OzzyOsbourne

How much would it actually cost to store all the emails that American citizens send and receive? I find it difficult to visualise a system of checks and balances approving the massive budget required to house all that data. And the technical challenge of sifting through those emails would be seriously hard. I understand that this might not be just about national security, but it could also be a power game on the part of the FBI. One has to consider how much [national security | power] this really affords [US citizens | the FBI] when measured against the gargantuan expenditure required to actually pull it off. This makes me totally skeptical. Additionally, by saying 'basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country' Binney demonstrates his lack of conviction and uncertainty of his own claims.

So, if his words aren't the giveaway, then two minutes of critical thinking will make the interview seem alarmist and inaccurate.

edit: specifically, What constitutes a voting ring? Why would HN want to find and prune them?

Do you have any evidence on the state machine-ness of bureaucracies? Anecdotes? How can you substantiate your opinion and example?

How often does this happen, and why? If this problem is inherent to cron, are there alternatives that are [possibly] better suited to server work?

BTW, I've been meaning to ask for a while though: what sort of algorithm is running that detects edges and orientation so when the mouse is moved, the small white circle or quadrilateral seems to touch the objects in the image?

Several years ago (probably first or second year of high school) I wrote and distributed amongst my friends a small desktop game. The program e-mailed me their new high-scores and internal game diagnostics daily. I found that this was too often so I rewrote the game to send these data daily. This way of retrieving data sucked. Often, I would get empty or unimportant messages.

Eventually I had the realisation that time-oriented polling was the wrong philosophy. Instead, there should be a "this event has happened now" (e.g. 500kb of diag. generated) algorithm that calls the polling routine/invokes the 'stuff to be done traverser'. If I understand the problem correctly, the mass e-mail example, you could make a simple counter as part of the HTTP request. When this counter hits a certain you-determined threshold value (e.g. there are 500 jobs to do), then call the traverse/processing code:

if jobs_to_do > thresh then invoke some async processing

The takeaway from this post is that, in my opinion, time-based (cron job-bish) polling algorithms are inefficient but can be replaced with a rudimentary event-driven ones.

And just BTW, 'countervailing' - I'm deifying this word. Holy s*. I'm going to use it all the time.

And as for the similarity between the Heroku documentation page - their github documentation page reads: "This program is forked from heroku/heroku-docs, and originally written by @rtomayko and @adamwiggins. Later, modified by @kzk and @doryokujin."