which further reinforces sending jobs overseas because in order to " be competitive" you need to live on less than 20,000 a year. You can do it if you're willing to do without such nonessentials as heat, fresh vegetables or fruit, or healthcare. I think this whole discussion is a waste of time because 1) we won't do anything about it 2) we keep electing politicians who are owned by the corporations 3) keep nominating politicians who will be owned by the corporations 4) the process is self limiting. Keep enough people out of work and US corporations won't have anybody to sell to. We will end up like Russia, a hollowed out state run by gangsters and selling spam

google SLAPP, also look up whistle blower protections laws and see how well they protect people and keep their careers from being savaged.

history shows that revealing identity is is a surefire way to silence or discredit a critic.

one possible tool might be the use of pseudo-anonymity. A two-way untraceable path between you and the anonymous party. think of it as a disposable identity. The trick then becomes how do I remove any association between me and the pseudo-identity so it can't be traced back to me.

The reason I suggest this tool is because true anonymity is a one-way communications path. Useful for broadcasting information but not interacting with any investigative authority. For example, I was working at a major film producer company that went bankrupt and we were working on a imaging device for nuclear medicine. since it was used a diagnostic setting, it had to pass certain FDA compliance regulations before could be used in a diagnostic setting.

They shipped beta code to sites using the image printer for diagnostics with real patients. A few people complained including not one but two FDA compliance officers within the organization. these people, including the compliance officers are either marginalized or pushed out. If I had a good anonymous channel to the FDA, I would've handed them documentation in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, this company was really good at sniffing out leaks so I didn't dare.

So for lack of true anonymity, a bunch of criminal behavior, or at least unethical behavior went unpunished.

I am not so foolish as to extend a single case to the entire net but, it is a good example, and an extremely common example of not reporting corporate malfeasance because people are not willing to have their careers and financial well-being savaged. Good anonymity support could help that.

I tried going the route of having someone type for me. It would cost me, by the time agency fees are factored in, around $100-$200 per day. If I'm billing, I can afford that. If I'm not billing, I can't and that puts me right back in the place of looking for a solution. Unfortunately, even at the best of times, it was a very tough experience. The typist could not type fast enough to keep up with what I was saying. I would try to teach her macros (stored in her head) and I would say things about constructing loops and method references etc., she would freeze up, think for little bit, and then start again. I would correct what she just typed and then we would keep going. Effectively what I was doing was teaching her to program. then I would have to pay her more money and she wouldn't want to type for me. She would want to write her own code. Get another typist... As you can see, the agency fees would add up and nearly get really expensive if I expected the typist to hang around until two o'clock in the morning so I could finish some work. The same money could be applied to developing these tools if the money was free to be used in this way. That's the second problem with being disabled. Before disability, you're making enough money to build the tools, after disability, you don't have enough money to build the tools and you don't have the physical ability to build the tools. This stuff is not simple. It is complex and you need a team of people and guinea pigs to make something work right. Hell, right now I would be happy if I could get someone to make vr-mode work

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/hardware/Ergonomics_and_Repetitive_Strain_Injury.pdf http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Repetitive+strain+injuries+stretch+higher-a018341055 http://www.rsi-therapy.com/statistics.htm I think the UK stats are probably the best stats to go by. Most of the RSI injury rate information in the United States is based on the last clean census of injuries which was roughly 1994-1995. Unfortunately, since that time states with a large chicken processing workforce, have either stopped counting RSI statistics or have merge them into some other heading making difficult if not impossible to track down what the actual injury rates are. It's amazing the kind of government service you can purchase if your name is Tyson or Perdue. I know this sounds kind of conspiratorial but, up here in New England, the same thing happened with glass cutters and textile workers. Remember, programmers are nothing more than a clean form of blue-collar labor that can be replaced by cheaper labor in a heartbeat. As for the near 100% comment, well as we age, we lose ability. Since everybody ages, is a good chance you will spend decades being unable to use the tools and toys you use today. There's a better chance that the twentysomethings 30 years from now will be inventing all of these cool things that you will be excluded from.

It was intended as a serious, albeit in your face, question. what I was hoping for was a serious answer. I don't expect you to drop anything

Let me introduce you to a term "TAB" Temporarily Able Bodied. It was created in recognition that physical ability is temporary, disability is the norm. I'm disabled because my hands don't work right. I'm also disabled because I need glasses. Minority or majority doesn't matter. My question was trying to provoke thought about what's going to happen to you when you become disabled. age-related ailments will steal your ability from you. But also do you want to leave the future to be a radical shift in career because your hands don't work or a shift in how you work?

As to the direction on what makes something accessible, there is a good 30 years worth of research on the subject in the library if people would only look. Is honestly simple concept of separation of functionality from presentation. If I need a word processor with a speech user interface, then I should be able to purchase a word processor and then purchase a user interface that does what I need. If a blind person needs a text-to-speech interface, then they should be able to purchase their own user interface. None of us should have to rely on adaptations or, as I like to call them, "brutal hacks" on the application.

Every two or three years we do hear about and disabilities. There was Nintendo thumb and now Blackberry thumb and other hand disorders from playing too many first-person shooter games. It's all right in front of us. we also have the issue of elderly, as you point out. I'm not worried as much about the elderly of today but, what happens when you hit 60 and you gradually discover you can't do anything. No texting, no video messages, no anything. Think about that future.

Also think about the implications of what our mobile devices are doing today. I've seen people advocate getting rid of voicemail because you can just send someone a text message. Or the only telephone you can use if you are blind is something that just makes calls and receives calls. These choices exclude people from the mainstream culture. If you are blind and cannot send a text message, you lose social connection. If you can't send a text message, you lose the ability to give someone a time delayed message the way of voicemail works. I do admit that it may be cheaper to warehouse disabled people but, it would be nice if we made a conscious decision.

And as a side note, I was not able to interleave my comments with your text because HTML is not friendly to the disabled.

try instead, each person has their own UI device and that device talks to all other devices like phones, atm's, gas pumps etc. you want multi touch, buy a multi touch display brick. want text to speech, get a tts brick. own your own ui.