The holiday season is (a) upon us and (b) often the deciding factor in whether a given brand had a successful year or not.

FORBES: Competition Promises To Be Fierce For Brands This Holiday Season

With tax breaks like these, if a family isn't likely to qualify for college financial aid, ( see box), deciding to invest in a 529 is easy.

FORBES: Early Decision

In return for supporting tax increases Mr Maldonado wants support for a ballot initiative that would reform the primary system, making it more hospitable to people like him (ah, to hold the deciding vote at such a time).

ECONOMIST: California's crisis

If the IRS later determines an employee's original deferral violated some new rule (say, just missing a deadline for deciding to defer pay), he'll have to pay regular taxes and the 20% penalty tax on the whole balance (including earnings).

FORBES: Strings Attached

For the same reasons Germany (which likes to cast a deciding vote between free-market and statist arguments) wanted Britain in the room.

ECONOMIST: Bagehot

That, in turn, depends on the two parties splitting the remaining seats 49-50, with the vice-president (who casts the deciding vote in the case of a 50-50 tie) coming from the minority party.

ECONOMIST: Lexington

Deciding which of these functions to use, abstract or ignore exposes you (as a developer) to all sorts of reach, performance and support complexity challenges and tradeoffs.

FORBES: How To Create An iPad E-Book App

Calculating basis (and deciding which shares to sell) gets messier if you've held a stock for decades or have been reinvesting dividends, meaning you've bought small lots of shares at different prices.

FORBES: It Pays to Know Your Number

While Toshiba's sittin' pretty with its 200GB perpendicular laptop drive, Samsung is finally deciding to join Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital (just to name a few) in the perpendicular byte stacking game.

ENGADGET: Samsung crashes the perpendicular party with bevy of laptop drives