Can we stop hyperventilating over the Google employee death benefit?

There’s been a lot of coverage in the past few days about an employee benefit at Google: The spouse of a Google employee who dies receives half the employee’s salary for 10 years.

That’s a nice benefit, but the coverage—both in terms of the benefit to employees, and the “harm” to shareholders—has been hyperbolic. Business Insider concludes:

It kind of makes the free lunch pale by comparison.

Targ manure! It does not make the free lunch pale by comparison. In fact, for many employees, the free lunch is the more valuable benefit!

Decepticons: 16% is not 0%

There’s a local TV ad for a window company. They advertise “5 year no-interest financing, or a 30% factory-direct discount.”

Targ manure! If the cash price is lower than the financed price, you’re effectively paying interest on the financing. But how much?

Thank goodness for Virgin Mobile's lousy coverage

Maximum PC reports that Virgin Mobile secretly caps "unlimited" data plans:

Subscribers to the $40 per month Unlimited Broadband2Go plan who exceed the industry standard 5GB cap will receive notice that their bandwidth will be significantly diminished for the remainder of the billing period.

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I obtained just such a device, but returned it due to a lack of coverage at my house. Since the whole point of the purchase was to have unlimited broadband, instead of my paltry 7.5 GB/month WildBlue satellite Internet plan, I'm glad that it didn't work out.

Virgin got some great press from David Pogue based entirely on the "unlimited" aspect of the plan. He's remarked upon the backpedaling, but I'm sure Virgin has still seen a huge net benefit from the coverage.

Most galling is this statement in Virgin's press release:

Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it’s about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails*. So this change shouldn’t affect you unless you’re a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.

Yes, it's "A LOT" of data if this is 1998, and we do 1998 things with our Internet, like read email(!) and surf(!) the web(!). But what if we want to do 2011 things? Well, 5 GB/month will get you less than two Netflix movies at highest quality, or about half of a major-release game download from Steam. An operating system update for your iThing will eat through half a week's worth of your allowance. Windows 7 installation media from TechNet? Two weeks' worth, sir. Grateful Dead shows? You could get one a week, if you don't want to use your connection for anything else.

It's 2011. Digital delivery of software and HD video is here now. Stop quoting bandwidth in "emails", "web pages", and "screen-resolution photos", and recognize it.

The (priceless) sound of silence

By now you’ve all read the hilarious reviews for the $6,800 AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cables. But it raises the question—what do people listen to with these fancy cables? The answer is in plain view.

Foursquare’s SMS interface is a festering heap of targ manure

Update: There's a new Foursquare SMS interface available, courtesy of DOTGO. The new interface addresses most of my complaints below; I've written up some intial impressions of the new service. Check it out!

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I like the idea of Foursquare, but I don’t have a smartphone. That shouldn’t be a problem, because Foursquare supports checking in by SMS (text message). The idea is that you send a text message to 50500 in the following format:

@ location ! shout

Foursquare should check you into location. The optional shout is a message that's shown to your friends and included in tweets generated by foursquare.

Unfortunately, the SMS interface is a colossal failure. It’s as if they set out to develop the least useful interface that could be said to check the “SMS compatibility” box off the requirements list.

Reason Zero: The Mobile Site

Foursquare offers a mobile site, http://m.foursquare.com/, which I should be able to access through the web browser in my phone. But it doesn't work, and Foursquare doesn’t care. It didn’t work on my last phone, a Verizon Samsung Alias, and it doesn’t work on my new phone, a Verizon LG Cosmos. The dysfunctional mobile website is the reason I have to use the SMS interface in the first place.