Employee stock options are similar to exchange traded call options issued by a company with respect to its own stock. At any time before exercise, employee stock options can be said to have two components: time value and intrinsic value. Any remaining time value component is forfeited back to the company when early exercises are made.
An arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a digital circuit used to perform arithmetic and logic operations. It represents the fundamental building block of the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer. Modern CPUs contain very powerful and complex ALUs. In addition to ALUs, modern CPUs contain a control unit (CU).
The left shift of the ALU result yields a word address, NOT a byte address, and accounts for the implicit right shift by two in the signal routing. The end result is simply the lower two bits of the ALU result being masked (zeroed) before being sent to the memory.