Larry Greenfield

I wonder if they will reprice them? - todd

Some companies do this, but I don't know that Google has ever done it. They didn't split their stock either, so who knows. - Chris White

yet another example of how money in the form of stock options doesen't exist until you exercise, sell, pay your taxes, and put that check in the bank. - Jason Kaneshiro

Sucks to be them. - Michael Forian

+1 Jason A lesson I learned too late. - todd

Are employees more or less likely to stay at Google if their options are underwater? - Jim Norris

Probably more. Especially in this market. From what I hear, Google's a great place to work. ;) - Chris White

I have to think Google will benefit from this downturn from a recruiting and retention standpoint. There is too much uncertainty for people to leave. From what I could tell from Sequoia's preso, they aren't exactly welcoming early stage companies with open arms right now :) - Bret Taylor

@Todd - same here - back in web 1.0, I only did okay with step one - exercise. I didn't sell soon enough. - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason, yikes. That can have severe tax consequences if you don't pay taxes right away. - Chris White

Definitely exercise and sell. - todd

@jason: agreed . i, too, learned this lesson way too late [sunw/java]. - James Todd

People will likely stay, but you see that zombie look in everyone's eyes when the options tank. It's ironic that you don't sell because you are so busy working your butt off to pay attention and then when you are completely focused again it doesn't matter anymore. Though I have to think Google will recover, just probably not with the same honeymoon zeitgeist. - todd

How can a weighted average be a "key price level"? Also, the options are not worthless unless they expire under water (and they are typically 10 year options, so that would not happen for quite a while). Google actually allows employees to sell vested options (and yes, underwater options do have value). - Paul Buchheit

What value would an unexercised option that is underwater have? Why wouldn't you just buy the stock on the open market? - todd

Since there's a chance the option will be above water before it expires, out-of-the-money options do have value. Buying one lets you make a bet that the stock price will rise while putting down less money than actually buying the stock. (Pricing options is tricky but there are commonly used models.) - Larry Greenfield

At 20 brokers and a $5M quotation size, the order book will be $100M deep, which is nothing compared to the $400B numbers being tossed around for the amount of CDS that will be brought to the table. I don't see how this is supposed to work, where a few million dollars of bond trading sets the terms for hundreds of billions of dollars of cash CDS settlement. We'll see! - ⓞnor

That was readable? It must be bedtime. "There is also a possible penalty in place for submissions that are off-market. If a dealer supplies a bid or offer that is the wrong side of the inside market midpoint (e.g. a bid that is higher than the IMM), and the open interest suggests it shouldn’t be (e.g. if a bid is higher than the IMM, and the open interest is to sell suggesting the price should go down so they shouldn’t be bidding high), then the dealer in question has to pay the quotation amount times the amount that their price differed from the IMM. This amount is termed an ‘Adjustment Amount’. This is not paid if the bid or offer in question did not cross with any other offer or bid respectively," - torque

An endangered species, perhaps? - Roberto Bonini

Not every conservative is the humorless, bumpkin douche you guys imagine we are. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Aw, c'mon, Mark. We don't think you're a bumpkin. - Steven "Joe" Perez

Seems to be real: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h... - Igor Krivokon

Perhaps the car belongs to Gabriel Schwartz: http://www.cosmictap.com/gabri... - Anthony Citrano

Its Sarah Palin's car, isn't it? - Joe the Plumber

I'd say it depends on what kind of car these stickers are on. The toyota prius, I don't believe. A Chrysler? Maybe... - Clare Dibble

F A I L - JA Castillo

It's a Prius, same as the one Igor found I think. Mark, I wasn't suggesting that anyone is humorless -- I'm just skeptical that this person actually supports McCain. - Paul Buchheit

@Paul: you should read IMAO.US. This is the sort of conservative humor you'll find there. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

I'm positive that this person is against McCain, and has a sense of humor. :) - Chris White

http://www.imao.us/docs/NukeTh... - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

I think there actually was a plan to nuke the moon back in the day. http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie... - Paul Buchheit

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/20... for more moon related war information. - Larry Greenfield

it's real Paul, I just drove down a side street in Princeton, NJ and counted 7 M/P signs and 2 O/B. In a college town, in a deep blue state. It made me very sad. - Sarah Miller

Sarah, it's the "More War for OIL" sticker that makes me doubt that this particular person is a real McCain supporter. - Paul Buchheit

it's real Paul, I just drove down a side street in Princeton, NJ and counted 7 M/P signs and 2 O/B. In a college town, in a deep blue state. Sry Paul, I read to quickly. I recently saw some bumper stickers that said "free our oil" that weren't a joke. - Sarah Miller

Disgusting. - Mo Kargas

omfg what is wrong with these oilers - Kyle Weller

Oh....the outrage! Not. - Peter Simard

https://members.premiereintera... - Craig Eddy

"More War for Oil" -- it sounds very much like the sentiment of a Free Republic denizen or Michael Savage fan -- defiantly fascist and in your face, and dead serious. Most "conservatives" these days are completely humorless and fanatically anti-conservative. (I've heard neoconservative McCain supporters call for first-strike nuclear attacks on Muslim and Arab nations.) - Sean McBride

Sent him to war and pray he dies for his country :) - Ryo

The neoconservative (anti-conservative) cult which produced Ann Coulter, Free Republic, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Pat Robertson, John Hagee and Pamela Geller would easily embrace bumper stickers which read "More War for Oil." It sounds very Ann Coulterish. Visit the Media Matters for America website http://mediamatters.org/ for an analysis of many examples of neocon extremist speech and hate speech. Many of these people are agitating furiously to expand the Iraq War to Iran. - Sean McBride

I'm glad they finally started bringing this up. This is a HORRIBLE policy that will end up with millions more people without health insurance. - Jason Carreira

Erin has a great post, too. Here: http://queenofspainblog.com/20... - Mona N.

They want to tax benefits because they want to encourage individuals to disengage from employer plans and shop on the individual policy market...their plan is all about the presumption that an explosion of competition in the individual market will bring costs down. And that it will lead to general adoption of higher deductible plans and less "frivolous" exams, procedures, etc. There are all sorts of problems with this, of course...but I think that's the gist of the case for the plan. - Chester

They are not making that case (mostly because it's a huge gamble with my health insurance and $5k wouldn't really be enough to balance it out) - Jason Carreira

They're not making the case or they haven't successfully convinced you of their case? Two different things. - Chester

They are not making the case that they will somehow bring down costs and definitely not that they want to disengage health care insurance from employment. They try not to talk about it, because it won't work well with the middle class. - Jason Carreira

@banana Unemployment benefits are taxed as income. - Kevin D. White

I disagree. If you read their official campaign statements, they clearly are presenting the credits as sufficient for affording individual plans...and even talk about how leftover money could be deposited into a Health Savings Account. The idea of competition driving down costs is part of a larger campaign to reduce health care costs through deregulation and efficiency measures. Reducing costs as part and parcel to increasing competition and increasing options is the foundation of McCain's plan: http://www.johnmccain.com/Info... - Chester

But the fact is that a family health insurance plan is like $1500 / month. Unless they can somehow cut that down by a factor of more than 3x, it's not going to work, and they know it. - Jason Carreira

Yeah...that's just ridiculous...you can't get healthcare for $5k a year. - Alex Scoble CISSP

I thought the whole point of employers having group plans is that it's cheaper -- a large employer has more bargaining power than an individual. - Gabe

@Chester one point I've heard from an economist on Fresh Air is that it will benefit the average low/middle-income employed person initially but the cost of medical services will grow faster than the inflation rate, or so he explained it, screwing us in the end. I also don't think a private insurnace market benefits us, as they are like the HMOs and striving to cheapen and compete with lower medical costs - anna awesomesauce

I like "taxing options before they vest"....the government's gonna owe me a helluva lot of money.... - Glen C

@Kevin re: taxation on unemployment benefits, we only get taxed on the usage of it, I believe, not on setting it aside (unused) - anna awesomesauce

Chester, you are correct about the motivation. In a stable environment, with stable healthcare costs, the plan actually has long-term merit, but neither of the above is true, and the rising cost of healthcare will immediately outpace the $5k per year tax break. - Joe the Plumber

I wasn't trying to say that the rationale for the McCain health care plan is sound...I was just trying to describe what I perceive the rationale to be...to explain that they are not hiding the tax on benefits or "sneakily" slipping them in. That aspect of his health care plan is out in the open. I think it's wrong, but I don't think it's hidden. - Chester

I thought the (effective) tax deduction for employer-provided medical was a way to benefit the middle class (who have employer-provided health insurance) and not the poor (who have to pay for health care out of pocket). - Amit Patel

Group plans are essential as they pool risk, and also spread the burdens of pre-existing conditions. My personal opinion is that health insurance costs and health care costs should never be taxed in any way, to companies or individuals. - £ogical €xtremes

Dear Obama campaign: Please license the Who's "I Can't Explain," cut up a loop, and make this commercial pop. Thanks. - Chris Baskind

1. I clicked through thinking that the Who song would be the soundtrack to the ad. Very disappointing. - Benjy Weinberger

several problems w/ the McCain approach: 1) tax credits only work if you've *already* spent $5k- millions of people can't afford that; 2) taxing benefits as income only works if you have an employer offering a plan - millions of people don't have that; $5k does not come close to covering the costs of an annual medial plan; 4) McCain has already committed to not raising taxes. - MikeAmundsen

You guys really need to implement un-like. - Kevin Scott

What the hell? - flammable

Hey, cool. The photo is the Charleston, SC port. I thought I recognized it. - James Williams (willia4)

I think the point is that the math just doesn't add up. Unless it gets a LOT more efficient people are going to be doing a LOT less shipping. - Jason Wehmhoener

This business where people talk about "projected" growth and then try to find enough carbon credits to "go around" to support the project levels seems to be presuming that the point of cap-and-trade is a shell game that magically makes global warming go away without actually changing anything. - ⓞnor

Ya, the language is misleading, but the point is that shipping produces a large amount of carbon emissions. - Jason Wehmhoener

I wonder if those crazy sail powered shipping vessels are workable. - ⓞnor

Consider the filing cabinet to be the audit trail table in your database. Every time the database changes, the audit trail table has to be updated, so indexing that table adds extra cost to every change in the DB. However, it makes the audit trail easy to query. If you don't index that table, every audit lookup requires an expensive table scan that bogs down your whole server for minutes at a time. That expense might be so high that you don't do audit queries even when you want to. - Gabe

What's an audit query, and why would anyone ever do one to their old phone bills? - ⓞnor

The audit table in your database keeps track of when something in your database changed. You would do an audit query when you want to find out when some field changed or what the value was on a particular date, for example. You would want to do this with your old phone bills when you want to figure out the last time your rates changed or to see how this month's usage compared to this month a year ago. - Gabe

My point is that keeping the data unindexed makes it almost impossible to use, so why bother keeping it at all? - Gabe

Because "almost impossible" is different from actually impossible, and because the large cost of finding those few items you need is less than the combined small cost of indexing the many items you file. - ⓞnor

Sure, Onor, but odds are that the task of going through the unsorted mess would be substantial enough that you just wouldn't do it, or would find other ways around it like just asking the phone company. - Gabe

Sounds good to me. But if the IRS comes knocking, you might really want those records... - ⓞnor

i like sinophore's comment on your blog (but i like commenting here better). i had a gigantic pile of bills/statements/etc in my closet which i had to sort through before i moved :( it was painful. - Neha Narula

The write penalty might be worth it if you ever need an incredibly fast seek performance... - Steve Lacey

Oh God, I can't stop laughing at the "Sure, Onor" comment. (Gabe, that "O" is an egg.) - niniane

Niniane: egg? That "O" is CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER O (according to http://www.fileformat.info/inf...), so what makes it an egg? - Gabe

Oh, it's the latin little-o? Maybe you're right then, and it's Onor. - niniane

Does it look like an egg or something? - Gabe

sunny side up. - Sanjeev Singh

The story is #7 on the Reddit front page. - Gary Burd

I am amused at how much discussion this post is generating. I hope RB doesn't mind. - niniane

I'm pretty sure you can't just uncircle an o like that, it messes up the phoenetics. - j1m

Anyway, I agree with ⓞnor's weights (as always) -- the point of saving papers is that there's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance that you'll need them. Not a chance that you'll want them really bad -- I don't know what that chance is -- but the chance that you'll *need* them. In that case you just search through the damn things, even if you have a file cabinetfull it won't take more than an evening to look at each one. In my experience this happens about once every 10 years. - j1m

Neha: Why did you have to sort them? Why not just move 'em all in unopened boxes? My name: we Circlevanians are used to people mangling our names. Call me Onor, Nor, @Nor, whatev'z. - ⓞnor

And if it turns out that you do need to search, just file then: manual incremental filing is probably less efficient than manual batch filing. - Larry Greenfield

I like the phrase "steel consumption of 300 kg per man per year". Yum. - Larry Greenfield

When construction of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges was at their peak in 1933 their combined steel needs equaled 6% of the national annual production. - Kevin Fox

i find the large solid cubes to be a useful way for getting a feeling of scale for certain things - bob

The annual global production of concrete is around 5 billion cubic yards - roughly enough to make a cube a mile on a side, or in standard metric units, "a holy ginormous fuckton" of concrete. - ⓞnor

Or, enough to make a solid concrete coffin for every person on earth. - Larry Greenfield

Hell, given that we take 60 years to die, a big ol' concrete sarcophagus. - ⓞnor

haha, but how much of the grand canyon could you fill in? - bob

10 miles average width * 1 mile average depth / 2 (assume triangular shape) = 5 square miles of cross sectional area, so a cubic mile of concrete would occupy 1/5 mile, or ~ 1000 ft, of the Grand Canyon. - ⓞnor

We better get started soon because it sounds like it may take a while to fill in. - Paul Buchheit

What size cube of steel do you need to reinforce the concrete used to fill in the Grand Canyon? - Gabe

i assume that since it will be solid and resting on the local rock that minimal reinforcing will be needed - maybe just a little bit between the 1000ft sections :P - bob

Shouldn't that be "a holy ginormous fucktonne"? - Jim Norris

According to wikipedia, rebar is 1-5% by volume of reinforced concrete, usually on the low end. If all the world's steel was combined with all the world's concrete, it would be a 2% mixture. What I want to know is how you would build the form. - ⓞnor

urbandictionary agrees with you, Jim: "Metric Fuckton: More properly, "Metric Fucktonne." The Fuckton is the Imperial standard for the measurement of fuckweight, while the Fucktonne, in contrast, constitutes the Metric measure of fuckmass... Generally used to imply superlative quantity with the Metric standard included to emphasize this point. The inclusion of the term is, however, fundamentally a misuse of the standard, as the Imperial Fuckton (2000 Imperial Fuckpounds) denotes a slightly greater measure of fuckweight within Earth's gravitational pull than does the Metric Fuckton (1000 Metric Fuckilograms)." - ⓞnor

Paul, Licensing in general is a serious problem in a free market. It creates an artificial barrier to entry and leads people to believe that the government can protect them from poor quality. But licensing doesn't ensure quality it limits supply which keeps prices high, thus hurting those it claims to protect, the consumer. - Steve Olson

I don't see any reason why my interior decorator needs a license or my real estate agent needs to be a Realtor®™©, but I'd prefer to stick with a doctor who passed her boards. - Jim Norris

There are good arguments that US doctor's salaries are kept artificial high by medical schools (they only admit a small number of people), licensing boards (requiring internships of immigrants), and immigration policies (keeping them out in the first place). And of course doctors won't let nurses perform procedures they might be well qualified to do. Overall health might be higher if we relaxed some of these requirements. - Larry Greenfield

"Suppose that a thread operating on behalf of Alice maps a file into memory and then unmaps it. A second thread operating on behalf of Bob then maps some other file that the underlying operating system happens to assign to the same memory address. Now Alice's thread can read, and possibly even modify, the contents of Bob's file." - Paul Buchheit

Seems kind of dumb. Suppose that the threads are all under my control and I really do want to unmap a file? It's like they are still thinking strictly in terms of browser applets instead of normal server-side code, which is really the only thing people use java for anyway. - Paul Buchheit

It is kind of dumb. Fortunately the workaround (if you use a few, large files) is not that bad. Call System.gc(), System.runFinalization() and try again..... - Sanjeev Singh

Who designed a file API with an Open command but no Close? It seems almost useless to me. Paul: a browser would not have threads running on behalf of different users; a server would. - Gabe

If they're unwilling the pay the cost to check whether the mapping is valid, how do they ever manage to stomach the cost of bounds checking the get() calls on the MappedByteBuffer? I suppose they probably consider the cost of bounds checking inevitable, and maybe it can even be optimized out with a sufficiently clever compiler. They could at the very least offer a slower unmappable flavor that does make the validity check. - ⓞnor

When I do use C++, it's not that C++ compiles to something faster than Java, but rather because C and C++ give me direct control over memory and other resources. Most languages focus on the common case, and make things easier 99% of the time, and then make that 1% tear-out-hair frustrating. C++ makes things harder 100% of the time, but it's predictably hard and I never feel like I'm going to run into something like the unmap issue. - Amit Patel

Gabe, the real issue is who controls the code. On the server, it's typically all my code and I'm not worried about complex security schemes to protect one thread from attack by another. The idea with applets was that you could run untrusted code from third-parties and they would all be kept in a secure sandbox. Of course such code would never be allowed to mmap, which is why "security" is a really dumb reason to exclude this feature. - Paul Buchheit

Even if you disregard the security, there's the safety issue to consider. Having another file mapped there is harmless, but mappings can be read/write. If you unmap and then some other part of the system (possibly a C library) allocates memory there you can end up crashing the program. Not good. - Larry Greenfield

What's wrong with mapping in /dev/null instead? Doesn't mmap normally replace existing mappings of the same address? - Jim Norris

Jim: there is a race condition where some other thread in the process could allocate the memory between when you unmap the file and map in /dev/null. - Gabe

Larry, unmap is unsafe in the same way that free/delete are in c/c++. It's not ideal, but I'd rather have an unsafe op that I need to be careful with than not have it at all. They can call it "reallyDangerousAndScaryUnmapThatYouProbablyShouldNotUse()". - Paul Buchheit

Hmm, surprisingly you don't seem to be able to write your own mmap/munmap in JNI, so I can't say just use JNI nyah nyah. - Larry Greenfield

If Sun didn't implement this in JNI, how else could they have done it? JVM changes? - Gabe

Larry, you can use JNI to do mmap/unmap. One of the JNI examples does that: http://java.sun.com/developer/... - Sanjeev Singh

Maybe this guy did it, but the way this investigation was conducted and is being publicized just seems wrong to me. - Chris White

"They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend." - Chris White

More interesting is http://friendfeed.com/jayrosen 's crusade to get abcnews to out their sources, who, he argues, abused confidentiality to leak untrue stories about the source of the anthrax - j1m

Is there an unbiased economics reason why auctions should be opposed? It seems to me that airlines object to them because the current airlines have something for free that's very valuable. Is there a reason as a passenger I should oppose them? - Larry Greenfield

It might depend on your willingness to trade off time spent waiting for delayed flights and possibly higher ticket prices or fewer routes. There's clearly a big externality that the Port Authority doesn't care about though. - Jim Norris

Isn't this the same old holy war about the value of referential integrity that rages among functional programmers (or between functional programmers and others) for decades? It seems to boil down to whether you think it's useful to name a value or a slot, and everyone talks past each other because it's hard to prove whether any particular conceptual framework is better or worse. - ⓞnor

I think you, and the author, give the Erlang folks far to much credit. But does this really count as a cargo cult? - j1m

Cargo cult programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... - Gary Burd

Why do we need Erlang? Does it solve any problems not handled by other languages, and is it suitable to replace those languages? Is it a practical language like Python, or more of a theoretical language like Lisp and Prolog? - Chris White

It's a practical language, and it has a consistent concurrency model that works well with distributed systems, something that most languages struggle to grapple with. I don't actually know Erlang but it doesn't seem nearly as pointlessly me-too as, say, Ruby. - ⓞnor

Gary, but the thing we're discussing here is forced by the language, isn't it? I thought cargo culting referred to something programmers 'chose' to do, not something required by the language. - j1m