Try the TrackMeNot plugin.

the folks from Litl started setting up their demo table. I glanced over and saw that they had a small gadget that looked like a laptop (appeared to be the size of of a Macbook Air) with a flip screen. As I was reading an interesting article, I overheard some explanation of what the machine did and I was tempted to get up and check it out as I am always open to new gadgets. However, that temptation quickly went away when I overheard the price being quoted after the explanation of what it did. For a good five or ten minutes I put my reading material aside and tried to imagine just what market this device is trying to cater to that one would be able to justify paying $695 (the price I overheard) for. In my quest, I came up empty handed and promptly went back to my reading. At lunch time I got up and left without so much as glancing at the demo table. I doubt any reasonable person will spend more than a minute in the same quest before they promptly dismiss it.

Some of the older hardware have displays that compare favorably with the the stuff that is sold nowadays on cheap laptops. I'm talking LCD quality, as in viewing angle, etc. and not necessarily LCD resolution, nor the ability of the GPU to render images. Some older laptops also have great keyboards, say, take any old Thinkpad. Lastly, some of the older hardware also have unique styling like the 486 Thinkpad 701C (the famous Butterfly, see ThinkWiki's page http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:701CS ) Thus for certain things (e.g. if you can offload heavy processing to another machine) running an old laptop maybe a reasonably good experience.

They may be capitalists but they must be very bad ones as most, emphatically not all, could easily be making more money outside of academia.

I'm having a hard time with your fourth paragraph, in particular this: "Today we have no pen computer elements in Windows." I may have misunderstood what you are trying to say but recent Windows versions starting with Vista (not all versions) have built-in pen support out of the box. Even XP had pen support albeit only in the special version Windows XP for TabletPC.

Simple solution is get a lanyard and carry the phone wound your neck. Ignore anyone who attempts to criticize you, you've got your reasons!

The "ftp://" thing is so recent in the history of the protocol that it boggles the mind...

I've got a Vaio UX which is similar to the OQO and was it's direct competitor. These two were really TabletPCs in a small package. The UX has the same OQO form factor with a much better processor (Intel Core Solo.) Unfortunately it has a passive digitizer whereas the last *production* OQO (not the OLED prototype on eBay) had an active digitizer (much better for handwriting) but the processor was a dog (VIA nee Transmeta.) You are right it does not fit in a shirtsleeve pocket but it sure is handy to have. In winter it fits in my coat pocket. Any other season I carry it on my hand in the fashion that you see people carrying their little digital cameras on a strap. What is handy about it, and important to me specifically, is that I have all the PDF articles that I need and can make annotations on them with the stylus. I have all my notes in OneNote (the only Microsoft product that is any good ) and add to it on the fly. It is possible to have a completely satisfying web cruising experience on these as well. In fact I know people who only use theirs for the web when on the road. In other words, a large screen and a keyboard is much overrated when contrasted with this kind of portability. My case, I can do without a keyboard altogether as most of what I do with it involves handwriting on the screen. The built-in hardware keyboard, along with the TabletPC virtual keyboard and TabletPC handwriting recognition are adequate substitute for those people I know who only use it for web cruising on the go. If you haven't used a full size TabletPC then it will be hard to understand this. If you haven't tried an OQO (with a digitizer) or a VAIO UX after using a full-size TabletPC then you surely will not understand how handy these small factor TabletPC machines are.

Very likely the person who won the bid already has one ( or something compatible) for when he ( or she) is sitting at a desk and just got the OQO for when he is out and about and doesn't feel like carrying a laptop -- which he also has. Heck, I'm a poor working stiff and I also have a machine for every occasion listed above.

The reason eBay bought Skype was for the same reason that it bought PayPal. In the same manner in which their business of auctioning is intricately dependent on having a well-oiled payment system in place, so it is with having a communication system in place where a prospective buyer can easily communicate with a seller.

The problem is you can't trust a programmer "programmer" handling floating point arithmetic.