With most spammers, it's pretty easy to see what they're spamming, thatis to say what they expect to get out of their spam; what their productor their scam or their cause is. But sometimes I run into spammers, evenpersistent spammers, where I can't figure out why they're spamming, whatbenefit they expect to get out of it.

One such persistent case is what I will call the 'conference spammers',who keep sending us email for various obscure-

Suppose you have a system with nodes and work items. You have to assignwork items to nodes somehow; one way to do it is to randomly distributework items around the nodes, but another is to assign them based onsome sort of fixed-outcome affinity function (like 'is topologicallynearest'). Now consider what happens when a node overloads or fails (oris just taken out of service) and its work has to be reassigned to newnodes.

In a random-assignment system, the failed