I used to suffer from a very acute case of RSI, requiring wearing a wrist brace and seeing a physiotherapist twice a week for more than a year. As a programmer, I seriously considered finding a new career but thankfully, I have recovered. Of course, recovery is relative here and as you know, you never come back to your college days when you could abuse your writs with all nighters after all nighters, you are always as risk. In my case, I can type without wrist braces for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and feel no pain. I do that on a full size keyboard at a desk; I can type with a laptop on my lap but only for a few hours before I am reminded that this is wrong.

One thing that really helped me was to get rid of the mouse. My main setup is a Unicomp EnduraPro keyboard with a touch-stick. A touch-stick is not as fast and as accurate as a mouse but the touch-stick is right there on the home row and it's easy to use with either hand to you don't put all the strain on the same hand all the time. I tried the Lenovo UltraNav keyboard but I don't like its cramped layout and I fell that the keys are not tactile enough. My laptop is a Lenovo X-Series with a touch-stick only. The key to be able to work efficiently with the touch-stick is to take the time to fine tune the sensitivity and to make sure that you can scroll with it in all your application. See the ThinkWiki website to learn how to do that under GNU/Linux.

But I have to be honest, finding a new keyboard is not what allowed me to move away from the wrist brace. It was only a minor part in a greater program to get my wrists back into shape. Your first goal should be to strengthen your wrists. Your physiotherapist probably recommended you some exercises and you have to do then. After a long and painful recovery doing wrist curls with barbels, I started doing rock climbing and this is probably the most effective way that I have to stay away from the wrist brace. If you go that route, be careful because the potential for injuries is very real if you try to do all the fun moves. Dynos and crimpers are not for you until you move away from the wrist braces but rock climbing will still be much more entertaining than wrist curls so you're more likely to keep a regular training schedule all year long, even when you don't feel the pain.

If your are not seeing a health professional, get off Slashdot and book an appointment with one immediately. Slashdot will recommend gadgets is this is not what you need. Good luck with your quest. I trust that you too can enjoy computing once again.

There are plenty of commercial uses of OSM already, and some are making quite enough money out of it. One that I personally use is offmaps.com, but that's obviously barely the tip of the iceberg.

But the question is whether OSM can make money out of it or not. Considering CloudMade are paying 40 employees, I guess they *do* can make money out of it, by "providing APIs for web sites, applications, and devices to use the rendered map data." (source is Wikipedia, probably the CloudMade website would provide more details.)

OSM is an example of success: open geospatial data and business profit.

I agree. In addition to OpenStreetMap and Geonames, a few other ones poped up in the geospatial community. OpenAddresses.org - with already 11+ addresses stored while it was launched less than a month ago, OpenAerialMap.org - which "rebooted" late last year, and OpenTopography.org too. There's other similar projects out there - the point being: there are several good starting points.

Also interesting is this OpenStreetMap VS Google MapMaker wrap-up - licensing terms being, once again, an information sharing showstopper.

NASA World Wind is the most popular afaik, but there are others, including OSSIMplanet, pTolemy3D, Virtual Ocean and quite a few other ones depending on your requirements.