But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).

I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.

We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.

With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.

Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.

Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.

By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.

So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.

Mostly for the humor value for an on-air radio show. I’m sure were pre-arranged just to make sure they got something usable, but I can see the occasion where a random person walking by and hearing the pay phone RINGING would cause them to pause. As a teenager I would have picked it up in a heartbeat (even not having heard the radio shows).

As for other “purposes” I’ve seen some crime/drama shows where the bad guy tells someone to go to the corner pay phone and answer it when it rings at a specific time. Horrible idea now as the phone systems would easily record the number that called it, but up until the early 2000’s it would be one option. Today I would guess dropping a burner phone in an envelope for the “victim” would be a more likely movie trope…

(Source: I’m from the US and remember a few radio stations doing this in the 1980’s and 1990’s.)

Man I was jealous!

When the first Xbox were getting long in the tooth, I believe people were repurposing the motion tracking bar as the mechanism to measure the topography of the sand table. That, coupled with a video projector mounted over the top of the sand table provides the additional colors and elevation lines. (And of course a bit of cool software to process and produce the image.)

https://www.kiwico.com/

LLM 3.0, LLM 3.1 Gen 1, LLM 3.2 Gen 1, LLM 3.1, LLM 3.1 Gen 2, LLM 3.2 Gen 2, LLM 3.2, LLM 3.2 Gen 2x2, LLM 4, etc...

No, of course not.

Adjusting your comment for the situation: > Is $100.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)

No, not silly if that's what I am comfortable to keep on me (wallet, mattress, etc) and I'm mugged/robbed most people will recover. (Especially if you're also able to afford the inherent risk of crypto.)

> Is $1,500,000,000.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)

YES! And probably a challenge for most humans even if you're able to get that cash in the limited US $100,000.00 bill [1] - that's 15,000 green slips of paper. (I'm making a bold assumption that this link [2] is reasonably actually for the physical scale, though this apparently only shows 13,000 not the 15,000 needed.)

They effectively treated the $1.5B like a pile of cash in a fence with a few (easily pickable apparently) locks keeping it shut.

That SHOULD have been in a 100% offline, air gapped system with multiple levels of 2+ person approvals to access.

But this failure implies to me that even THEY didn't really consider the crypto assets they were holding as something with a real value either.

1- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-th...

2- https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/GHNABiJh6A

https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

The data captured, stored, processed, and evaluated after just one of their more notable experiments generate petabytes of data.

They know a thing or two that directly apply.

I don't know if Apple IOS is correct enough to log the time and position of AirTags when the device itself is disconnected from a network...

Only 1/2 /s

he used to be a time when only natural disasters were the thing most Dr planners were concerned about, today cyber terrorism as well as a shooter coming into a room or more things to add to their planning list.

Your comment about variables for usable values reminded me that it would be nice if the configuration file parser could reference other variables and sections of the configuration file to avoid repeating oneself in the same configuration file. for example, if the configuration files describing a fleet of virtual machines, it would be very handy to define small/medium/large system types with varying RAM, CPU counts, and disk layouts, then reference just the small, medium, or large type throughout the configuration file.