If you are the CEO of a company and there is an inner circle of influential employees driving your business and you do not know about them you are not doing your job as CEO.

It is completely reasonable and often a good idea to have an inner circle of high-ability influential employees to drive your business (see, for example, Good to Great, J Collins). It is entirely incompetent of the CEO to not know who they are and not to be using them to build a successful enterprise.

Wave did not take off because there were no Wave servers worth a damn that weren't Google.
Wave protocol is a Sharepoint killer. It's not a new cool social medium, it's a workgroup and corporate information sharing system.
And I want to kill Sharepoint, because the stupid thing only works with Windows.
Many organisations do not want, or cannot, share their information with Google. Google doesn't even use any translucent database techniques to help users keep their data private. Google being a Wave server is useful for some public publishing, but there must be your own private Wave server for Wave to be usable by most of the target market. The target market is the market of Sharepoint, larger organisations who are always more careful with their data.
So Google's error was not to make something noone wanted. It was to make something none of the interested people could use, because they did not release a free Wave server to use inside your organisation.
They will make the same mistake, of assuming people will share their data when they won't, again in future.

And I really don't care that people, usually from Google, say that Google can be trusted not to read users' data. That's not relevant; they can be compelled to reveal it to random other authorities without the users' knowledge or consent, and if anything like that does happen, they don't give any information out as a matter of policy.

After being ignored by arrogant dolts who didn't bother to correct him and guide into providing a better fix.

The first rule of the tautology club is the first rule of the tautology club :)

And coincidentally, I do have a fair amount of experience with ATMs (probably outdated by now, though). Boot time, at least in my country, isn't a factor: nowadays, most of them actually run a stripped down version of Windows 2000...

That statement shows a severe lack of understanding on IT Technology... The PIN number doesn't need a boot of the whole OS system to be processed, all relevant information should either be in RAM memory, or contained in the card itself...

You're not. I'm also almost blind on one eye (perfect peripheral vision, so no depth perception problems, but forward vision is around 20%), and 3D simply doesn't work for me, regardless of the technology used.

I'm not exactly concerned about exclusion, yet. I've watched the 2D versions of most recent 3D movies (Avatar excluded), and thought they all sucked. The only thing going for them was the 3D gimmick, so most people (my wife included) liked the visuals and felt they got their money's worth; for me, not so much.

I know at least 2 other people with the same condition I have (1 relative, 1 co-worker), and several others with various eyesight problems that prevent them from fully seeing 3D movies.
I doubt (at least hope) we'll ever get to a point where 3D stops being a gimmick and becomes an integral part of the movie (like... needing a 3D view to fully understand a scene), at least until holograms (actual 3D projections instead of visual tricks) come along...

The correct link is http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html sorry for the typo.