And it's those lost emails that are very annoying. It turns out that the doctor's office uses Microsoft Lookout for handling all their email. I run my own email server. I've sent email to that doctor before, but that was maybe last year. This year, I guess Microsoft has decided to just simply drop emails from my server without any notification what so ever.

Sigh.

By convincing the Trade Federation to blockade Naboo, his own homeworld, and coerce Queen Amidala to sign a treaty legitimizing the Federation occupation, he has already won the day and now must keep up appearances with the Trade Federation so they don't rat him out. Having the Federation attack the Jedi, symbols of the Republic's power, he only strengthened his position. No matter what, all roads led to Valorum's removal, and the path forward for his ascendancy to the Chancellorship out of sympathy for his planet's plight was clear.

• Should Queen Amidala sign the treaty, Palpatine can lobby against this action in the Senate for Valorum's removal due to allowing this to take place.
• Should Queen Amidala escape into exile or be killed, Palpatine has himself a martyr to use for this same lobby. Should the Jedi be killed, the Republic would be forced to acknowledge the under-the-table actions Valorum had taken to try and avert this without taking a stand.
• With Queen Amidala's successful escape, she fell right into his lap for him to demonstrate the corruption of the Republic firsthand, manipulating her into calling for Valorum's removal, with public support on her side due to their plight.

XanatosGambit / Live-Action Films - TV Tropes

But the fact that Senator Palpatine is a Sith Lord is beside the point?it's the politics of the Republic that lead to this. And in the two hour video ?I read all the Star Wars books, and now I understand the prequels,? Timothy Hickson does a deep dive into history of the Republic and how it ended up where two Sith Lords were able to basically take over the galaxy (?Kevin??the name of the galaxy is Kevin) without having to really use The Force at all. He also goes into how the Jedi Knights are basically the Republic's CIA (not so much in the ?intelligence gathering? aspect and more in the ?secret wet works to get the Republic's way? aspect).

Any parallels with our current time is, I suspect, purely unintentional.

1. Pull the tab of the attached VIN Gauge Combination Box? and your 5-digit number will light up.
2. Scratch off the circle below. If the two numbers match, you are one of our GRAND PRIZE WINNERS.
3. Immediately call the phone number below to find out which of the five prizes you won (see the prize list below).

First off, I'm assuming that VIN stands for ?Very Important Number? and not ?Vulvar Intraepithelial Neoplasia.? Second, why is it a ?VIN Gauge Combination Box??? What does ?gauge? have to do with it? It's not referncing a distance, quantity, capacity or dimention, just a number.

But whatever. The prizes themselves are nothing to write about, being a bit vague with ?worldwide destinations? (Kandongjang-ni, North Korea is a ?worldwide destination?) and ?getaway in major U.S. cities? (Scranton, Pennsylvania is a ?major U.S. city?), but the VIN Gauge Combination Box?? That is fascinating!

The VIN Gauge Combination Box? is a 2?×1?×¼? (50mm×25mm×6mm for the U.S. Imperial impaired) plastic box with the text ?Combination Box?? painted on. Just below the text is what looks like a LCD screen. There's a small plastic tab sticking out the side, with the text ?PULL TAB TO ACTIVATE? printed on it. Pulling the tab lights the LCD screen with a five digit number lit up. The tab was just keeping the battery from making contact with the circuitry.

Now, looking at the LCD screen it seems a bit off. The numbers aren't aligned with the edge, the left side is slightly higher than the right, and the center number is a bit brighter than the rest, with the light kind of dimming the further from the center of the display you get. Looking closer, it doesn't even look like an LCD screen. It's more of an LED screen, black background with green LEDs, but the screen itself looks weird.

I push the tab back in to turn it off, and ? wait a second! The battery is disconnected as the light turned off, but I can still see the number!

It's just green printed text on a black background. The battery is just there to power a backlight! The ?tab? itself is long enough to not only block the battery, but to cover the ?LED display? itself. Taking it apart, it's just eight pieces:

1. the plastic strip making up the ?tab? which breaks the circuit;
2. the top half of the box;
3. on the underside of the top half, a metal piece to bridge?
4. an LR41 button battery (the thing is tiny!) and
5. a second LR41 button battery;
6. a green LED;
7. a plastic piece with the green text ?63371? (my ?number?) on a black background.
8. the bottom half of the box;

And that's it. It's so cheap they didn't even bother removing the flashing from the plastic mold. I would not be surprised of everyone that received this in the mail got the same number as I did.

The most amusing bit though, is the injected text on the back of the device: ?THIS DIGIAL ELECTRONIC DEVICE IS NOTATOY.? It lists the patent number (a patent number! Someone patented this thing?) And of course, it was made in China.

So the ?VIN Gauge Combination Box? is, in fact, a notatoy. How about that?

But one thing not brought up in the Hacker News thread is that Gmail supports custom domains. So if some other Sean Conner were to have Gmail support email for example.org, then I would expect seanconner@example.org (our hypothetical Sean Conner who is not me) to be distinct from seanconner@gmail.com (which is me). And now I have to wonder if this might be a cause for some of the issues being reported? Google is a Leviathan system with millions of moving parts where a slight mishap (like a timeout or some lost packets on a database lookup or even a bug on a system not yet updated) causes email being delivered to seanconner@example.org to end up being delivered to seanconner@gmail.com.

I'm just trying to figure out what is more likely via Occam's razor, that a large, distributed system like Google has the occational hiccup, or a surprisingly large number of people forget their email addresses, especially given how important email addresses are for account recovery, password resets, and the like? I mean, it could be both. I'm just wondering what causes the larger number of incidents now that I'm seeing I not alone in all this.

I know that fobs have a decent range on them but I always thought the data sent was unique per fob. Maybe not? And then there's the fact that fobs can help criminals steal cars! That's more surprising.