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ALS Sufferer Used Legs To Contribute Last Patch
krkhan writes "This is a little old, but seeing as it didn't make it onto Slashdot at the time, I think it deserves a headline now. Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away."
ALS is Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis It's a form of motor neurone disease, not a nice way to go.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
ALS or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Quoting from Wikipedia
"[ALS] is a form of motor neuron disease caused by the degeneration of neurons located in the ventral horn of the spinal cord and the cortical neurons that provide their afferent input. The condition is often called Lou Gehrig's disease in North America, after the famous New York Yankees baseball player who was diagnosed with the disease in 1939. The disorder is characterized by rapidly progressive weakness, muscle atrophy and fasciculations, spasticity, dysarthria, dysphagia, and respiratory compromise. Sensory function generally is spared, as is autonomic, and oculomotor activity. ALS is a progressive,[1] fatal, neurodegenerative disease with most affected patients dying of respiratory compromise and pneumonia after 2 to 3 years; although occasional individuals have a more indolent course and survive for many years."
It isn't a computer techie nerd term, it is a medical term. ALS is in the news about as much as MS so I think most folk would reasonably conclude that anyone who crawls out of their personal rut now and then would have heard about it. Also, if you don't know what ALS is then the expansion probably would not help. At one time "Lou Gehrig's" would have been more common than ALS but I think it may be the other way around now.
Google is just a mouse click away.