bad UI's are the bane of any person of any ability level. the UI induced pain gets worse with an increase in one's level of disablity. what may be a speed bump for you is a brick wall to a crip like me.

I feel his pain because I've been living for over 20 years with nerve damage in my hands and it basically ended my programming career. I've been trying to build a programming by speech environment that matches the capabilities speech recognition versus the current efforts of trying to make speech recognition replicate the capabilities of one's hands.

Much of the accessibility problems can be summed up as not being able to truly understand what it means to live with a disability, the steadfast belief that it will never happen to them, and the inability to accept any other application/user interface combination other than the all in one bundle we use today.Age will make us all disabled it's only a question of how much, how fast. The lack of understanding about disabilities and how they affect people has created generation after generation programmers writing software that they will never be able to use once their hands or eyes stop working..

The biggest technical issue with accessibility is the fixation on the all-in-one user interface and application model. If you separate the user interface from the application then you can swap out the UI for another one. I could remove the GUI and put in a speech or an interface with graphical augmentation for feedback. Or use text-to-speech for feedback. Splitting off the UI from the application makes it possible to make an application accessible without having to go through the effort of writing an accessibility interface and it reduces the cost of accessibility on the developers making it possible to make more applications accessible.

There is a secondary, less obvious reason for splitting off the UI from the application. We all know how messed up many GUIs are. These interfaces were written by people who've use the same interface for years but they still mess it up. You will not be surprised if I tell you that in the speech recognition world, the speech interfaces we are given are messed up even more than the GUI interfaces are and I believe that is directly due to the lack of empathy or experience with being disabled. So with the split I propose, I can do or other disability activists can build UIs based on the actual needs of disabled people versus forcing them to live with the interface you think they need.

not to mention that the newer device uses less energy and has better performance.

The fallacy of that analysis is the economic multiplier of paying someone to work. http://www.economicsonline.co.... I've seen estimated multipliers of 1.6 to 2.0 every dollar spent on unemployment payouts http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/p...

As the above article points out, paying unemployment saves other people's jobs by virtue of the fact that the unemployment dollars are spent. This interesting secondary factor which is unemployment once people find jobs roughly equivalent to what they had before. If people were forced to take low paying jobs, cutting their income to a fraction was before, the economic multiplier works the other way that we lose twice as much economic activity as the person lost in wages.

So, I'm cool with paying people to dig ditches and then fill them in, (it would be nice if there were publicly owned fiber in the bottom of the ditch). More people working, getting paid, buying necessities keeps other people working and the economy grows. Starve people's financial resources, reduces demand, the economy shrinks, more people are starved for financial resources and you spiral down. It's the law of supply and demand, no supply of money, no demand for goods.

I think you have a misstep in logic. You said that in Copenhagen it's expensive the park so people take transit because it's more practical. Try people take transit because it costs less. Cost being equal, people would drive because it's more efficient use of their time and personal (mental/physical) energy. Don't underestimate how draining public transit is. You have to be on guard for pickpockets, backpack/messenger bag theft, intrusion your physical space, body odor, contagion of flu and cold. Being on alert for that for hours every day is exhausting.

They are faster if you have dedicated bus lanes and everywhere you go is on a bus lane. As soon as you need to transfer, it's automatically faster with the car even during rush-hour. As for being stuck in traffic jams, I cannot tell you the number of times I've been stuck in a traffic jam with a bus. Even so, I still make it home a good 20 minutes before the same bus makes it there. But I don't think it's either buses or cars. If you scale a bus size down and use smart routes going where people go, not where the routes are you could get the speed that is needed to make public transit acceptable and reduce congestion.

here is one of many studies that says othewise http://www.todaysdietitian.com.... also, this vid helps understand normal blood glucose reaction to carbohydrate intake. I forget where is in the video but he does say something about how there is an excessively high spike at breakfast as a result of our traditional high carbohydrate breakfast. http://www.diabetes-symposium.... I'm willing to believe that diabetes is less common in vegetarians, I just wish there were better studies on the topic. I suspect it's the same mechanism as how I've been able to reduce my blood sugars through caloric restriction. I suspect that from a dietary perspective, vegetarianism is inherently inefficient and many of the calories consumed just pass through the body without being utilized. That is one possible explanation for why a lot of vegetarians are very skinny. One snarky question is are they self-righteous because of hunger or does self-righteousness lead to vegetarianism. At the same time, the-diabetic-vegans I have met are grossly obese, probably because of diabetes, and have untreated blood sugars running at a level that should have them hospitalized. Another thing about diabetes I've learned through experiences that the higher the carbohydrate intake, the more likely that insulin-based treatments are going to cause wide-ranging blood swings (i.e. 40 to 300 in two hours and back down again). Most the diabetics I've met have been willing to experiment, find that they can reduce their blood swings if they reduce their carbohydrate intake. The assertion that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter is also experimentally false. You can test it yourself with a blood glucose meter. For me, most whole-grain products spike high and drop fast. There's a couple of exceptions such as barley which spikes high and stays there for 4+ hours, again, counter to conventional wisdom. I confirmed this multiple times with my blood glucose meter. My personal experimental results say I have to have, in the meal, no less than 18 cal per gram of carbohydrate if my blood sugars can stay in the normal range. This is not unusual. Many of the diabetics have the similar requirements for calories per gram of carbohydrate. I've yet to find a plant-based diet that will do this unless that meal is supplemented with 200 to 300 cal of oil. Diabetes is one of the few illnesses where the patient can verify, on their own, how successful treatment is if they're willing to follow a good measurement protocol. This protocol lets them determine which foods react badly in their body, the excursion of blood sugars as result of food and insulin intake and how modifications to food and insulin can reduce excursions, drop their A1c, and reduce the risk to diabetic complications. Sadly too much myth and magical thinking clouds effective treatment protocols.

Unfortunately, one side effect of a plant-based diet will be an increase in the rate of diabetes. Older studies associated fat with diabetes Because that's what they were looking for the time. This was driven by the heart health studies such as the Framingham study which we are now finding was also flawed with regards to cholesterol and cardiac health. The current generation of studies are now looking at carbohydrate consumption and there's a much stronger association showing carbohydrate intake driving cardiac and diabetes risk. For a fun research read, look up glycated LDL

The primary signal seems to be spiky blood sugar levels which produce insulin resistance and, the start of diabetic neuropathy (if the BG level rises above 140 mg/dL). Doesn't matter if the carbohydrate is net, fast or slow, it's the absolute amount that matters. You can test this on yourself with a blood glucose meter. Many diabetics have reported that they get the same BG rise from a can of soda or the same number of carbohydrates in the form of whole-grain foods.

If you want to reduce your risk of diabetes follow this rule of thumb evolving from current experience. Limit yourself to no more than 40 g of carbohydrates in the meal or 120 g per day. No more big bowls of pasta, whole bagels, muffins. This also leaves out large quantities of lentils, beans, rice or any other starch used to make up the calorie difference between green vegetables and what you need for your daily caloric requirements.

Try it, run the science project. Figure out how many calories you should have, limit yourself to 40 g of the meal and figure out what you can eat to meet both the calorie requirement and carbohydrate limit. If you want to make it more of a project, by a blood glucose meter and measure your BG every 20 minutes for three hours after a meal.

http://annals.org/article.aspx... This article is one study in a long line of studies that show that a low (40g/day) carb diet is healthier than a high carb one. how does the future of food keep diets under 40 carbs per day and still supply enough calories? assume 1200 cals for a woman and 2000 for a man. 30 cals/carb and 50 cals/carb respectively

trig history pre hi carb, 400. high carb diet, 600. low carb diet back down to 400 then up to 850.

SPF records are not sufficient anymore. More spammers use them than legitimate sites. As others have suggested, check your PTR record. Since Comcast owns that, they may not have set it up for you, and sign all of your messages with DKIM. It works amazingly well for helping you bypass blockages. I know your pain, and I wish you the best of luck in beating poorly engineered antispam systems.

I wrote the computervision cgos kermit many moons ago.

If I choose to ride a car, motorcycle, subway, do I pay different costs of I get hurt because of who is at fault? If I choose to take a shortcut home through an "unsafe" neighborhood and get hurt in a mugging do I pay more? I cut code, I develop rsi, I can no longer work. is it my fault for choosing programming as a career? you take a dr prescribed drug that puts on 60 lb and will not come off because of non-reversible biochemical changes? are you at fault for being fat? .you live in a city, poor and can't afford or find off working hours, food that isn't cheap carbs and become diabetic? are you at fault because your living environment and income won't pay for food that doesn't make you sick? today, each of those very real examples has a "and then you sue" component to determine fault. big waste of time and money when the goal should be restoring the person injured to health asap? chasing all of these corner cases would probably cost more than just paying without question.

we are already spending twice the most expensive single payer system to service fewer people why do you think we would need to add to out tax burden? take what we are spending today on health insurance, eliminate all but 10% admin overhead and we could have a gold plated health coverage for everybody. starting up means rearranging what we spend on health, not adding to it.

they don't. I've worked for blind people, I've worked for deaf people. I'm disabled as well and we all get no end of crap from tabs (temporarily able-bodied).

I lost roughly 30% of my hand function because I was busting my ass working normal IT programmer hours in a hostile work environment. I was fired from my job, I was denied workers compensation because "it wasn't workplace injury", I've been denied employment because "you can't have any technical knowledge because your hands don't work". I really understand now the discrimination that some women are told they're no longer qualified for the job just because they became pregnant.

I've even been discriminated against by geeks. I need to use proprietary package for speech recognition in order to be able to write and do some command-and-control. there were a few of us that wants to bridge NaturallySpeaking to Emacs but the Breaking with alarming frequency. After explaining the problem to Stallman and a few other fsf types, I was told that the official position of the free software foundation is that the needs of free software come before the needs of disabled people. If that meant that the free software equivalent wasn't going to arrive for a decade, disabled people would have to sit on their hands and wait till arrived or, do without free software that worked with speech recognition. Rather shortsighted, and rather harsh.

As I sometimes say, geeks don't give a crap about accessibility until they become injured and then they can't do anything about it because their hands don't work. They spend a couple of years reinventing and failing with the same solutions that failed for decades in the past and then either they give up and change careers or they fall off the economic ladder.

If we had greater accessibility for all types of disabilities, allow rsi injured, blind and tab programmers to compete on a level playing field by raising us up, not tearing others down, it would be okay for us to succeed or fail because it would be on our merits, not on our disabilities. We still have to deal with the bigotry of hiring managers but that's true for all of us.

The sad thing is, from the work I've been doing with speech user interfaces, I'm coming to believe that it's possible to build a common API to accommodate both text-to-speech and speech recognition user interfaces. With a bit more work, the interface can be expanded to also include a graphical user interface and once you have partition the application into everything else and the user interface, then accessibility becomes cheap, dirt cheap.