Just to illustrate how ridiculous this scenario would be in any other market, here is an equivalent story where data == water.

Imagine that you get your water from a little company called Verizon. They normally supply water at a price of $100 per month for an unlimited amount, but for the past 2 years they’ve given you a promotional deal where you get unlimited water for free. Your son has a garden and uses quite a bit of water for irrigation, but it’s fine — after all, you have limitless water for free.

One day you get a bill in the mail from Verizon for $18,000. You had (understandably) forgotten that your 2-year promotional deal had ended 2 months ago. Now, this bill staring back at you says that since you did not have the $100/month unlimited plan for the past 2 months, you must pay for your water usage at a rate of $10 per cup, for a total of $18,000.

Should you have to pay the whole bill? In this scenario, the answer to that question is stupidly simple, so the real question is:  if not $18,000, how much should you have to pay? Even that is pretty clear: 2 months for unlimited water at $100 per month, for a total of $200, plus some silly management fee for automatically rolling you over into the unlimited water plan, giving $225 as the grand total. Water works as a fairly accurate and handily intuitive comparison to data transfer — most of the differences between the two are not relevant here.

At first, this news report was rather infuriating, since an innocent family was to be burdened with a $18,000 debt for no good reason. After more thought, it is simply puzzling as to why Verizon thinks it’s a good PR move to defend its position. And the story above makes it more than apparent how overages like this one should be handled — it’s not as if the water coming out of your tap will ever suddenly go from costing $0.02 per cup to costing $10 per cup, because you used beyond your monthly limit.

Consumers should demand a stop to being tricked into giving telcos extra money for something whose marginal cost is the same as the non-marginal cost.

This style is less disruptive to the overall document’s formatting, and makes the wave look much more cohesive and professional. For chat-style exchanges, it’s important to keep what is said closely linked to who’s saying it, but when collaboratively editing, it’s rather unnecessary, and turns out to be more distracting than anything else.

[Continued 10 minutes after realizing this would actually be doable with Stylish]

Here I present to you, the smallest style with the largest impact for Google Wave: Now all of my waves look like this (except they’re not in Russian).

The names of the blip’s contributors are hidden, as well as the time/date (I don’t need either one near enough to justify how much they mess up the formatting of blips). The drop-down menu is made smaller but still displayed. The good part for you is that each part is incredibly easy to hide or show; the CSS is below, and if you want to hide or show the time, names, or menu, just add or delete the appropriate item from the list!

Want it quick? Firefox users,  install it from here as a Stylish style or a Greasemonkey script. I also threw together a simple Chrome extension.

.GTB[dc=contributors] {

    float: right !important;

    margin-right: 0 !important;

    margin-left: 2px !important;

}

[dc=menu] {

    width: 9px !important;

}

.MTB[dc=time], .KTB[dc=names] {

    display: none !important;

}

Computer science offers students avenues of self-expression, improved reasoning skills, and the ability to look at the bigger picture while not discounting the details. These opportunities alone are too good to pass up; it is essential that we work on increasing exposure to computer science and decreasing the surrounding stigmas, from elementary school onwards.

As far as why my loyalty is shifting from Firefox to Chrome, the simple fact is that Chrome gives a snappier (and thus, better) experience: opening and closing tabs is instantaneous, scrolling pages is more tightly tied to the physical action of spinning the middle mouse button, and various websites with heavy JavaScript just respond faster. If I could get the Omnibar to work exactly like the Awesomebar does in Firefox, there would likely be no going back (though, of course, Firebug wins for any web development needs!).