You are making assumptions that it would only cost Symantec a couple of seconds. This is not at all the case. They didn't find out about this as quickly as they did because they have offices in foreign countries. They found out about it quickly because they offer a service where they monitor thousands of different areas of the internet looking for patterns in the traffic that resemble attacks and other malicious activity. When they find these patterns they have a highly paid analyst dig into the issue further. Once the analysts have determined exactly what the issue is, they give the information to the customers who have paid to support the service. Along with telling them about the "attack" symantec also gives recommendations on how to deal with the issue.

Tony's analogy is dead on. The service that symantec is providing costs thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain. Why is it that you think you should be privy to this information, for free, that cost symantec so much money to gather?

If symantec were just to give this information away, they would not be able to continue gathering that data to begin with for much longer, mainly because it would be a situation where they would lose mass quantities of money.
Just because you don't understand my perspective, please don't just start claiming I'm making assumptions here...

To clarify my point and to put it a little differantly:

All I'm saying is that; Since Symantec already had the information, AND were already planning on giving it to the public FOR FREE (Like they eventually did) - is that it would of seemed a better PR tactic (IMHO) to give it to the people a few hours earlier then they did so that people could of been prepaired. Instead of after the fact as if to say 'well now that its to late heres the info you needed to-bad for you for not paying us'...

How is it costing them thousands and thousands of dollars to send out a notification that they had PRE-PREPAIRED already - only to send it out a few hours ealier then they did. (Since they already planned on giving it to the public for free anyway)...

(Which btw is why the anology was wrong, although like i did say - I see where his point was coming from, so you don't have to explain it to me... But for it to be accurate Jaguarr would have to both be giving cars to all their paying customers and then going back and giving whats left on the lot to all the non-paying customers - which we all know they don't do)

Which is where my comment came from, that it would only take them a few seconds - as thats all the time it takes to post a pre-prepaired statement that they plan on posting later anyway...

And Yes I know it was 'pre-prepaired' because what they released to the public was nothing more then a copy of the information half of what they did send out to their customers hours and hours earlier... Which again I don't have a problem with them giving MORE of the info to their customers - nor do I have a problem with them giving it to their customers first... As you says thats just part of the business...

RRP