But you can't provide your own 2TB GPU to help you (or to run it, if that's what it needs). So if They(TM) don't like what you're doing, They(TM) can put you at a vast disadvantage compared to everybody else.

Every. Single. Individual. End. User. Device. Should. Be. Addressable. Given that there are more such devices out there then there are IPv4 addresses to begin with, cost doesn't even come into it.

And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up to date. You're probably jammable, too.

The same applies to the gravitational hacks, and the mapping issue applies even to visual navigation.

Those guesses, by the way, are because not only is AQNav's "data sheet" worthless fluff, but they seem to be allergic to letting anybody even see a picture of the product. Which makes me doubt that they actually have what a normal person would think of as a "product" to begin with.

If you try to use those port forwarding hacks, you force every single piece of software to deal with the fact that the IP address it sees for itself is not the IP address its peer sees for it. And you force every single protocol design to allow for that possibility. Add in UPNP, and now you have to implement a whole extra (badly designed) protocol in parallel with the actual application.

It's not trivial to even discover the address your peer is seeing; even now there's a huge diversity of nasty unreliable hacks for doing it.

HTTP isn't the world. In fact, HTTP becoming "the world" was another part of the problem.

If I wanted to blame large corporate "users" for NAT (which I actually do), I would blame their obnoxious intransigent refusal to upgrade to IPv6. That part wasn't the ISPs' idea, but it had nothing to do with the cost of address space and everything to do with shortighted laziness. They were, in fact, willing to pay for IPv4 space to avoid having to do anything.

I'm pretty sure they'd see it as a win, at least unless it led to massive public backlash. So why not skip that step and just give them the backlash?

In the original sense, probably yes. In the more current sense, no.

The original sense was something like "unanswerable libel, especially around group characteristics". The most common present sense is closer to something like "disparaging epithet aimed at a group, meant to have universalized negative and/or libellous connotations". A slur in this sense roughly means "a member of this group, which, I chose this particular word as a way of reminding you, makes the person despicable and omniwrong regardless of anything else". That's what "pejorative" means.

If you call TESCREAL, or a component of it, a "cult", you're first evoking the idea that anybody who falls under "TESCREAL" umbrella is already bad (as all right-thinking folk already perceive). Then you're perhaps proposing or emphasizing a particular way everybody should think they're bad (it's a cult)".

It's also wrong and dumb. Some of the components of "TESCREAL" may have shared weird beliefs, and even shared weird social rituals. That's not what a cult is, not even close. Not in modern speech outside of academic history and folklore. And even if they were cults, they would not all be the same cult.

> Or calling out the outsized, malign impact they're having?

That kind of frothing is a better example of the original sense, if still not of the new sense. Vague imprecations that can't be defended against.

Nobody identifies with "TESCREAL". If you look at all the people who do identify with any of the labels that go into it, you end up with a pretty diverse group. It's even possible that that diverse group has more fascists in it than there are in the general population. Fringe groups tend to have fringe members who are members of other fringe groups. But fascism is neither a majority characteristic nor a defining one.

By the way, "fascist" itself is a slur when used to mean "anybody whose politics I don't like in certain ways", or when used to imply that fascists are universally bad or wrong in some way not directly related to their fascism.

"Fascist" is not (usually) a slur when applied to say, Elon Musk. He's actually in the group; his publicly avowed politics are largely compatible with Mussolini's version (with probably some minor quibbles about business independence)... and even more compatible with Umberto Eco's definition, which is what a lot of people go for these days. More importantly, when people call Musk a fascist, they are pretty clearly calling him out for the particular stuff he has personally said or done to earn that particular label, not about some unrelated issue. And most of them are doing it in conjunction with saying, or at least alluding to, something identifiable and substantive about policies, not just throwing it out there in an unrelated context.

If you were arguing with Musk about the best flavor of ice cream, and you suddenly came out with "What do you know about ice cream, anyway, you fascist", then you'd be using it more as a slur.

As another comparison, if you called Musk a "rockspider", that would be a slur. The word carries specific meaning; beyond marking "a member of this group", it adds "of which, I chose to use this particular word as a way of reminding you, you are supposed to automatically dislike all members". Also, insofar as it does have a well-defined meaning in terms of who falls in the group, you'd obviously be stretching to apply it to him, which would make it especially obvious that you were trying to use it as a per se insult. Actually I think he may be far enough outside the group that the insult wouldn't even land; no actual Boer ancestry, and too upper class to boot. I'm not up on South African slang.

Nor are a bunch of small groups a single "organization" if they don't have some kind of ongoing, systemematic structure for coordinating their actions.

I'm an atheist. That doesn't make atheism an organization.

So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system? It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.

In fact, if you sell 10 hobby prototype boards to other hobbyists, you probably have a higher risk of getting hit by a bus on the way to the post office than you do of being fined.

The reason Stars and Stripes has had so much independence for so long is that bosses who weren't morons saw the value in that. The reason it's losing it now is that bosses who are morons don't.