An individual was kind enough to reach out and inform me that they believe I should have not said "I am sure you were not trying to be 'technical'..." but instead "I am sure you were trying not to be 'technical'..." as the former sounded like I was suggesting Stuart was giving bad advice by being lazy.
In the event that was the interpretation by other people, most notably Stuart; then I apologize. The intent of what I was saying was merely to add a potentially relevant "technical" detail that for most people is _not_ relevant. For almost all things (short of FOL proofs), there are exceptions; so it is understandable and even desirable often times to be "loose" with the technical details. When one has gathered enough preliminary knowledge, then they can revisit some of those things with a more precise perspective (e.g., in physics one learns about Newtonian mechanics before relativity even though "technically" it is not quite correct or Ohm's law despite it rather obviously falling apart when resistance is 0 or even approaches 0). I said what I said because I didn't want it to be misconstrued as "one upping" Stuart with the rather obnoxious "actually" response (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAyt3KUVkrY) which of course is exactly what I ended up doing. :( I do believe that stating network or broadcast addresses shouldn't be assigned to a host is a reasonable and perhaps correct thing since most people won't find themselves in the position of needing or even desiring to use /31 or /32 IPv4 networks.
