The word you are looking for is "Struldbrug", from Gulliver's Travels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struldbrug

My wife and I were very lucky on this. Her parents, ages 88 and 95, needed in-home care, and were willing to pay for us to move to their town to provide it, as we were nearing retirement, and I was transitioning to full-time tech volunteering. It turned out to be vastly cheaper to live here in Indiana than in Silicon Valley, especially with the jobs gone away in the current recession just after they started coming back from the previous recession. We now live in the inherited house and have a comfortable income, between retirement and inheritance.

The writer is in a very different situation, but also has options outside the conventional I assume that the writer has significant home equity after 20 years, and has some savings and investments socked away, some in tax-deferred retirement accounts. Consider, then, the option of moving somewhere vastly cheaper. Quite comfortable houses in our town are available for as little as $70,000. There is a university town nearby (Indiana University, Bloomington), and we have several colleges and university affiliates right here in Columbus.

If you would like a different challenge among the enclued, you could do much worse than to join my outfit, Sugar Labs (a partner of One Laptop Per Child) working on Free Software for education plus Open Education Resources for millions of children now, and ultimately a billion at a time. Our mission is to end global poverty and its many associated ills, using technology as infrastructure for everything else needed. But there are other options right around here. For example, the OpenMRS Medical Records System is being developed in part nearby in Indianapolis. Your database skills would be perfect for them, and they even pay. ^_^

The schools here are pretty decent, and I and my wife also have experience in homeschooling our son and daughter.

So there really are options. Look around, and ignore the naysayers who claim that it can't be done.

LaTeX is excellent for journal and technical book publishing and some other applications, but it was not designed for collaboration over the Web, and for full multiformat output.

BookType, and its predecessor Booki, are designed for collaborative authorship around the world and for multi-format output, including HTML, PDF, print-on-demand, and others. The original development was sponsored by FLOSS Manuals, http://www.flossmanuals.net/ which creates manuals for Free Software applications. I have worked on manuals with them for How to Bypass Internet Censorship (now available in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, and more), Firefox, the Linux command line, mifos microfinance software, and more, and they have dozens of other titles. FLOSS Manuals also pioneered the Book Sprint, collaborative writing of manuals by 8 or 10 people (writers, subject-matter experts, editors, artists, tech admins) gathered in a room, and several others (particularly proofreaders) over the Web within a week. We did the Censorship book from Monday morning to Friday evening in a rented house in upstate New York, ordered copies from Lulu.com, and then went out for dinner. Pics available, such as https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102331710307773485600/albums/5634256041091466881/5634256041835752050

Since then I have become Program Manager for Replacing Textbooks at Sugar Labs, the Free Software and OER partner of One Laptop Per Child. The rationale for the program is that netbook and tablet computers such as the XO-3 cost much less than printed textbooks, and have many other advantages in any school system, but especially for poor children in developing countries. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_textbooks, http://booki.treehouse.su./ Our mission is to end poverty and the various other ills associated with it. This includes unnecessary disease, disability and death; oppression of the poor and minorities around the world; much of government corruption; and wars of oppression or plunder. Naturally, more is required than computers to accomplish all of this, but it cannot be done without giving every child unfettered access to information and to other people around the world. See, for example, http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2011/02/15/sharing-in-gaza/

Sugar Labs plans to host book replacements in every traditional school subject, and whatever else our students need, at every level of development in every language needed. I am currently working on an Algebra text where every math statement can be copied from the document and pasted into a software session to execute and if desired plot or graph. There are more than 100,000 other OER packages available at various other Web sites that we have listed. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources

Yeah, some of us have a plan for that, starting with getting children around the world into contact with each other and out of poverty. Free Software is a critical dependency. Also Creative Commons.

Check out the FLOSS Manuals model and Book Sprint methodology at http://www.flossmanuals.net/ . I got paid for my work on How to Bypass Internet Censorship (now available in Farsi, Russian, and Chinese!). Eight of us in a room and three others online wrote, edited, and illustrated the English original in five days, and published it in PDF and print-on-demand on the fifth day.

Think of it as Extreme Documentation with pair writing, frequent refactoring, and so on.

Exactly. Netbook computers already cost less than printed textbooks, and schools here and there are getting ready for the transition. Herr Gubernator Schwarzenegger has noticed that California could save billions with digital textbook replacements, and started the process last year.

Earth Treasury has a plan for creating such materials under Free licenses.

http://www.earthtreasury.org/wiki.cgi?ReplacingTextbooks

We are partnering with some of the major pioneers in computerized education from the 1960s.

Alan Kay, inventor of Object-Oriented Programming and the Dynabook educational computer concept, and his Squeakland group. (Smalltalk)

Doug Engelbart and the Doug Engelbart Institute (The Mother of All Demos)

Ken Iverson's group based around his company J Software and his previous employers, IBM and I. P. Sharp Associates. Iverson died in 2004, but his work continues. (APL and J)

Seymour Papert's group at MIT. Papert has been disabled by brain injuries from an accident outside an education conference in Vietnam. (Logo, Turtle Art)

We are in contract talks with education authorities.

Edward Mokurai Cherlin
Founder, Earth Treasury
mokurai@earthtreasury.org

OMG, can you imagine a billion children getting their first taste of computing with Windows XP running on an OLPC XO? Microsoft has apparently paid for 7,000 dual-boot XOs (Linux + Sugar in main flash, XP on an extra flash card) to be used in trials in Uruguay.

http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/uruguay_windows_xo_ms_office.html

The only good thing I can say about this is, "Woot!" Microsoft is actually paying to have trials of Linux + Sugar vs. XP plus educational shovelware, on the same hardware, conducted by a multitude of teachers and schoolchildren, none of them on the M$ payroll. Oh, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

The best bit is that Uruguay has just started an educational blog, where teachers and students have started posting. Story at http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/update_on_xo_laptops.html, more (in Spanish) at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_educativo

In 1983 I wrote a market research study on the competition between Microsoft DOS and Digital Research CP/M-86. DOS was, well, DOS, but Gary Kildall had just put a real-time kernel into CP/M-86, and it could read and write on the floppy drive, the hard drive, keyboard and screen, and the modem all at the same time without missing a beat. DOS then, and Windows afterwards, couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time for many years. Apparently nobody at MS knew anything about concurrent programming, particularly how to make concurrent file operations safe. Anybody remember untangling cross-linked files with Norton Utilities?

Gates was a hotshot programmer in high school, but apparently never learned any significant amount of Computer Science before he dropped out of Harvard. Kildall was a CS Prof. If IBM had been willing to deal with Kildall, we would have been spared more than 25 years of software incompetence coupled with insensate greed.

CS is misnamed, of course. It isn't science. We don't have big experimental CS labs. Some of it is math, and some of it is how to do engineering design so that your product actually works, in large part by using math that actually works. Like how to use semaphores correctly in concurrent programming, how to use that do atomic database writes, and other things of that kind.

Also LiveCDs, among other options. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Emulator_image_files#Live_CDs

You can develop software for XOs using an emulator on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Also, I guess you never heard about the developer program that gives out XOs for free if you can explain why you need the actual hardware, and can't develop on an emulator.

Can I have yours? I have projects that can use any number of XOs that would otherwise molder in closets.

Put it on eBay if you don't want it, or give it to a LUG, or to a budding programmer in a school near you. Or a child. Children like XOs better than grownups do. It was designed for them.

This turns out not to be the case. There are several documented ways to run Linux apps in Sugar. Text-mode stuff like Midnight Commander works like a champ in Terminal. You can boot several flavors of regular Linux on an XO. And the developers are working on a way to wrap ordinary Gnome applications for Sugar on the fly.

The Venezuala deal uses Caixa Magica Linux, which is based on Mandriva, which is based on Red Hat. Sugar Labs is working on a port of Sugar to Mandriva and Caixa Magica. So we haven't lost the Venezuela deal.

No netbook costs half what the OLPC XO does, and if you can design one for $50, I can get you a job, or venture capital funding if you prefer. The XO would have cost about $100 if

a) W hadn't sold off the dollar to the Chinese, and

b) OLPC and some of the governments interested in it hadn't decided to double memory and storage, and use a slightly faster processor.

By the time Asus et al. get anywhere near $100, the XO-2 (most likely from Pixel Qi, not OLPC) is projected to be $75. Mid-2010 is the latest estimate.

There are also projects to create $12 8-bit computers for education, such as PlayPower. Unfortunately, that's without a display. If somebody can figure out how the students can use them, there is excellent free 8-bit education software that we can port over.

I have some pre-Linux math software for the Apple II and C64 that I have offered to GPL if somebody else will do the necessary work to get it into Sugar or onto the PlayPower system. (Sorry, I'm writing textbooks to go out under GPL full-time now.)