Someone on this thread remarked disparagingly about a "glorified golf cart," but given your budget constraints you should seriously consider a street-legal electric golf cart. They're cheap, and reliable. Of course, they're golf carts, so they're slow, and don't have a great range. But as a second car, or for someone who doesn't travel much every day, it can be a practical solution.
Watch out for cold weather, though -- it'll drastically affect battery performance unless you warm your batteries.
NaturalPoint (http://www.naturalpoint.com/) is a hands-free pointing device. It's basically an ir camera and an ir-reflective dot. The dot is dorky, so I spent an extra $20 for the baseball cap.
It works great, unless you're near a window with direct sunlight. Then the camera goes nuts.
But I do all my mousing by moving my head, and clicking with my feet (I forget where I got the foot clicker, but the NaturalPOint website should point you in the right direction).
There's already a highly effective treatment for PTSD -- it's called EMDR, short for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
I'm always suspect of drugs as treatment for psychological problems. On the one hand, they work great for problems that appear to be primarily biochemical in nature (eg, bipolar, some forms of schizophrenia). But there's a tendency to throw drugs at problems that are primarily emotional or behavioral in nature (eg, the ballooning diagnosis of ADHD with the attending behavior-control drugs).
Drugs should be a treatment of last resort; if there's an effective non-drug treatment, such as EMDR, that should be tried first.
I'm sure you're sick of the "why don't you just bike, fattie?" responses, so for a change of pace I thought I'd give you some useful info.
I've been researching electric bikes myself, as I live in Oakland -- and yes, I'm a fattie too. I can manage the flat bits pretty well, but the hills out here are killer.
One really useful page with lots of links to various manufacturers and honest opinions by actual users is http://electric-bikes.com/others-b.htm#Elebike%20H ub%20Motor%20Kit -- some of the links are broken, but mostly it's got good info.
A good FAQ is here: http://www.peltzer.net/ebike/PA_FAQ.htm
As I have a recumbent, a front-wheel system won't work for me. And as I have a drum brake, I need a friction drive. I ended up deciding on Palmer Industries (http://www.palmerind.com/pwrkit.htm). Their product line kinda resembles the Zap system, only they have more mounting options. Plus they're small and friendly. I talked for about a half hour with the engineer, who I think is the husband of the saleswoman -- it feels like a real "mom & pop" organization. They also have several bikes and trikes available.
As for being sweaty, I agree that you should bring a change of clothes, and I find that baby-wipes are great for a quick cleanup when there's no shower available.
Ignore the nimrods who just want to tear you down. It's great that you're looking into the e-bike thing. You don't have to be a triathlete, and doing some of the peddling will definitely help you get in shape, and the motor will help you with the bits that push your limits. An e-bike is far more ecofriendly than a car, and maybe a good stepping stone to "pure" biking. Or maybe not, and that's fine too.
Disco was not the only music happening in the seventies -- far from it! The so-called "alternative" music of the eighties (which was then called "college rock" and "new wave") grew out of the punk rock movement, which was happening in the seventies. There was also a lively progressive rock scene, and funk emerged in the seventies as well -- which is quite different from, and far superior to, disco. Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, Parliament, Stevie Wonder, War, the B-52's, Nick Lowe, and many many more -- all artists who started their careers in the seventies. The seventies rule!
The thing that separates intelligence and genius is a lot of disciplined, tiring, rigorous work.
No! Work is what turns intelligence into success. Genius is not simply more intelligence, it is radically different intelligence. Intelligence lets you learn Newton's laws. Genius let Einstein improve them.
This is not to knock work. Whether you have genius (and if you do, I really pity you) or just plain intelligence, you'll still need to work at something to earn the greenbacks you need to survive. So find where your passion is -- and this might not be the thing you're best at. When you have passion, when you love something, you can devote the kind of hours that lead to success without it feeling like work.
If you're truly as gifted as you imply, then work on your favorite gift. Even if you're "better" at (say) physics than music, if you're already devoting six hours a day to playing and practicing music, you'll never cut it as a physicist. But what glorious music you'll make!
If you work at what you're merely good at, because others want to give you money for it, you'll be miserable. I know whereof I speak.
"Our generation will set the trend for copyright in the information age and should show more responsibility." Responsibility to whom? Our corporate masters? That won't cure any problems, any more than file-sharing will. You don't do master's bidding, you don't steal the master's silverware -- you amend the constitition outlawing slavery. You burn down the mansion. The only solution that's going to work is one that directly connects musicians to music listeners, without involving RIAA, ASCAP, or BMI. The web has the potential to be the ultimate "fair trade" platform, if we in the geek community can roll the tools to automate negotiating non-compulsory licenses, and devise a artist-collective alternative to ASCAP & BMI. The problem always defines the solution. We need to cut out the corporate parasites.
Two words -- Microsoft Access. Yes, I know that OO.o has some sort of database support, but many companies have invested in extensive custom apps in Access, and rewriting these using OO.o's feature-poor database tool is a non-starter. And yes, I know that Access has a lousy native database, and that postgresql/mysql/firebirdsql can slice & dice those fries for you... or gnoda, or rekall... but serious Access apps have backends in Sql Server or Oracle or some real database. And it's still much cheaper & simpler to buy Crossover office & run the existing app than to rewrite everything (especially if your mickey geeks don't know python or tcl). I do have hopes that eventually mono will provide a seamless way to port MS Access apps to a native linux app -- and I hope someone on the mono team is working on an application porter for Access apps -- but in the meanwhile Crossover Office is a huge step forward. There really isn't a good replacement for Access on linux yet. Really. But thanks to codeweavers, it's actually possible despite that lack to ditch Windows, switch to OO.o for word processing & spreadsheets, evolution for email,, etc, and run that legacy Access app too. Mock if you will, trolls, but this is a watershed moment for linux. This frees many companies who are tied to Access but hate Microsoft. It'll be cheaper for IT departments to hang onto their Office 2000 licenses & port the desktop to linux than to upgrade to XP & licensing 6. Then they can migrate the applications at their leisure.
There are lots of low-tech building approaches using earth and/or building underground -- building with tires (http://www.earthship.org/), cordwood masonry & earth-bermed housing (http://www.cordwoodmasonry.com/index.php), and my personal favorite, cob (http://www.cobcottage.com/).
These also mesh very nicely with the earlier post regarding non-toxic housing, and incorporate passive solar design, can support rainwater catchment, greywater reuse, etc.
Plus you can build them yourself, for way cheaper than buying a crappy stick-built rectangle in a hideous burb.
I'm starting the process to do just this -- I will build, within the next five years, a sustainable low-impact house with no new cement, no new lumber, and probably spend less than twenty grand (including the five acres of land) to do so.
I encourage anyone interested in real alternatives to suburban tract housing to check out the numerous resources available for owner-builders -- I've just scratched the surface, there's lots more out there. A house should last a century, and still be livable. A house should heat and cool itself, and provide its own water and even electricity. All this is possible today.
The 10/10 rule (which I just invented, but is nonetheless real) states that if you start with $1000 you can build a crappy-to-mediocre recording solution, and that forever thereafter you can increase the quality of the sound 10% by paying 10 times the money.
I have that crappy $1000 solution for some home recording, and produced some decent tunes, using mostly software but also some conventional recording. A buddy of mine, who happens to be a real pro in CD mastering, Greg Reierson of Rare Form, volunteered to master our CD on his fantastic studio equipment, and made it sound *so* much better -- and this was just mastering, after we'd already done all the mixing. Studio reference speakers. My god. I had no idea, just amazing, made my home speakers sound like tin cans.
OTOH, even my crappy home studio is significantly better than the gear that most Beatles albums were recorded on. Don't underestimate the importance of talent -- and that most emphatically includes the talent of recording engineers.
It's like laser printers -- they aren't as good as high-end presses, but they're good enough for the undiscriminating eye. However, just owning one doesn't make somebody a designer, any more than owning MS Access qualifies one as a DBA, or buying AutoCAD makes you an architect. The musical equivalent of the "desktop publishing revolution" is hitting -- anybody can do a halfway decent recording of their stupid crummy songs for very little money if they so choose -- but that doesn't make them John Lennon.
The real question isn't, how much does it cost for a label to record, package, and promote worthless parasites like Britney Spears and John Tesh, but how we're going to build a way to find & support the really good musicians out there who are struggling to create great art with no money. Swapping mp3's without paying Eminem doesn't help support music -- we need a positive solution that puts the money where it belongs, in the hands of musicians and the engineers who make them sound so good for so few bucks.
Who in their right mind would want to live inside a giant PDA, riddled with gizmos? This "future" -- like so many others -- has built into it all the assumptions of the present.
A more appealing vision of the future is something like this: Earth Ships -- energy-independent, passive-solar, captures and cleans its own water, and it's built out of old tires.
That's our future, here in the industrialized west -- trying to figure out what the hell we're going to do with all this trash.
Only two things keep me tied to Windows, and I'm dying for decent replacements of them both.
On the work side, there's Microsoft Access. I support numerous applications written in it; it is actually a terrific database front-end development tool (though a lousy database back-end, of course). Fastest & easiest to build forms & reports -- the reporting engine rocks. I've replaced everything else on my Windows desktop with opensource alternatives (excepting music stuff, see below) -- Openoffice for word processing, Mozilla for browsing, cygwin for the "command prompt", vim for text editing. All superior to their MS analogues, and all free.
As soon as Crossover gets Access working under linux, I'm ready to switch, from a programming career point of view.
BTW, I think MS made a fatal blunder making their new file formats xml-based. I fully expect file-compatibile workalikes for MS Access once that technology hits the street. It would be possible today to write an import/export tool that moved most of the gui to & from access, so maybe mono would have a use after all!
The other thing shackling me to Windows -- a more personal thing -- is Soundforge. I'm a musician, and I have *tons* of plugins. There are linux-based sound editors out there, but no one supports the VST plugin format, so I have a huge investment that can't easily be ported (and believe me, good plugins for audio filtering are *not* all the same).
I do run linux on my laptop, which I primarily use for writing. And I do lots of linux-based programming (my current project is a jboss application on top of an oracle database running on a redhat server).
I do believe it's just a matter of time before there are viable linux alternatives to these two sticking points for me -- MS Access and Soundforge. But until there are, I have compelling motivations to stick to Windows, at least on one machine.
I've got a mouse that needs no hands!
on
Airborne Mouse
·
· Score: 1
No kidding. It's the TrackIR head-mouse (now called NaturalPoint. There's a small infrared camera, and a reflective gizmo I dangle from my glasses, and my head movements control the mouse. I click with my foot using a foot keyboard controller from Kinesis Ergo (which is also where I got my ergonomic chair-mounted keyboard). I've been using this rig for a year now, and it rocks. Not cheap, though -- with the foot clicker, the whole rig cost around 300 bucks. And not accurate enough for really fine mouse work (say, an illustrator or animator). But a code monkey like me, that spends most of the time typing and just needs to click on the OK button, it works great.
Spending money on computer ergonomics is a wise investment -- way better than the fastest cpu.
...why buffer overflow viruses are such a common vulnerability in software. Yes, I grok how they work, but their effectiveness depends on knowing in advance exactly how big the buffer is.
It would be trivially easy to write a function to randomly assign buffersize based on parameters (say, min max and optimal size), and even change its size periodically at runtime. That would eliminate this entire class of attack.
Okay, I'm a hardcore leftie anyway. But this is the sort of situation that cries out for a little labor organizing.
I bet *none* of the programmers are happy with this demand from management. If you got everyone (or even a significant chunk, say half) to agree to say so to the boss's face, and you went, en masse to him and said, "we will not work more than eight hour days, here's the rational basis for our argument but we're not arguing, take it or leave it"... what would boss do?
Cave. Maybe the boss could afford to fire one programmer, or two, but gutting his IT staff will kill the project even quicker than fifteen-hour days.
You don't have to quit, and you don't have to knuckle under. Just present a unified front.
Or you could just kill and eat the boss. His wife probably wouldn't miss him either. (Joking! Murder is bad!)
The easiest, most flexible, and most lucrative way to earn money with computers is as a consultant. I've been working from home for years, and rarely see my clients (except for analysis meetings).
Web-based development, database analyst/admin, sysadmin -- all can be done remotely, and usually ends up being cheaper for your client as well.
In fact, why not approach your current company? Base your hourly rate on double your current salary, and you'll be beating the competition.
www.naturalpoint.com -- this is a hands-free mouse that you aim by head motion, and click with an add-on footpad. I've been using it for about a year because of rms (the medical syndrome, not the guy). I also have an ergonomic keyboard-cum-chair from ErgoKinesis, and they might have some adaptive keyboard products you'd find useful. BTW, the comments on the order of "just whack off with the other hand" are pretty damn insensitive, if you ask me.
Forcing cable companies to open up support for other isp's is an issue of freedom of speech.
Roadrunner's terms of conditions prohibit its users from running websites, or even from running operating systems capable of such (eg linux, mac os x). Combine this with linux's lack of support for dsl winmodems (and yes, I know there are good reasons not to support them), and you have a large segment of the population effectively barred from putting up their own sites on the web.
The internet shouldn't be viewed as just a shopping mall, where large corporations get more and more rights to sell crap to hapless consumers. It should be the intellectual commons. Treating broadband access as a data access downgrades citizens to mere consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
...that lame Who cover band that played during the Superbowl.
Someone on this thread remarked disparagingly about a "glorified golf cart," but given your budget constraints you should seriously consider a street-legal electric golf cart. They're cheap, and reliable. Of course, they're golf carts, so they're slow, and don't have a great range. But as a second car, or for someone who doesn't travel much every day, it can be a practical solution. Watch out for cold weather, though -- it'll drastically affect battery performance unless you warm your batteries.
NaturalPoint (http://www.naturalpoint.com/) is a hands-free pointing device. It's basically an ir camera and an ir-reflective dot. The dot is dorky, so I spent an extra $20 for the baseball cap. It works great, unless you're near a window with direct sunlight. Then the camera goes nuts. But I do all my mousing by moving my head, and clicking with my feet (I forget where I got the foot clicker, but the NaturalPOint website should point you in the right direction).
There's already a highly effective treatment for PTSD -- it's called EMDR, short for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I'm always suspect of drugs as treatment for psychological problems. On the one hand, they work great for problems that appear to be primarily biochemical in nature (eg, bipolar, some forms of schizophrenia). But there's a tendency to throw drugs at problems that are primarily emotional or behavioral in nature (eg, the ballooning diagnosis of ADHD with the attending behavior-control drugs). Drugs should be a treatment of last resort; if there's an effective non-drug treatment, such as EMDR, that should be tried first.
It's nice to finally see this. It was written about, years ago, by Spider Robinson in his terrific novel, Stardance.
I'm sure you're sick of the "why don't you just bike, fattie?" responses, so for a change of pace I thought I'd give you some useful info.H ub%20Motor%20Kit -- some of the links are broken, but mostly it's got good info.
A good FAQ is here: http://www.peltzer.net/ebike/PA_FAQ.htm
I've been researching electric bikes myself, as I live in Oakland -- and yes, I'm a fattie too. I can manage the flat bits pretty well, but the hills out here are killer.
One really useful page with lots of links to various manufacturers and honest opinions by actual users is http://electric-bikes.com/others-b.htm#Elebike%20
As I have a recumbent, a front-wheel system won't work for me. And as I have a drum brake, I need a friction drive. I ended up deciding on Palmer Industries (http://www.palmerind.com/pwrkit.htm). Their product line kinda resembles the Zap system, only they have more mounting options. Plus they're small and friendly. I talked for about a half hour with the engineer, who I think is the husband of the saleswoman -- it feels like a real "mom & pop" organization. They also have several bikes and trikes available.
As for being sweaty, I agree that you should bring a change of clothes, and I find that baby-wipes are great for a quick cleanup when there's no shower available.
Ignore the nimrods who just want to tear you down. It's great that you're looking into the e-bike thing. You don't have to be a triathlete, and doing some of the peddling will definitely help you get in shape, and the motor will help you with the bits that push your limits. An e-bike is far more ecofriendly than a car, and maybe a good stepping stone to "pure" biking. Or maybe not, and that's fine too.
Disco was not the only music happening in the seventies -- far from it! The so-called "alternative" music of the eighties (which was then called "college rock" and "new wave") grew out of the punk rock movement, which was happening in the seventies. There was also a lively progressive rock scene, and funk emerged in the seventies as well -- which is quite different from, and far superior to, disco.
Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, Parliament, Stevie Wonder, War, the B-52's, Nick Lowe, and many many more -- all artists who started their careers in the seventies.
The seventies rule!
No! Work is what turns intelligence into success. Genius is not simply more intelligence, it is radically different intelligence. Intelligence lets you learn Newton's laws. Genius let Einstein improve them.
This is not to knock work. Whether you have genius (and if you do, I really pity you) or just plain intelligence, you'll still need to work at something to earn the greenbacks you need to survive. So find where your passion is -- and this might not be the thing you're best at. When you have passion, when you love something, you can devote the kind of hours that lead to success without it feeling like work.
If you're truly as gifted as you imply, then work on your favorite gift. Even if you're "better" at (say) physics than music, if you're already devoting six hours a day to playing and practicing music, you'll never cut it as a physicist. But what glorious music you'll make!
If you work at what you're merely good at, because others want to give you money for it, you'll be miserable. I know whereof I speak.
Ahem. Indians who are American citizens are Americans.
Just thought I'd point out the (probably unconscious) racism that underpins the framing of this issue.
"Our generation will set the trend for copyright in the information age and should show more responsibility."
Responsibility to whom? Our corporate masters? That won't cure any problems, any more than file-sharing will. You don't do master's bidding, you don't steal the master's silverware -- you amend the constitition outlawing slavery. You burn down the mansion.
The only solution that's going to work is one that directly connects musicians to music listeners, without involving RIAA, ASCAP, or BMI.
The web has the potential to be the ultimate "fair trade" platform, if we in the geek community can roll the tools to automate negotiating non-compulsory licenses, and devise a artist-collective alternative to ASCAP & BMI.
The problem always defines the solution. We need to cut out the corporate parasites.
Two words -- Microsoft Access.
Yes, I know that OO.o has some sort of database support, but many companies have invested in extensive custom apps in Access, and rewriting these using OO.o's feature-poor database tool is a non-starter.
And yes, I know that Access has a lousy native database, and that postgresql/mysql/firebirdsql can slice & dice those fries for you... or gnoda, or rekall... but serious Access apps have backends in Sql Server or Oracle or some real database. And it's still much cheaper & simpler to buy Crossover office & run the existing app than to rewrite everything (especially if your mickey geeks don't know python or tcl).
I do have hopes that eventually mono will provide a seamless way to port MS Access apps to a native linux app -- and I hope someone on the mono team is working on an application porter for Access apps -- but in the meanwhile Crossover Office is a huge step forward. There really isn't a good replacement for Access on linux yet. Really. But thanks to codeweavers, it's actually possible despite that lack to ditch Windows, switch to OO.o for word processing & spreadsheets, evolution for email,, etc, and run that legacy Access app too.
Mock if you will, trolls, but this is a watershed moment for linux. This frees many companies who are tied to Access but hate Microsoft. It'll be cheaper for IT departments to hang onto their Office 2000 licenses & port the desktop to linux than to upgrade to XP & licensing 6. Then they can migrate the applications at their leisure.
There are lots of low-tech building approaches using earth and/or building underground -- building with tires (http://www.earthship.org/), cordwood masonry & earth-bermed housing (http://www.cordwoodmasonry.com/index.php), and my personal favorite, cob (http://www.cobcottage.com/).
These also mesh very nicely with the earlier post regarding non-toxic housing, and incorporate passive solar design, can support rainwater catchment, greywater reuse, etc. Plus you can build them yourself, for way cheaper than buying a crappy stick-built rectangle in a hideous burb.
I'm starting the process to do just this -- I will build, within the next five years, a sustainable low-impact house with no new cement, no new lumber, and probably spend less than twenty grand (including the five acres of land) to do so.
I encourage anyone interested in real alternatives to suburban tract housing to check out the numerous resources available for owner-builders -- I've just scratched the surface, there's lots more out there. A house should last a century, and still be livable. A house should heat and cool itself, and provide its own water and even electricity. All this is possible today.
The 10/10 rule (which I just invented, but is nonetheless real) states that if you start with $1000 you can build a crappy-to-mediocre recording solution, and that forever thereafter you can increase the quality of the sound 10% by paying 10 times the money.
I have that crappy $1000 solution for some home recording, and produced some decent tunes, using mostly software but also some conventional recording. A buddy of mine, who happens to be a real pro in CD mastering, Greg Reierson of Rare Form, volunteered to master our CD on his fantastic studio equipment, and made it sound *so* much better -- and this was just mastering, after we'd already done all the mixing. Studio reference speakers. My god. I had no idea, just amazing, made my home speakers sound like tin cans.
OTOH, even my crappy home studio is significantly better than the gear that most Beatles albums were recorded on. Don't underestimate the importance of talent -- and that most emphatically includes the talent of recording engineers.
It's like laser printers -- they aren't as good as high-end presses, but they're good enough for the undiscriminating eye. However, just owning one doesn't make somebody a designer, any more than owning MS Access qualifies one as a DBA, or buying AutoCAD makes you an architect. The musical equivalent of the "desktop publishing revolution" is hitting -- anybody can do a halfway decent recording of their stupid crummy songs for very little money if they so choose -- but that doesn't make them John Lennon.
The real question isn't, how much does it cost for a label to record, package, and promote worthless parasites like Britney Spears and John Tesh, but how we're going to build a way to find & support the really good musicians out there who are struggling to create great art with no money. Swapping mp3's without paying Eminem doesn't help support music -- we need a positive solution that puts the money where it belongs, in the hands of musicians and the engineers who make them sound so good for so few bucks.
Who in their right mind would want to live inside a giant PDA, riddled with gizmos? This "future" -- like so many others -- has built into it all the assumptions of the present. A more appealing vision of the future is something like this: Earth Ships -- energy-independent, passive-solar, captures and cleans its own water, and it's built out of old tires. That's our future, here in the industrialized west -- trying to figure out what the hell we're going to do with all this trash.
Only two things keep me tied to Windows, and I'm dying for decent replacements of them both.
On the work side, there's Microsoft Access. I support numerous applications written in it; it is actually a terrific database front-end development tool (though a lousy database back-end, of course). Fastest & easiest to build forms & reports -- the reporting engine rocks. I've replaced everything else on my Windows desktop with opensource alternatives (excepting music stuff, see below) -- Openoffice for word processing, Mozilla for browsing, cygwin for the "command prompt", vim for text editing. All superior to their MS analogues, and all free.
As soon as Crossover gets Access working under linux, I'm ready to switch, from a programming career point of view.
BTW, I think MS made a fatal blunder making their new file formats xml-based. I fully expect file-compatibile workalikes for MS Access once that technology hits the street. It would be possible today to write an import/export tool that moved most of the gui to & from access, so maybe mono would have a use after all!
The other thing shackling me to Windows -- a more personal thing -- is Soundforge. I'm a musician, and I have *tons* of plugins. There are linux-based sound editors out there, but no one supports the VST plugin format, so I have a huge investment that can't easily be ported (and believe me, good plugins for audio filtering are *not* all the same).
I do run linux on my laptop, which I primarily use for writing. And I do lots of linux-based programming (my current project is a jboss application on top of an oracle database running on a redhat server).
I do believe it's just a matter of time before there are viable linux alternatives to these two sticking points for me -- MS Access and Soundforge. But until there are, I have compelling motivations to stick to Windows, at least on one machine.
Spending money on computer ergonomics is a wise investment -- way better than the fastest cpu.
It would be trivially easy to write a function to randomly assign buffersize based on parameters (say, min max and optimal size), and even change its size periodically at runtime. That would eliminate this entire class of attack.
Okay, I'm a hardcore leftie anyway. But this is the sort of situation that cries out for a little labor organizing. I bet *none* of the programmers are happy with this demand from management. If you got everyone (or even a significant chunk, say half) to agree to say so to the boss's face, and you went, en masse to him and said, "we will not work more than eight hour days, here's the rational basis for our argument but we're not arguing, take it or leave it"... what would boss do? Cave. Maybe the boss could afford to fire one programmer, or two, but gutting his IT staff will kill the project even quicker than fifteen-hour days. You don't have to quit, and you don't have to knuckle under. Just present a unified front. Or you could just kill and eat the boss. His wife probably wouldn't miss him either. (Joking! Murder is bad!)
The easiest, most flexible, and most lucrative way to earn money with computers is as a consultant. I've been working from home for years, and rarely see my clients (except for analysis meetings). Web-based development, database analyst/admin, sysadmin -- all can be done remotely, and usually ends up being cheaper for your client as well. In fact, why not approach your current company? Base your hourly rate on double your current salary, and you'll be beating the competition.
www.naturalpoint.com -- this is a hands-free mouse that you aim by head motion, and click with an add-on footpad. I've been using it for about a year because of rms (the medical syndrome, not the guy). I also have an ergonomic keyboard-cum-chair from ErgoKinesis, and they might have some adaptive keyboard products you'd find useful.
BTW, the comments on the order of "just whack off with the other hand" are pretty damn insensitive, if you ask me.
Forcing cable companies to open up support for other isp's is an issue of freedom of speech.
Roadrunner's terms of conditions prohibit its users from running websites, or even from running operating systems capable of such (eg linux, mac os x). Combine this with linux's lack of support for dsl winmodems (and yes, I know there are good reasons not to support them), and you have a large segment of the population effectively barred from putting up their own sites on the web.
The internet shouldn't be viewed as just a shopping mall, where large corporations get more and more rights to sell crap to hapless consumers. It should be the intellectual commons. Treating broadband access as a data access downgrades citizens to mere consumers.