I was compiling links not expressing an opinion. No need to get personal, please try to stay on topic.

According to this article, this is not the first time, William Connolley is in the news. If anyone wants to check out his contributions at wikipedia, they are here.

Who is the author of TFA? Lawrence Solomon is author of the book The Deniers. Summary at amazon:

Global warming is a question for citizens, not just scientists. We must decide how serious the threat is and what to do about it. But how can we settle the fiercely complicated scientific issues involved? Al Gore?s answer is to rely on the argument from authority. Accept the word of the great scientists who really know, who say that global warming is real, caused primarily by humans and will lead to catastrophe if unchecked. The science is settled, and those who dissent are either crackpots or crooks. Eminent environmentalist Lawrence Solomon was not satisfied with Gore's answer. He decided to find out whether any real scientists dissent from the Gore/U.N. line. What he found shocked him. Not only were there serious scientists who dissented on every headline global warming issue, but the dissenters were by far the more accomplished and eminent scientists.

Other articles by Lawrence Solomon about wikipedia and climate change: Wikipedia's Zealots and Wikipropaganda.

Is Windows sold or licensed?

From November's ruling:

[MacOS...] are covered by software license
2 agreements that provided that the software is “licensed, not sold to [the user] by Apple Inc.
3 (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License” (Chung Exh. 26 at 1). Apple’s license
4 agreements restricted the use of Mac OS X to Apple computers, and specifically prohibited
5 customers from installing the operating system on non-Apple computers.

Both of these methods that you propose already help to protect your privacy. However, the IP you use probably would already be associated with you, if its not a shared ID, etc. That's why it's better to have the scraper run from a remote server.

I think you didn't get my point.

I wrote it would be difficult for google to track you. There is no cookie that identifies your google account, no javascript that tracks your usage data or your history. They can track searches by server IP, however if they want to associate these searches with you they need some to look for the whois entry of the server, which you can leave anonymous.

If you want to be even more private you can share the server with other people, as you do with scroogle.

It's very easy to build something like scroogle yourself. You need a server with support for php (or maybe java or python) that performs your searches server side and there you go. Three years ago, with no knowledge of php to start with, I wrote a simple program to send and fetch queries to and from google in about a day. It didn't even use the google search API it just parsed the returned HTML. I think anybody who just looks at the search API could put something together very fast. In the (unlikely) case anybody should ever be interested in who is behind your server you can share your server publicly to increase anonymity.

Improve it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hghpuxCHTc&feature=player_embedded

Ok... given you stipulate users have to use your applications and it is practical to do so (otherwise the calculation becomes void). You assume that you can collect more data to target ads better in order to increase significantly the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of the ads. Can you really collect more data? The device would be marketed most successfully to people already using google accounts, I think. Other people would not be so much interested in a google netbook ("where is the internet here? where is word?"). If netbook users are already google users there would be not so much to gain. If you don't annoy people with additional ads, you would hardly gain any more to get returns from your investment. Let's assume to the contrary that CPM will not significantly increase. Though there are stories about people gaining about $25 CPM, I think adsense CPM is usually much lower, say about $0.4. Now if you want to get back your money for the netbook in one year (say $150) you'll have to show many additional ads to people. I calculate 375000 impressions/year at a CPM of $0.4 or 1027 a day. If people use their netbooks in their free time, 4 hours a day (sounds ok?), that would be 4 ad impressions per minute. That sounds very high and unrealistic. I would think that in order to get back your money from the netbooks they'd really have to annoy people with full screen ads and more. I am skeptical about the business model.