To treat your questions seriously, yes a manual wheelchair is carbon neutral.

- Carbon from manufacturing/delivery is comparable to a artisan-made bicycle - approx same manufacturing process, and style and size of business.
- Pushing a wheelchair burns about as many calories as walking. If you think about this it makes sense - you have smaller muscles called upon to do the work, but you're engaging less of your body in the effort, and you have the mechanical advantage of wheel.

Some data's available here, which puts wheelchair in the middle of light exertion walking.
http://caloriecount.about.com/activities-walking-ac17

Finally, using a wheelchairs all about sitting on your ass all day - how couldn't it burn less calories! :-)

You asked, so here's why this won't work:

"fit a pedal-powered generator". Where do those pedals fit? Basically down and in front. Take a look at some recumbent bicycle designs - preferably the more upright ones. Take a look at some wheelchair designs - standard legs out in front hospital-style, and some more active ones like tilite.com. Your pedal chain rings and crank-arms are going to have to fit somewhere very clever indeed to avoid them or the legs sticking out in front in a very awkward manner. Even standard hospital-style wheelchairs are a PITA to maneuver about due to the legs banging into everything, by adding the ability to pedal, you've just made that PITA far, far worse.

Leg strength - You're asking the compromised legs of someone who needs a wheelchair to produce power equivalent to an able-bodied person. That's not going to happen for a long, long time while atrophied muscles get stronger. You device needs to be enjoyable enough during that time, or human natures says, it will be abandoned.

Generating power - Most electric bicycles are just power assist for climbing hills. I don't think full-power generation is currently practical.

Power wheelchairs are hardly restricted to slow short-range trundling. They're 24-volt, and can reach speeds of at least 25km/h have ranges than can be extended by greater battery capacity, up to at least 30km. (Speed and range maximums may be higher - numbers are just from some individuals I know).

It's debatable that walking is better than a chair, but the able-bodied often blindly assume that walking must be so.

I'm partially paralysed due to a spinal cord injury, but can walk with a walker and a leg brace. When walking, I can go about 200 metres before my leg nerves/muscles are too weak to continue, and I need to take a break. That 200 metres will take me about 15 minutes - I've had double-leg-amputee Grannies speeding past me. During that time I can't carry anything unless it's very light and I can stuff it into a backpack.

Contrast this with my wheelchair, In which I can go faster than walking pace, can go for miles, and can carry heavier items in a backpack, and can carry items in my lap - either on their own, or in a tray. I can't clear the dining table while walking, but can with the chair. I can't go to the store with the walker.

Standing up - say to get stuff out of the cupboards - is a great, truly useful skill. Walking with compromised legs nerves, though, takes a another leap in level of ability before it beats a wheelchair.

There's a series of decent (but marketing-focused) articles explaining low-latency messaging around exchanges, and high-frequency trading at Solace Systems, makers of low-latency messaging appliances:
http://www.solacesystems.com/tag/low-latency
From that feed, here's a Reuters story about HFT that's more than just fear and frothing at the mouth:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN173583920091202?pageNumber=1

- Richard

My solutions do include using the right tool for the job - if you're getting tripped up by a few references to paths containing spaces then you're doing it wrong. If you'd need to do _lots_ of path manipulation and thus lots of escaping, then doing it in bash makes no sense. With mastery of the tools, the question of "which tool?" is "where is this easier to type?"

Sending with scp works easily, all you need are some quotes - the following will work fine:
scp "A File Called Wanda" remote:/tmp

The problem's not with the tool...

If you (or the people supplying you with shell scripts) are having problems with spaces in pathnames, use double-quotes around your path references. Or backslash-escape the spaces if you must. And use the -0 arguments where appropriate (like with find and xargs).

If this (or another type of difficult input) gets too tedious, substitute perl - its quoting operators can make awkward backslash-escaping disappear.

- Richard