Taxes is EXTREMELY important here. Those shares are going to be taxed as income, even though they have no cash value (they will be taxed at the current valuation of the company at the time of the award). This can be a very significant amount of cash..

You should be looking for options, which allow you to defer much of that tax burden till at least they are liquid (but be careful how the contract is worded in terms of vesting and term of availability.

You sir have master (with incredible (and absolute)) skill the art of parenthetical (the use of parenthesis to denote (or markup (or provide additional detail))) writing.

My hat is off to you :)

It's always interesting when I consider the number of hard-core Republicans I know that happily take government welfare. Rural areas are FILLED with people who don't want to work (they're "contractors"), yet live on 5 acres and have 11 horses (real example). They need food stamps to get by. They depend on government medical coverage for their children.

Yet come election time they are red as red can be.

Just because sexuality has been overly criminalized by a prudish society is not the fault of those engaging in sexual acts.

Literally every single Windows user I know has been infected with this. I removed it several times over the holidays. My wife (and many of her coworkers) where infected...

I know it's not necessarily a representative sample, but I'd be shocked if it was only 400k machines in total.

How do you identify "good code"? That's one of the great problems we have as software developers. Quantifying 'good' code is extraordinarily difficult. Code reviews do an excellent job of identifying clever code, but rarely capture the full utility of what is being written. You may think you know good code when you see it, but over the course of my career I've become convinced that is not true at all.

Really the problem is that the only way to truly measure code quality is by seeing how it runs in a production environment. Even then I can easily quantify the quality of the teams overall output (does it work? does it work consistently?), but tracing that back to an individual programmer is often nearly impossible. Systems tend to interact with each other, and placing blame is not an exact science. The gulf between 'good' and 'good enough' is not nearly as wide as it seemed when I was a novice programmer.

Great code almost never breaks. Good code works most of the time. Poor code is another matter.

Poor code is easy to spot. Poor code never works. It's ugly. It's complex. It's stateful. It's jump off of the screen and practically begs to be put out of its misery.

That's precisely why companies have processes and checks. They are an attempt to catch marginal code and make it 'good enough'. The problem, as the article points out, is that in the process they often inspire great coders to deliver marginal code themselves.

The secret is to spot (through some mixture of science and art) great programmers and provide them with the freedom to write great code. If circumstance requires you to hire marginal programmers, then by all means put the process in place to make sure that what they do doesn't detract from the work your best and brightest are doing. Separate them as best you can. Limit how their systems interact.

But whatever you do... don't limit your best programmers, as they are far more valuable than hundreds of poor ones.

Unless you open the phone via something like telnet. Theres a simple piece of social engineering here. Come up with a sob story about how you need to make a phone call and you don't have a phone. Find a kind G1 owner to let you borrow theres to make a call. Have a friend distract them.Quickly run the exploit and open up remote access...

You could potentially download a little thing that calls home to help you locate the phone on the network, and get pretty much whatever you want off of it and since it's a keylogger that might include passwords.

This is identical to a fairly widespread attack in which someone 'borrows' your phone and then signs you up for some premium SMS service that charges you for a stupid joke every day or something like that.

I bought a MythTV system from Cosmos Engineering. You can probably save money by building one yourself but I liked the fact that it just works out of the box. It was reviewed in Linux Journal so that might be reputable enough for you.