It's not a ridiculous starting figure for a field that more often than not requires a Master's level degree, not a Bachelor's. You need to be thinking more along the lines of pay grades for civil engineers, not software developers.
The short version: By offering to buy their own stock, they are spending their pile of cash to raise the value of the other shares. That raises the stock price at the cost of the cash they spent. It also signals to investors that this stock is safer to buy, because if it starts to drop the company will step in and buy from them.
In Cleveland, OH (where you have lots of laid-off factory workers) the going rate for a starting programmer seems to be $0, because every headhunter I've talked to about the market says you're basically unemployable until you have 3 years of experience as a programmer. So if you're a programmer starting out, you take what you can get, which in my case was $26K/yr. When you counted overtime, that amounted to around $3.50/hr before taxes. That is insultingly low pay for anyone, but particularly low for a job requiring a 4-year degree.
approach to fighting identity theft. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop identity theft for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from identity thieves (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) identity thieves don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of identity theft ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Dishonesty on the part of identity thieves themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (X) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about your legislature:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're stupid people for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
No, these are lasers, not phasers. So in order to use them, our GI's will have to go through Stormtrooper Academy to ensure that they all are capable of missing from 10 feet away.
Although I'm not the OP, my impression of his point is that the world needs good plumbers, mechanics, welders, electricians, janitors, secretaries, cooks, etc, and that "college degree->better job" for each individual does not equate to "college degree for everyone->better jobs for everyone". All that everyone getting a college degree does is means that you have college-educated people pushing brooms.
And to be clear, my own view on this issue is that open access to knowledge and education is great, but don't see it as a substitute for treating janitors badly.
That is true for universities who can afford it. It's not so true of smaller or less well-funded colleges.
So if you're poor and make it into Harvard, you've done quite well and could, say, end up being President of the United States. If you're poor and don't get accepted at Harvard but do get accepted at West Bilgewater State, the cost will continue to be a barrier. That means there is still a barrier: If your family is poor, you have to be really really top-notch or you're outta luck. If your family is wealthier, and you are merely talented, you can go to the second-tier school and still do pretty well for yourself.
It may not be perfect, but it's definitely pretty darn good. Especially compared to the bad old days of Altavista and the like.
In your example, The Onion may be first, but second is Wikipedia's article on onions, third is the National Onion Association (which I'm guessing is an onion industry group), and fourth is a cooking page discussing onions as a cooking ingredient. All those answers are a reasonably good guess as to what you're looking for.
Forget pirates: How about an organization with an agenda and enough people to pose a military threat that doesn't like Google showing the world how stupid they are? I'd think governments, religious fanatics, some corporations, and political groups of all stripes would be after this thing.
And what about the possibility of being Fair Game, not just fair game?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. Who is this AG and where is he hiding Michael Mukasey?
And if he doesn't accept the ad hominem argument, then we'll just kick his ass.
I'll save those huge computers a few million years: The answer is 42.
Now try producing that on a mere Milliard Gargantubrain.
It's not a ridiculous starting figure for a field that more often than not requires a Master's level degree, not a Bachelor's. You need to be thinking more along the lines of pay grades for civil engineers, not software developers.
The short version: By offering to buy their own stock, they are spending their pile of cash to raise the value of the other shares. That raises the stock price at the cost of the cash they spent. It also signals to investors that this stock is safer to buy, because if it starts to drop the company will step in and buy from them.
Read more about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_buyback
Hey, I can beat you at that game.
I'm going to accurately detect humans pretending to be a monkey 100% of the time when the human test subject is told to pretend to be a monkey.
Here's the source:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Yes"
They haven't figured out a way of training a giant rat to teach the tortoises.
It was closer to 16 by 7, but even if it were 8 you're still talking about being able to make more delivering pizzas.
sexist!
(Just kidding)
In Cleveland, OH (where you have lots of laid-off factory workers) the going rate for a starting programmer seems to be $0, because every headhunter I've talked to about the market says you're basically unemployable until you have 3 years of experience as a programmer. So if you're a programmer starting out, you take what you can get, which in my case was $26K/yr. When you counted overtime, that amounted to around $3.50/hr before taxes. That is insultingly low pay for anyone, but particularly low for a job requiring a 4-year degree.
That's because asshats tend to be at the root of technical problems like this one.
Your government advocates a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting identity theft. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop identity theft for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from identity thieves
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) identity thieves don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of identity theft
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Dishonesty on the part of identity thieves themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about your legislature:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're stupid people for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
No, these are lasers, not phasers. So in order to use them, our GI's will have to go through Stormtrooper Academy to ensure that they all are capable of missing from 10 feet away.
When you lose your job, and the guy next door also loses his job, it's a depression.
Oh, wait, no one is willing to use the word "depression" to talk about the economy going to hell in a handbasket.
Aye, but then thar be no booty in it, and what's good for gold is good for all landlubbers, savvy?
Sorry, my last sentence should obviously read "...don't see it as a substitute for treating janitors like decent people."
Although I'm not the OP, my impression of his point is that the world needs good plumbers, mechanics, welders, electricians, janitors, secretaries, cooks, etc, and that "college degree->better job" for each individual does not equate to "college degree for everyone->better jobs for everyone". All that everyone getting a college degree does is means that you have college-educated people pushing brooms.
And to be clear, my own view on this issue is that open access to knowledge and education is great, but don't see it as a substitute for treating janitors badly.
That is true for universities who can afford it. It's not so true of smaller or less well-funded colleges.
So if you're poor and make it into Harvard, you've done quite well and could, say, end up being President of the United States. If you're poor and don't get accepted at Harvard but do get accepted at West Bilgewater State, the cost will continue to be a barrier. That means there is still a barrier: If your family is poor, you have to be really really top-notch or you're outta luck. If your family is wealthier, and you are merely talented, you can go to the second-tier school and still do pretty well for yourself.
So now the cops can use those same cameras to track your face. Nice going.
So in other words, this will be almost but not entirely unlike Douglas Adams' writing?
It may not be perfect, but it's definitely pretty darn good. Especially compared to the bad old days of Altavista and the like.
In your example, The Onion may be first, but second is Wikipedia's article on onions, third is the National Onion Association (which I'm guessing is an onion industry group), and fourth is a cooking page discussing onions as a cooking ingredient. All those answers are a reasonably good guess as to what you're looking for.
Don't worry about god: All you need to do is shoot him with a photon torpedo, and your problems are solved.
Forget pirates: How about an organization with an agenda and enough people to pose a military threat that doesn't like Google showing the world how stupid they are? I'd think governments, religious fanatics, some corporations, and political groups of all stripes would be after this thing.
And what about the possibility of being Fair Game, not just fair game?
It's what Republicans do.
To be fair, it's not what all Republicans do. Ron Paul, for instance, would not be interested in starting another war.
It's just recently that the Republicans have nominated people who seem to prefer getting soldiers killed over having profit margins drop.
... or he was halfway across the country when he found out that the and meeting was happening, and there was no way to make it back in time.