Upvoted because that’s about the only way to get the message away.
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.
I self-hosted email long enough to have done that song and dance too many times. It sucks.
And in this case, it makes me want to lean harder into it. If suddenly Outlook users, especially ones using enterprise hosted Exchange, suddenly can’t email people, then maybe this crap might get fixed. No one cares when hyper aggressive spam policies hurt you and me. They might care when it affects enterprises.
> Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)
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.)
> Horrible idea now as the phone systems would easily record the number that called it
I think the idea was that you'd be calling from another pay phone, probably a different one each time so the number didn't matter.
You could do the same with pagers. Your drug dealer would own a pager, you'd call the pager from a random pay phone and send that pay phone's number as a message. The dealer would then use a different pay phone to call you back.
Unlike cellphones, pagers were often one-way, receive-only devices, so you couldn't use them to track somebody's location.
I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team).
it's not the exact science museum experience mentioned, but a quick Google search for "sand table video augment" pulled up a few, and this was the first one I found:
https://share.google/89A6x4yfaw5a4hOuh
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.)
This is one of those things that's really not that hard, nor expensive, with one decent hacker who wants to set it up. Maybe $1500 of parts? Feels like the kind of donation lots of people here could make to a local lower budget kids science centre. And I bet would be the kind of donation these centres would love to have.
As a bonus: you can likely make it out of "100% recycled e-waste" and "100% recycled lumber" (if you're building the table, too), giving it an extra educational theme. not only is this cool, fun, and educational, but it's a demonstration of doing something good with a used depthsense, projector, and computer.
I wonder how many firewalls would break with some of these? I hope they would fail closed (block unexpected traffic). Their stacks probably work on the packet binary data...but the GUI?
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.
I just want to piggyback off this and discuss the scale in terms of the largest most readily accessible bill, the $100 bill. The relevant parts are [1]:
- Height: 66.3mm
- Width: 156mm
- Thickness: 0.0043 inches = 0.11mm
- Weight: 1.0g
So the volume is 1138mm3. You need 15M notes so that's just over 17 cubic meters or approximately 603 cubic feet, which is a cube roughly 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) on each side, weighing in at 15 metric tons or 33,000 pounds. Put another way, that's over half the volume of a standard twenty foot shipping container (~1100 cubic feet).
But let's get it more compact. The current gold price seems to be about $2939 per Troy ounce, which is 31.1035g. You need 510,378 Troy ounces, which is actually heavier at 15.87 metric tons but way more compact. Given a density of 19.32g/cm3 that's 822,000cm3 or 0.822 cubic meters or 29 cubic feet.
Whatever the case, it's a lot less practical to steal.
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.