It is even extremely rare that a reporter gets threatened by court to reveal his sources [...]
The last instance was a columnist who writes for one of the free newspapers (Spits in this case). He was remanded into custody for not revealing his source, but I do believe he won that and went free without revealing anything. I'm too lazy to Google right now.
As for corrupt politicians, I wouldn't be too optimistic. The Dutch press is highly concentrated, to the point that both a progressive and a conservative paper are held by the same publisher. It also appears that no journalist is willing to endanger his good relations with political insiders, and part of that bargain seems to be to not raise too much of a stink over inside problems, like corruption.
As a fact, witness the lack of attention to Neelie Smit-Kroes' reputation of corrupt dealings when she was proposed as a European Commisioner. The last person to actually make a stink of her reputation was Pim Fortuyn as a columnist for the conservative weekly Elsevier, and he gave up writing that column 3 years ago, and 2 and a half years ago he was shot and killed, so the last critical voice in this case was lost. The regular press this time focused only on her work to promote more female executives (work that she has been doing for only the past few years). The funny thing is that she got grilled harder in her confirmation hearing as Commisioner than in the press. I find this an ominous sign.
Actually, I do regularly ride a bike to work, 12 km two ways. That takes me about 45 minutes, and I arrive without sweating any more than I would standing in a subway carriage. If my biker's sweat would be offensive, then so would the sweat of one who has just spent some time in a crowded subway carriage.
Of course, if you're a lardass and you try to ride that distance at that speed, you will sweat a lot more. There's two solutions:
Exercise more so that you don't have to pedal all those extraneous kilos around.
Leave earlier so that you won't have to ride so fast.
And I do believe that for distances below 15km a car is overkill to transport a single person.
I'll grant one thing: I live in the Netherlands, and I can reach almost all I need (work, shopping, entertainment) within 45 minutes by bike, and our roads are (mostly) optimised for bike traffic.
Mart
Re:Good lord...welcome to slashdot
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe that's because those comments are right?
An e-bike confers no speed advantage, at the cost of being environmetally unfriendly, and denying the user exercise.
Objectively speaking, this is a net loss. So yes, he is a lazy bastard, and a polluter to boot.
The US auto industry opposed a bill that would have given them 13 years to reduce consumption to 36 mpg average, saying that that target was (in effect) not reachable?
I did some calculating, and 36 mpg is about 6.5 l/100 km or 1 l/15 km, which is currently attainable by most European and Japanese automobile manufacturers. Granted, most of them market cars with lesser fuel efficiency, mostly because of the US carmakers influence in marketing gas-guzzling mostrosities, but 36 mpg has been an attainable goal for at least 15 years now.
The Golden Retrievers' problems you mention is because the popularity of the breed drew in a lot of bad breeders a few years ago. The inbreeding in the line led to said problems with the race (some bad lines are actually mean, the very opposite of what a Golden Retriever should be).
The same happened here in Europe with the German Shepherd (I believe the Americans call it the Alsatian?) and the Collie (where attempts to breed a finer pointed nose by crossing in the russian Borzoi led to serious character problems).
In cat land the prime examples are the Siamese (character problems and fragile health) and the Persian (the modern Persian's flat nose leads to respiratory and tear duct problems).
Health problems in purebred cats are mostly found, as in purebred dogs, when a race gets particularly popular, and thus draws in those 'breeders' who are only in it for the money. Of course, efforts fix a certain characteristic, (like aforementioned flat nose in Persians) also means lots of inbreeding, with the attendant problems.
I have done some research on this. I have always been around moggies, but currently I am seriously considering getting a pure-bred Maine Coon. This breed is fairly free of problems, aside from a slightly higher chance on certain heart conditions. A friend of mine owns a pure-bred Persian, a beautiful smoke-coloured female of the classic kind, with the longer nose, and she's one unproblematic cat, full of as much vigour as the breed standard allows (Persians are not known for being very active, but she is at the top end of the spectrum).
Thankfully, the trend in cat breeding over the past few years is for 'natural' cats. The lines are looking more robust these days, and the image of the high-strung, weak-health pedigree is slowly fading. It will take time, careful breeding, and a loss of some snobbiness as well, to make pedigrees as robust as the moggies, but it is by no means impossible.
Abortion (not killing babies, thank you for that leading categorisation) is indeed a moral issue.
However, it is a moral issue for the woman considering the abortion. A blanket condemnation of abortion is a not-so-veiled implication that those women are incapable of moral judgement. We have left that misogynistic Calvinist notion that women are inherently immoral behind us, therefore it would behoove us to let that moral choice for abortion or not with the person who is about to undergo that ordeal.
Those women have enough trouble and enough soul-searching to go through without your cheap shots, thank you very much.
Linux distributors just are more honest about minimum specs, precisely because they know they get blasted by the critics if Linux is perceived to be slow.
Just try running XP on its recommended spec, and you will find out that that 300Mhz, 128MB is actually its minimum spec. What Microsoft specifies as minimum is "it boots, that's all".
Anecdotal evidence: if my laptop (an HP Omnibook 6100) throttles down to 730Mhz to conserve battery, it still runs snappily when running multiple user programs, including such hogs as OpenOffice.org (although loading time on that beast is still awful). True, it has 382MB memory, but aside from a full Gnome desktop with all the eyecandy on, it runs a webserver (Apache), a database server (PostgreSQL), an application server (Zope), an LDAP server (OpenLDAP) and a nameserver (BIND9) for development purposes. It still smokes my work PC in performance (2.4GHz PIV with 256M, running XP and some desktop apps).
So don't give us that "Linux is just as bloated as Windows" line. It is simply not true.
And oh yeah, my laptop does not crash when I try to generate a print preview of a large document. XP reliably bluescreens when I try that. Thank you Microsoft for integrating GDI with the kernel.
"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaida"
From the State of the Union 2003, straight from the horse's mouth.
Mart
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The left leaning folks are making it difficult for Europe to restructure.
And this is a good thing.
Restructuring, as the current neo-con governments in Europe call it, is nothing more than:
Selling the national assets to big corporations (like the rail system and the communications infrastructure). What good is a privately held telephone company that both offers service and owns the infrastructure, for example? That's just a monopoly, where every cent of profit is exploited from the public, who see no improvement in service, and the only GDP growth is in the rising salaries for the executives. Same with all other public services being sold out. In the Netherlands they just launched a plan to privatise disability insurance. The buyers are all the big insurance corps, and I ask (as a syndicalist): why weren't the unions asked to participate to offer cooperative insurance to their members?
Crippling legislation that kills off the small and medium enterprises, the true engines of the economy, where most of the worthwhile jobs are, where the least money is wasted on the overhead of useless 'managers', where the most innovation happens.
A further slashing in public education, effective selling off our Universities to be nothing but the R&D arm of the big corporations.
Killing off unemployment benefits, effectively removing the power to bargain from the workers with their employers. And since the only remaining employers stand to be the big corps (see above), this is a huge setback. It's easy to say that jobs are merely free-market bargaining, but if there is a power disparity in the market, one party will end up exploited.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? The so-called restructuring is nothing but a naked grab for power by the corporations and their toadies. The proof is in the pudding: all European politicians who participated in such 'restructurings' end up with cushy jobs at their friends' megacorps (do you hear me, Wim Kok?).
I mean, how hard can it be to set file and printer sharing by default to the local subnet only? Those parameters are already known, and in 90% of the cases this would suffice for normal usage.
The very fact that MS overlooks such simple security measures and pushes things like the new security control panel (forgot what it's called) as a 'solution' proves to me that MS is more concerned about the appearance of security than actual security itself.
Microsoft shows sloppy coding techniques and no understanding of security. Film at 11.
On the other hand, the very nature of Free and Open Source Software promotes good software design techniques:
Modularity: since developers can be very far apart, each must be able to work on his part of the project without having to consult with others all the time.
Related: well documented dependencies in the code, so that a developer can see where others' work might impact his code.
Good documentation: the source must be clearly documented so any developer with the requisite skillset can work with the code, not just its owner.
I am not a developer myself, so I think real developers can think of several more good points, but these are obvious. Any F/OSS project of more than moderate complexity seems to adhere to these standards, because this is the only way such projects even get to grow beyond that point.
It is also worth mentioning that e.g. Microsoft admits itself that it fails the first 2 criteria. Try googling for its internal Hotmail Unix-to-Windows 2000 migration memo.
Indeed, F/OSS is no panacaea, but its very nature does give it certain advantages, and dismissing these out of hand is silly.
Just look at the sordid history of the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive). You will see that the entertainment industry will meet up with some European Commisioners, have lunch, and presto! two months later the relevant committee comes up with a new EU directive implementing the latest draconian US copyright law into an EU Directive.
I am not hopeful. And I live in one of the countries that generally implement EU directives in the most liberal way possible.
Well, as I said, the documentation is currently 50km away from me, as I am not at home. However, I was referring to my copy the Unix Sysadmin Handbook, which someone was kind enough to quote for me.
Nope, sorry. They even manage to break that standard.
Not in really harmful ways, that must be admitted, but still, MS does not implement TCP/IP correctly. The example that comes to mind is the way they make sure all packets coming from an MS OS are high priority (I haven't got the technical docs right here, they're 50km away, but it has to do with marking them as coming from interactive sources), thus breaking one of TCP/IP built-in Quality-of-Service mechanisms.
So even something as basic as TCP/IP they manage to mess up. This is not very conducive to their trustworthiness.
And you certainly picked a representative site, didn't you?
startpagina.nl is invariably used by the same kind of people that wouldn't know how to download another browser. Whether or not these are representative of the population of computer users in general is another question and therefore using the startpagina.nl stats to answer questions about the general computer-using population is a statistical no-no.
Actually, a closer look at Orwell's other writing will show you that Animal Farm was meant as an allegory on all forms of powermad regimes using a revolution to grab power.
It's unfortunate that the closest thing Orwell had was the Stalinists taking over the Russian Revolution, but the book was meant as a mere example of a more general principle.
The narrow interpretation of Orwell's allegory is usually used by the right to defend their own version of the Animal Farm society, by using the 'Godless Commies' as their Farmer Jones.
Heh. I was actually aiming for a joke, but still...
When it comes to normal-length variable names, say around 7 characters, I find it quicker to just hit Caps-Lock and type out the full name, instead of taking my fingers from home row to hit a control sequence. Somehow, I can't type Alt-Anything while touch typing.
In fact, how often do you use caps lock at all (unless you write spam)?
Well, actually, when I am shell scripting and I need to enter $BLOODY_STUPID_LONG_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE_NAME for the umpteenth time, I praise God for giving me a Caps Lock key.
You are obviously a manager, or by God I hope you are joking.
Every one I have ever talked to would have much preferred it if marketing/legal/bizdev would have come over and actually talked to the people in the trenches. This fosters a mutual understanding and removes miscommunications.
By having everyone communicate through managers only you get two results:
You bloat up the managerial class, creating a huge bureaucracy.
Misunderstandings between departments, leading to projects that seemed like a good idea to management becoming hated impediments to workflow to the actual workers.
Of course, if your goal is to create jobs for paper MBAs then #1 is a feature, not a bug. This seems to be the trend these days, alas.
Collecting Fees (except for physical distribution) is prohibited under the GPL [...]
I am sorry, but this is wrong.
Collecting fees beyond the cost of distribution is prohibited under the GPL for the source only. You are free to charge whatever you want for the binaries as long as:
You provide the source.
You don't add additional restrictions on the GPL
That's it. That's as simple as it gets.
Mart
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 1
Greedo shooting first [...]
Actually, last week one of our local TV stations was screening A New Hope. Since I didn't know whether this was the special edition version or the original, I was paying close attention to the cantina scene.
As it happens, it was the Special Edition, but what surprised was how little Greedo shooting first mattered for the tone of the scene.
You see, in the scene you see Han reaching for his blaster under the table as Greedo comes to sit with him. Han's intent is obvious: he intends to shoot Greedo under the table. So regardless of whether or not Greedo shoots first, this scene retains the characterisation of Han as somewhat of a rat.
Frankly, the whole 'but Han was supposed to shoot first!' cries seem a bit like a storm in a glass of water to me. It is a silly gratuitous change, true, but it is not the earth-shattering change the rabid fan boys make it out to be.
Last I checked, Northern Ireland is an independent member of UEFA, seperate from England and the Republic of Ireland.
Mart
Re:Typical, you'd think they worked hard from this
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
Nice that you mention options.
Let's look at the incentive options offer: You get the opportunity to buy stock at a low price set now, but you get to buy the stock in the future when it is actually worth more than that.
Look at the major clinching point: in the future. This means that the corporation has you tied to them for the duration of the option grant. Of course, since your options are expected to to become worth Loads Of Money(tm), you are expected to take a relative pay cut now.
Of course, since you need the money, you had better shut up about the incompetent management, or you might lose your job, and your option rights.
Of course, the managers have options as well. But they get bailed out if the options end under water, or they get compensatory benefits.
Of course, these are merely options, not voting stock, so you also have no say in the running of your own workplace.
In the end, options are a sham to keep the proletarians quiet. It's a bone thrown to a faithful dog, to make him forget his food is merely the leavings of his masters table.
And for proof: look at one of the most succesful option grant programs in this regard: Microsoft. Guess who had to curtail option grants and move to restructuring the workforce, offering higher wages and actual stock to the employees to keep the best and the brightest?
Keep your options. They are merely the velvet glove hiding the iron fist of management.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, another dutchman chiming in.
The last instance was a columnist who writes for one of the free newspapers (Spits in this case). He was remanded into custody for not revealing his source, but I do believe he won that and went free without revealing anything. I'm too lazy to Google right now.
As for corrupt politicians, I wouldn't be too optimistic. The Dutch press is highly concentrated, to the point that both a progressive and a conservative paper are held by the same publisher. It also appears that no journalist is willing to endanger his good relations with political insiders, and part of that bargain seems to be to not raise too much of a stink over inside problems, like corruption.
As a fact, witness the lack of attention to Neelie Smit-Kroes' reputation of corrupt dealings when she was proposed as a European Commisioner. The last person to actually make a stink of her reputation was Pim Fortuyn as a columnist for the conservative weekly Elsevier, and he gave up writing that column 3 years ago, and 2 and a half years ago he was shot and killed, so the last critical voice in this case was lost. The regular press this time focused only on her work to promote more female executives (work that she has been doing for only the past few years). The funny thing is that she got grilled harder in her confirmation hearing as Commisioner than in the press. I find this an ominous sign.
MartActually, I do regularly ride a bike to work, 12 km two ways. That takes me about 45 minutes, and I arrive without sweating any more than I would standing in a subway carriage. If my biker's sweat would be offensive, then so would the sweat of one who has just spent some time in a crowded subway carriage.
Of course, if you're a lardass and you try to ride that distance at that speed, you will sweat a lot more. There's two solutions:
And I do believe that for distances below 15km a car is overkill to transport a single person.
I'll grant one thing: I live in the Netherlands, and I can reach almost all I need (work, shopping, entertainment) within 45 minutes by bike, and our roads are (mostly) optimised for bike traffic.
Mart
Maybe that's because those comments are right?
An e-bike confers no speed advantage, at the cost of being environmetally unfriendly, and denying the user exercise.
Objectively speaking, this is a net loss. So yes, he is a lazy bastard, and a polluter to boot.
MartLet me get this straight:
The US auto industry opposed a bill that would have given them 13 years to reduce consumption to 36 mpg average, saying that that target was (in effect) not reachable?
I did some calculating, and 36 mpg is about 6.5 l/100 km or 1 l/15 km, which is currently attainable by most European and Japanese automobile manufacturers. Granted, most of them market cars with lesser fuel efficiency, mostly because of the US carmakers influence in marketing gas-guzzling mostrosities, but 36 mpg has been an attainable goal for at least 15 years now.
Are US autos really that bad in fuel efficiency?
Mart
The Golden Retrievers' problems you mention is because the popularity of the breed drew in a lot of bad breeders a few years ago. The inbreeding in the line led to said problems with the race (some bad lines are actually mean, the very opposite of what a Golden Retriever should be).
The same happened here in Europe with the German Shepherd (I believe the Americans call it the Alsatian?) and the Collie (where attempts to breed a finer pointed nose by crossing in the russian Borzoi led to serious character problems).
In cat land the prime examples are the Siamese (character problems and fragile health) and the Persian (the modern Persian's flat nose leads to respiratory and tear duct problems).
Health problems in purebred cats are mostly found, as in purebred dogs, when a race gets particularly popular, and thus draws in those 'breeders' who are only in it for the money. Of course, efforts fix a certain characteristic, (like aforementioned flat nose in Persians) also means lots of inbreeding, with the attendant problems.
I have done some research on this. I have always been around moggies, but currently I am seriously considering getting a pure-bred Maine Coon. This breed is fairly free of problems, aside from a slightly higher chance on certain heart conditions. A friend of mine owns a pure-bred Persian, a beautiful smoke-coloured female of the classic kind, with the longer nose, and she's one unproblematic cat, full of as much vigour as the breed standard allows (Persians are not known for being very active, but she is at the top end of the spectrum).
Thankfully, the trend in cat breeding over the past few years is for 'natural' cats. The lines are looking more robust these days, and the image of the high-strung, weak-health pedigree is slowly fading. It will take time, careful breeding, and a loss of some snobbiness as well, to make pedigrees as robust as the moggies, but it is by no means impossible.
Mart
Abortion (not killing babies, thank you for that leading categorisation) is indeed a moral issue.
However, it is a moral issue for the woman considering the abortion. A blanket condemnation of abortion is a not-so-veiled implication that those women are incapable of moral judgement. We have left that misogynistic Calvinist notion that women are inherently immoral behind us, therefore it would behoove us to let that moral choice for abortion or not with the person who is about to undergo that ordeal.
Those women have enough trouble and enough soul-searching to go through without your cheap shots, thank you very much.
Mart
Linux distributors just are more honest about minimum specs, precisely because they know they get blasted by the critics if Linux is perceived to be slow.
Just try running XP on its recommended spec, and you will find out that that 300Mhz, 128MB is actually its minimum spec. What Microsoft specifies as minimum is "it boots, that's all".
Anecdotal evidence: if my laptop (an HP Omnibook 6100) throttles down to 730Mhz to conserve battery, it still runs snappily when running multiple user programs, including such hogs as OpenOffice.org (although loading time on that beast is still awful). True, it has 382MB memory, but aside from a full Gnome desktop with all the eyecandy on, it runs a webserver (Apache), a database server (PostgreSQL), an application server (Zope), an LDAP server (OpenLDAP) and a nameserver (BIND9) for development purposes. It still smokes my work PC in performance (2.4GHz PIV with 256M, running XP and some desktop apps).
So don't give us that "Linux is just as bloated as Windows" line. It is simply not true.
And oh yeah, my laptop does not crash when I try to generate a print preview of a large document. XP reliably bluescreens when I try that. Thank you Microsoft for integrating GDI with the kernel.
Mart
Here you go:
From the State of the Union 2003, straight from the horse's mouth.
MartAnd this is a good thing.
Restructuring, as the current neo-con governments in Europe call it, is nothing more than:
Are you starting to see a pattern here? The so-called restructuring is nothing but a naked grab for power by the corporations and their toadies. The proof is in the pudding: all European politicians who participated in such 'restructurings' end up with cushy jobs at their friends' megacorps (do you hear me, Wim Kok?).
MartWhat bugs is that this is not on by default.
I mean, how hard can it be to set file and printer sharing by default to the local subnet only? Those parameters are already known, and in 90% of the cases this would suffice for normal usage.
The very fact that MS overlooks such simple security measures and pushes things like the new security control panel (forgot what it's called) as a 'solution' proves to me that MS is more concerned about the appearance of security than actual security itself.
Microsoft shows sloppy coding techniques and no understanding of security. Film at 11.
MartOn the other hand, the very nature of Free and Open Source Software promotes good software design techniques:
I am not a developer myself, so I think real developers can think of several more good points, but these are obvious. Any F/OSS project of more than moderate complexity seems to adhere to these standards, because this is the only way such projects even get to grow beyond that point.
It is also worth mentioning that e.g. Microsoft admits itself that it fails the first 2 criteria. Try googling for its internal Hotmail Unix-to-Windows 2000 migration memo.
Indeed, F/OSS is no panacaea, but its very nature does give it certain advantages, and dismissing these out of hand is silly.
MartJust look at the sordid history of the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive). You will see that the entertainment industry will meet up with some European Commisioners, have lunch, and presto! two months later the relevant committee comes up with a new EU directive implementing the latest draconian US copyright law into an EU Directive.
I am not hopeful. And I live in one of the countries that generally implement EU directives in the most liberal way possible.
MartWell, as I said, the documentation is currently 50km away from me, as I am not at home. However, I was referring to my copy the Unix Sysadmin Handbook, which someone was kind enough to quote for me.
MartNope, sorry. They even manage to break that standard.
Not in really harmful ways, that must be admitted, but still, MS does not implement TCP/IP correctly. The example that comes to mind is the way they make sure all packets coming from an MS OS are high priority (I haven't got the technical docs right here, they're 50km away, but it has to do with marking them as coming from interactive sources), thus breaking one of TCP/IP built-in Quality-of-Service mechanisms.
So even something as basic as TCP/IP they manage to mess up. This is not very conducive to their trustworthiness.
MartThey have been thinking of using patents, and specifically to attack Linux, since 1998.
So yes, you are the only person to notice, sorry.
MartAnd you certainly picked a representative site, didn't you?
startpagina.nl is invariably used by the same kind of people that wouldn't know how to download another browser. Whether or not these are representative of the population of computer users in general is another question and therefore using the startpagina.nl stats to answer questions about the general computer-using population is a statistical no-no.
What are you trying to prove?
MartActually, a closer look at Orwell's other writing will show you that Animal Farm was meant as an allegory on all forms of powermad regimes using a revolution to grab power.
It's unfortunate that the closest thing Orwell had was the Stalinists taking over the Russian Revolution, but the book was meant as a mere example of a more general principle.
The narrow interpretation of Orwell's allegory is usually used by the right to defend their own version of the Animal Farm society, by using the 'Godless Commies' as their Farmer Jones.
MartHeh. I was actually aiming for a joke, but still...
When it comes to normal-length variable names, say around 7 characters, I find it quicker to just hit Caps-Lock and type out the full name, instead of taking my fingers from home row to hit a control sequence. Somehow, I can't type Alt-Anything while touch typing.
MartWell, actually, when I am shell scripting and I need to enter $BLOODY_STUPID_LONG_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE_NAME for the umpteenth time, I praise God for giving me a Caps Lock key.
MartYou are obviously a manager, or by God I hope you are joking.
Every one I have ever talked to would have much preferred it if marketing/legal/bizdev would have come over and actually talked to the people in the trenches. This fosters a mutual understanding and removes miscommunications.
By having everyone communicate through managers only you get two results:
Of course, if your goal is to create jobs for paper MBAs then #1 is a feature, not a bug. This seems to be the trend these days, alas.
MartThe funniest bit is that the Queen's Birthday is a national holiday: in the Netherlands!
Now, if you look at the map, and the cultural difference, then this cock-up becomes highly amusing.
Mart (Dutch, so I should know of the significance of April 30th)I am sorry, but this is wrong.
Collecting fees beyond the cost of distribution is prohibited under the GPL for the source only. You are free to charge whatever you want for the binaries as long as:
That's it. That's as simple as it gets.
MartActually, last week one of our local TV stations was screening A New Hope. Since I didn't know whether this was the special edition version or the original, I was paying close attention to the cantina scene.
As it happens, it was the Special Edition, but what surprised was how little Greedo shooting first mattered for the tone of the scene.
You see, in the scene you see Han reaching for his blaster under the table as Greedo comes to sit with him. Han's intent is obvious: he intends to shoot Greedo under the table. So regardless of whether or not Greedo shoots first, this scene retains the characterisation of Han as somewhat of a rat.
Frankly, the whole 'but Han was supposed to shoot first!' cries seem a bit like a storm in a glass of water to me. It is a silly gratuitous change, true, but it is not the earth-shattering change the rabid fan boys make it out to be.
MartHow about Football?
Last I checked, Northern Ireland is an independent member of UEFA, seperate from England and the Republic of Ireland.
MartNice that you mention options.
Let's look at the incentive options offer: You get the opportunity to buy stock at a low price set now, but you get to buy the stock in the future when it is actually worth more than that.
Look at the major clinching point: in the future. This means that the corporation has you tied to them for the duration of the option grant. Of course, since your options are expected to to become worth Loads Of Money(tm), you are expected to take a relative pay cut now.
Of course, since you need the money, you had better shut up about the incompetent management, or you might lose your job, and your option rights.
Of course, the managers have options as well. But they get bailed out if the options end under water, or they get compensatory benefits.
Of course, these are merely options, not voting stock, so you also have no say in the running of your own workplace.
In the end, options are a sham to keep the proletarians quiet. It's a bone thrown to a faithful dog, to make him forget his food is merely the leavings of his masters table.
And for proof: look at one of the most succesful option grant programs in this regard: Microsoft. Guess who had to curtail option grants and move to restructuring the workforce, offering higher wages and actual stock to the employees to keep the best and the brightest?
Keep your options. They are merely the velvet glove hiding the iron fist of management.
Mart