Also higher than more than the bottom half of US states.

I only have problems with two products I own:

1. Samsung Galaxy S3. The screen is so big that it is wider than my thumb. That means that I've some difficulties using the back button. Since that is the button I use more, its uncomfortable. Right handed people with small hands would have the same problem with the "menu" button. Also, lot of program with scroll bars are on the left side. Very few offer an option to change the size of the scrollbar; the buttons can usually be reprogrammed after rooting (I still have to look how to do it on the S3.)

2. My Sony Vaio laptop. I use right-handed buttons on the mouse but with the left hand (left side). My Vaio has the fan air exit on the left side, so if I'm using an external mouse my hand is constantly receiving a not so nice (specially in summer) how air stream.

Other than that, I've never feel "impeded" by technology.

It maybe cost effective considering the CPU/memory to cost ratio, but the smaller option they're offering with 3.75 "google compute units" is 104$/months if you have an usage of 100% (like the typical web server). An Amazon small instance for example, which is more than enough for the load of the majority of web servers is 58$/month, or 27.77$/month if you get a reserved instance (I have one for a webserver with about 2000 visits/day). A lot of people is even running webservers on microinstances.

Both my cats respond to their names. They also understand other sentences like (in spanish) "food!" (obvious), "time to nap with me!" (she runs like lighting to the bed), "want to go outside?" (goes to the door), "GTFO!" (she goes out of the room), "stop it!" (used usually when they're harassing birds or the neighbor dogs), "not today" (when I don't want to have cats in the bed at nighttime), etc.

One of my cats brings me his playing ball when she wants me to throw it (like a dog). I youtubed it once (with crappy phone quality), tough it doesn't show when she initially brings me the ball:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQBBa_fUhQs

I also doesn't find this particular API hard or convoluted. But there is some boilerplate (new_key(), get_key(), etc) here that could be simplified with higher level functions.

I've been finding real uses for Google Wave and I'm liking it a lot. I'm also a programmer. I've used it with great success to do some "agile" style development for some projects I work on as freelance (read: all weekend bugfixing at home to finish a project for monday) and coordinate the tasks to be done with other programmers and designers.

Because usually the list of tasks isn't fixed but the programmer/designer finds new things to fix or implement as they're working on fixing the previous ones (for example: you notice you'll need to install a third party module => "install module X in Y", the module has a bug => "fix bug in module X", etc...), the wiki-style editting capabilities of Wave are great, everyone updates his tasks, everyone can add comments on them (and delete them later) and everyone knows what the others are working on.

I've also used it for informal chitchat with friends, like the "LOST" example above. The threads are a lot easier to follow than emails with several people on the CC, but is also "asynchronous" unlike Jabber/MSN.

I've a wave with some friends were we attach every ebook we buy so we all share them with just one of us paying for every title (which is legal in my country BTW).

Mmmm... more uses... oh yes, I've used it to write drafts for articles before publishing them on my site (again, the RTE is much better than emailing and remailing you for that.)

Using is too as personal notes manager (using tags.)

Things that MUST improve the make wave perfect:

- Performance on threads with hundreds of messages (blips).
- Drop the pseudo-MDI GUI, which I hate, and use something more like Gmail.
- Allow you to receive your email inside Google Wave and reply from there so I could stop using Gmail entirely.
- A good Android/iPhone native app (the web sucks on mobile devices currently.)

It's open source; you switch to another client just like there isn't a single Jabber client.

Read a little about the project. It's a network of distributed servers, much like email is. If everything works as designed and Facebook NOMNOM them, there will be 0 consequences for the network.

...but it was stored on Google Docs.

You mean 15 eur/hour on staff or as freelancers? Because I know of some romanian programmers earning less than 31.000€ here in Spain. A freelancer usually takes 30-60 eur/hour, and a consulting company a lot more.

On my country, Spain, that's pretty much the average salary for a userspace developer with 2-3 years experience. But not a kernel developer. A kernel developer could not find work here.

2.4 million people tuned in for the finale.

And probably five times that figure downloaded the torrent outside the USA. I wish a system to pay for the chapters outside USA, at a reasonable price and with good subtitules were in place; I would use it.