Yeah, sure. Pretty much any Android tablet has all of that available if you look hard enough.

But.. speaking of ignoring what was said I did NOT recommend running stuff directly on the tablet. Use a REAL F'ING computer for that! A Desktop!

Use the tablet as a remote terminal via VNC, RDP or whatever protocol floats your boat. Here in the modern world we have this really cool thing.. internet without wires! You should put down your acoustic-coupled modem and try it some time!

But we don't want the DISEASES to benefit. We want to get rid of those!

Yeah, I know. Growing up in a small town where everything interesting was long distance AOL was pretty much off the radar for me back then.

I'm thinking more of the late 90s when a lot of people, having missed the whole BBS days were getting their first experience with online anything with AOL as an internet connection. Remember the "provide your own access plan" I knew a lot of people who used that with their cable modem or college campus ethernet connections and it was the only way they even considered accessing the web.

Laptops suck. They are hard to find driver for.. unless you want to run the sucky Windows home edition and malware that it comes with. And.. they don't last. Buy one this year, you will be buying another next year.

Get a tablet with a good stand and bluetooth keboard.

Get an unlimited data connection for your phone and tether it. Unless you spend all your time in the presence of wifi. If so then maybe you don't need to bother with the phone data.

Get a good, always on internet connection for home.

Get a good desktop with all the processing power needed for your physics simulations and more.

The next part should be ovious.. do all your work on the desktop. If you don't feel like being tied down use VNC or a similar solution from the tablet.

Do it this way and everything pretty much "just works". And... it does so for years! Laptops are such a ripoff!

Wow, how many people still spend $1k on a computer? And a laptop no less... how long before it quits working? Laptops these days are practically disposable. They should have wax paper chasis made by Dixie!

Hawaii

In the United States, where very few are not willfully ignorant of technology, America Online is bringing its own version of the net: America Online, an application that gives computer users access to certain features such as E-Mail, mindless time-killing games and, of course, instant messaging with search functions made for creepy people. While the initiative has clearly profitable goals, it's also been criticized as an "imperialistic" push for AOL colonies, where novice Internet users will grow up thinking their restricted version of the web is the real internet. To fight against that possibility, an 11-year-old developer who goes only by the handle Mr L33t is working on an application that tunnels the "regular" internet through AOL's Instant Messenger, one of the services free to use on America Online's application. This allows AOL users to establish a link to the outside, unrestricted internet, circumventing restrictions.

Great! Now just buy me solar panels and a Tesla battery. Also negotiate with the people who just installed my new shingles so as not to break the waranty. Do all that and I am sold!

Sometimes things actually run faster in Wine than on Windows.

Yeah! I'm sure a server from the mid 90s is VERY secure! I hope they applied all their updates!

Nah, these days most of those cowboy wannabe types just join the police force and get their jollies that way.

Most non-criminal gun ownwers would much rather just flash the gun and watch their would be attacker walk away before the violence starts.

poison

cut brake lines

waterproof pda playing reality tv episodes in a loop on the bottom of their swimming pool (might not work for all Slashdotters but would work with a good percentage of the population)

There are no reliable studies to compare those two things.

    Gunowners rarely actualy end up in shootouts with would-be attackers. The common scenario is would-be attacker starts to walk over, gun owner shows what they have just by pulling it out and holding it. There is no need to even point. Would-be attacker walks away. Everyone lives. Police are not called, nothing is recorded making useful statistics pretty much impossible.

The odds of any one person within a lifetime ever encountering someone who is about to go on a rampage is so small it may as well be zero. Sure, it happens and we see it on the news but there are a lot of people out there occupying a lot of space. It's not very likely to ever happen to you.

Now compare that to the odds of encountering someone wanting to rob, rape or otherwise harm you.

The rampage people are clearly crazy and I would hesitate to even predict how they would react to the site of your weapon. That second, much larger group... they will likely just walk away peacefully. You will pobably never even know what you avoided.

200 light year radius? In 1815 there were still 59 years to go before the birth of Marconni! Even if the author confused radius with diameter that would be pushing it. I doubt many radio transmissions of the kind being used in 1915 made it into interstellar space.