Totally agree. Google really has a pretty spectacular infrastructure to feed the rest of its services. Microsoft gets a fragment of that with Bing, and Apple can collect some through the usage of their devices, but at the end of the day Google gets the bulk of the most valuable commodity: people looking for something…

Sure, of course it's not tax-free. But for people who are trying to decide whether to spend money on a 401k or something else right now, they get a 20% discount on saving that retirement money. It's especially important at the beginning of peoples' careers where they're often not earning as much and have to make that…

No, you're not missing anything. It's the same reason why it's foolish to pay cash for a car if you qualify for a 0% loan - you're just throwing money away.

Dear Verizon,

You're getting a discount on what you're depositing, since you aren't paying taxes on that money.

For those who do have some kind of 401k matching through work, if you are not contributing something, drop everything you're doing and set it up right this very minute. Not tomorrow. Not this afternoon. Right now.

One of the best knife tips I ever got:

If the article can be summed up in one sentence, it's probably not the best subject matter for an article.

I figured that was lumped in under "read carefully" which sometimes involves double-checking things you've read.

So, um, read carefully, and apply common sense when looking at arbitrary units like "per sheet"?

I believe the post was edited to clarify that... I'm pretty sure the original text stated 3 dB.

A change of 3 dB is perceived as a doubling of noise, so a change of 2 dB is quite noticeable for those of us who care about the noise level of the system.

I work in the IT industry.

How about "Chrome for iOS Adds Support for Apple's App Extensions"? Or just "...for Apple's 'Extensions'"

It doesn't actually establish a VPN. It takes advantage of the OS' ability to route all network traffic through an app - the easiest way to do that is to have the app claim it's creating a VPN, but it's really just scanning the data locally and piping it back out to your normal data connection.

I stopped Jailbreaking my iPhone when I switched to Android. Does that count?

My battery life went to hell when I tried to allow an app to manage my iVPN connection, presumably because the app had to be awake most of the time and keeping the VPN active, otherwise my background data wouldn't flow through it.

This all looks good but it appears I can't actually send SMS messages via my Voice number through the Hangouts app.

Sure, that's great. I'm glad it works for you - everyone should use what works. But saying your system is the best of an imperfect set of choices is silly. It's only the best at some very specific things, and is completely inappropriate/wrong for other priorities.

It's only "the best of nothing but imperfect options" if you weight privacy as absolutely the #1 most important thing, overwhelming all other considerations.