I had a couple including one USB one that I later modified to use to scan regular bar codes.
I pulled up Wikipedia to look up who created them, and apparently he changed his name after they failed. He was also on Curse of Oak Island searching for gold and was involved in ballot shenanigans in the 2020 US presidential election where he was notable for supposedly inventing a machine to find bamboo fibers on ballots.
I remember being a teenager in the 90’s and going in to see if I could special order a 75pf - 100pf Variable Capacitor. The guy behind the counter just said that he wasn’t going to help me because he knew I was just looking to make a cable descrambler to watch ppv porn. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, but it still hurt.
Oh no, someone is going to harmlessly watch porn. What a dick.
You could argue that, because he knew what it was most likely to be used for, he had foreknowledge of a crime and would then be knowingly facilitating the commission of that crime. So he may have been trying to err on the side of caution.
Still a jerk.
Why yes, because those capacitors certainly aren’t used in any other way /s