Here’s a really interesting idea courtesy of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet (“How to … install Ubuntu 8.04 on a USB flash drive“).  In the post he outlines the process of how you would go about preparing a USB flash drive to run Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
What this means is you’d have the ability to carry a portable operating system with you wherever you went.  All you’d need to use it is a physical computer to plug in to that would recognise the USB Flash drive and whose BIOS supported booting by …