What would be faster is if everyone checked their $#@$@# luggage.
What would be faster is if the airlines too serious responsibility for lost or damaged luggage. Maybe "in cabin checked luggage" where you get to stow it and you get to punch out the jerk who sticks his ski poles through your laptop.
I think I should have included a smiley or something. What's the smiley for "irony"?
The point is that they haven't found out, yet, how far it can be practically scaled up or how strong they can make it. Any number you come up with could easily be off by five decimal orders of magnitude.
Re: your point #1: I won't read a book on a computer, but I've been reading books on my PDA since 2000. They're electronic, but they're still books.
The book isn't the physical paper, and what makes the paperback more readable than the screen involves a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with paper. It's all about size, and convenience, and ruggedness.
On the other hand, "e-book readers" are nasty, pointless things. They don't maintain the readability of paperbacks. They're big, clumsy, and inconvenient. You can't stick them in your pocket, pull them out when you have a few spare minutes to burn, and read them... because they're hardcover sized and fragile to boot.
PDAs aren't so fragile. They're obviously not as rugged as paperbacks, but the smaller screen makes them significantly less likely to get busted, and there's a whole pocket industry of protective cases for handhelds... and whether they're high-end cellphones or pure PDAs a lot of people are carrying them anyway.
Raytracing is more computationally expensive, but what about human expense? To get high performance while achieving comparable results with scanline rendering you need to prebake shadows, create reflection maps, pick which objects are going to be self-shadowed, and so on... many of these techniques involve selectively applying ray-tracing algorithms where you notice them, along with a myriad of other algorithms that are individually cheaper than raytracing for specific cases. At some point it makes sense to simplify the code and the artists's job and just raytrace everything.
What does Pixar have to do with realtime graphics? Pixar's not DOING realtime graphics.
Pixar has the luxury of controlling every take, and going back after the fact to re-render shots with different settings, or even to use different algorithms (including ray-tracing) to fix any rendoring flaws caused by whatever approximations they're using at that point. Realtime graphics do not have that luxury... if there's a problem in a scene, you can't go back and fix it.
So whether raytracing is more or less appropriate for realtime graphics, whether Pixar uses it or not is irrelevant.
I think that it is a good thing that it is easier to declare someone dead than undead.
I don't think that anyone is asking that it be as easy to declare someone undead as dead, but rather that the extra step of documenting where the mistake was made is an excessive hurdle. If you can provide N pieces of documentation that you are, in fact, still alive then you should be able to be treated as such by the government... even if they can't figure out which clerk made which typo.
I didn't realize spam interrupted a process that is biologically necessary to live...
Don't be an ass. You know perfectly well that there are thousands of similar situations. The principle is that there are limits on the ways you can express even constitutionally protected speech, and it's a solid and sound one. Other examples, off the top of my head:
* Posting bills where prohibited. * Putting leaflets directly into mailboxes. * Soliciting on private property. *...
You have no absolute right to speech, no matter what the subject of the speech, if the *manner* of the speech is damaging... even if it's "merely" property damage or theft of services.
If you run a blaring loudspeaker van through a residential neighborhood at 4AM it doesn't matter whether the material you're playing is "constitutionally protected speech" or not. You're still subject to noise abatement laws.
The whole issue of freedom of speech is a red herring.
it stands to reason to believe that they would not try to make a working product out of it unless they could make money off of it.
They did the hard part (bringing the algorithm to the point where anyone could implement it, like Phil Zimmerman did for PGP) in 1977 before they even considered applying for a patent, and *other people* were reducing it to working implementations by the time of the math lecture I mentioned. That was in 1979. Hell, the development of commercially viable tools based on the RSA algorithm was done primarily by people other than RSA Data Security: they didn't develop PGP, they didn't develop SSH, they didn't develop SSL, their first major product (SecurID) wasn't based on the RSA algorithm and they didn't reveal the algorithm it used, let alone patent it... in fact they took great care to keep it a trade secret.
You cannot possibly suggest that without that company the banking system would have advanced as it did.
Sure I can. I'm honestly surprised that you'd suggest RSA's patent had any positive impact on banking at all. As far as I can tell, most of the work in cryptosystems post 1985 was based on elliptical curves just because of the potential impact of the RSA patent on any algorithm based on prime factoring.
Name one person who created a new industry from the work for which he was awarded a Fields medal.
* RSA didn't create a new industry from the RSA algorithm. * The example you gave where I brought up the fields medal had nothing to do with RSA, but was something that would get you a Nobel-equivalent in mathematics.
There isn't a tight binding between rendering and access control. Permissions are controlled at a process level.
They're controlled by the security zone mechanism, in the HTML control. There should not be a mechanism whereby any object that is not explicitly installed as a plugin gets to run as unsandboxed code in the browser, or in any other application.
The DRM is optional.
So I can get a version of Vista that doesn't include it?
And XP drivers still work
XP sound drivers don't work in Vista, because of the changes in the audio subsystem to support strong DRM.
Let's take one of the key features in your high dollar item server product and put it in your $60 desktop os. Anti-trust authorities won't have ANY problem with that.
If antitrust authorities didn't have a problem with Microsoft buying Citrix and putting competing virtualization technologies out of business in the first place they won't blink at this.
That being said, commandline.Net tools are already on the machine
There's a reason that there's a huge outburst of complaints whenever Microsoft hints that they might want to pull Visual Studio 6 (the last full version of VS).
And no, it won't raise antitrust issues for Microsoft to include the same functionality in Windows that every UNIX vendor (including Apple) does in their operating systems.
Yeah, I can see the headline now -- "Microsoft declairs security optional".
They did that in 1997.
Then they took away even the OPTION of a secure install.
* Rewriting applets in something other than HTML is not the goal, it's a necessary step on the goal. The goal is eliminating the merging of the desktop and the internet under a single security umbrella mediated by the HTML control and security zones. Replacing HTML with another markup language (or.NET, which uses the same unworkable security model) does not do anything useful.
* The last time I checked Interix was available for 2000, XP, and the server operating systems... but not Vista desktop other than Ultimate. At least that was what the documentation said.
* I specified Visual Studio 6 for a reason: that's the last version that includes all the pre-dot-NET compilers.
As for my motivation: I explained that already - it's to make Vista more accessible for businesses, which is where Microsoft's market penetration starts. It's driven by the office, not the home, and it always has been. Home users used Apples and Ataris, not IBM PCs, until they were using PCs at work. Home users used DOS, not Windows, until they were using Windows at work. Home users were using Wordstar, not Word, until they were using Word at work. Home users have TVs and DVD players, they really don't care all that much about playing DVDs on their computers... enabling DRM support won't sell Vista, having Vista at work and getting used to it there will.
Microsoft has forgotten the business world. The last really *professional*, business-oriented version of Windows on the desktop was Windows 2000. Which some businesses are still using, because there's no *business case* to upgrade to XP (let alone Vista)!
Microsoft is always in something of a no-win position when it comes to minimum system requirements. If it specifies huge hardware needs, then the opportunity to sell upgrades is reduced since most existing PCs can't handle the new version. If it sets a minimal baseline platform, then it's difficult (though arguably not impossible) to add any features that make upgrading worth the hassle and risk.
It would have been easy to add features to make Vista worth buying: make it modular, make it simpler, make it more rather than less reliable, and make the features that reduce Windows security optional, and look at what your best competitors were doing.
* Make the HTML control optional, rewrite the control panel applets and other shell components that need it to work without it, and change the tight binding between rendering and access control. Provide a "legacy" wrapper for it so that old programs can use the insecure API, but make THAT optional as well.
* Make the DRM optional. Vista without DRM would still use the old XP drivers and remain compatible with XP, but wouldn't have the components to run the latest encrypted media, so give us the option... Basic Vista or Video Vista. If you don't install Windows Media Player, you get WMP 2.0 and a WMV3 codec so you can play most video, but if you want to play HD-DVD you need to take on the full thing.
* Bundle Interix with ALL versions of Vista. They could call it "A better UNIX than Linux".
* Remove the crippling in Terminal Server, allow multiuser use over networks. If you can't afford to upgrade all your computers to Vista you can use the old ones as terminals to your Windows Home Server.
* Bundle Visual Studio, in the package, the way Apple bundles XCode and all free UNIXes bundle their compilers. Windows is the last hold out of the horror of the '80s... the compiler-less OS.
These might not sell to home users, but it would sell to business, and don't forget that what got Windows into the home for a lot of people was the fact that they were using it at the office.
But this would all be diametrically opposed to Microsoft's "we know better than you what you want, and that's *our* OS, not yours" policies. Hell, even Apple gave up on the idea of unbundling access to UNIX from Rhapsody, and if it's not too scary for APPLE users it's not too scary for Windows.
You can move the world *and* get the Fields medal.
As for RSA, you'll have to explain that one.
* It was developed before there was any reason to believe that a software patent was viable. The first "software patent" was the setuid patent, applied for in 1972, granted in 1979. RSA was published in 1977.
* It was only patentable in the US because they didn't file until months after they published.
* The biggest effect of the patent was to kick off a search for a non-patented alternative, leading to the DSA algorithm being explicitly released royalty-free world-wide in 1991.
* The next biggest effect of the patent was to create nearly as big a split in the crypto community between the US and the rest of the world as ITAR did.
* It wasn't economically valuable for years because nobody could afford hardware that could actually manage to run it fast enough to be economical: I remember a lecture at UNI in 1979 where the prof started an RSA encryption with a fairly short key at the start of the lecture and it finished at the end.
* By the time RSA was making money from RSA, rather than from venture capital, the main reason that RSA was in wide use was PGP... and RSA managed to screw PGP up in the process. The history of RSA is a mess of acquisitions and speculation.
So the work clearly wasn't motivated by software patents - the patent itself seems to have been an afterthought, and it's at the very least questionable that the RSA patent has in fact advanced the state of the art. So where's your point?
Maybe in a better-defined way, but if they are abolished, software will be hindered severely.
Can you point to a single software patent that has worked the way you think they should?
I may have an idea of how to SOLVE the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time.... Again, not prove that it's impossible, but solve it. It's not my direct are of expertise. So I would need to invest at least a year to iron the details of my idea. I have no intentions of doing it just to publish a paper.
Not even for a crack at the Fields medal? I suspect that a solution any problem of this magnitude would be a shoe-in.
To summarize: no patents=no solution to an outstanding problem.
If that's the case you should have no problem coming up with an answer to my first question. For my second, well, that's between you and your tenure committee.
Crocodile-skin print on the case, nothing. When Sony makes a machine with a case of recycled aluminum cans, and a keyboard using material from old piano keys and bakelite telephones, then I'll be impressed.
The way they're releasing it requires a fairly large high resolution screen even to read, due to the way the web page is laid out and the image-based page viewing. I can't imagine reading this even on a full-time connected handheld... so it's missing the largest potential pool of readers.
If someone with an iPhone or equivalent could comment on how readable it is on the small screen I'd be interested in knowing how far off the mark I am.
I don't have to be a drug user to be appalled by the War on Drugs.
I don't have to be a "pirate" to be appalled by the RIAA's tactics.
Some people have this thing called empathy, and this sense that the punishment should fit the crime. When you have people being ruined for life for what would, if it involved a physical CD, get them a few hundred dollars fine and a suspended sentence... that's just outrageous.
When Microsoft release the source to Interix (their BSD-derived UNIX-on-NT) or Apple starts putting "non-commercial-use-only" restrictions on things like launchd, THEN you can start talking about Apple and Microsoft's support for open source being in any way similar.
In Beta they enabled their full drag and drop by default, but turned it off-by-default after a storm of protest on the Parallels forums. The reason for the protest is that they implemented the ability to do Mac-Windows drag and drop everywhere (instead of just to and from the Windows desktop) by creating a special magic UNC path that provided full local-user access to the root of the OS X file system.
As far as I know that's still in there, for both drag-and-drop and, if I recall correctly, for their "Coherence" mode where the Windows run in a pseudo-multi-window mode integrated to the Mac user interface.
VMWare Player is free too, and supports limited video acceleration. It's what I use to convince Photoshop 4 to let me run it when I need to poke around in actual.PSD files (it freaks out and tell me that I need more than 256M RAM if I run it with the full 2GB).
A lot more people use the desktop versions than you seem to think, and quite a few folks use them for testing of software they think might be suspect. I don't know why you would use shared folders in that environment but it's a good thing to be reminded that shared folders are inherently a security hole (albeit one not so large as this, normally).
My gasoline? I'm in Houston, TX, and my first full-time job was in the oil and gas industry.:)
Gasoline wasn't a buck a gallon in 2000: it started rising from the buck-twenty average in the '90s during 1999... before Bush took office. Much as I would like to blame everything on Bush the man is not that competant a villain.
And 40c a gallon tax isn't what's making gasoline in the US cost 3 bucks a gallon. A lot of it is simply the weak US dollar... or, if you prefer, inflation. In 1980 dollars, in fact, gasoline is only $1.20 a gallon, and the rise in gas prices over Bush's term in office is half as great when you adjust it for inflation.
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Am I the only person flying consistently (once every two months, generally) who has never had a bag lost?
Never had one lost, damaged, or arrive on the carousel open? Possibly so.
where is the damn bag going to go on a one-leg flight?
It's one of the mysteries of nature, like the sea turtles and the sock eaters.
What would be faster is if everyone checked their $#@$@# luggage.
What would be faster is if the airlines too serious responsibility for lost or damaged luggage. Maybe "in cabin checked luggage" where you get to stow it and you get to punch out the jerk who sticks his ski poles through your laptop.
I think I should have included a smiley or something. What's the smiley for "irony"?
The point is that they haven't found out, yet, how far it can be practically scaled up or how strong they can make it. Any number you come up with could easily be off by five decimal orders of magnitude.
Re: your point #1: I won't read a book on a computer, but I've been reading books on my PDA since 2000. They're electronic, but they're still books.
The book isn't the physical paper, and what makes the paperback more readable than the screen involves a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with paper. It's all about size, and convenience, and ruggedness.
On the other hand, "e-book readers" are nasty, pointless things. They don't maintain the readability of paperbacks. They're big, clumsy, and inconvenient. You can't stick them in your pocket, pull them out when you have a few spare minutes to burn, and read them... because they're hardcover sized and fragile to boot.
PDAs aren't so fragile. They're obviously not as rugged as paperbacks, but the smaller screen makes them significantly less likely to get busted, and there's a whole pocket industry of protective cases for handhelds... and whether they're high-end cellphones or pure PDAs a lot of people are carrying them anyway.
At one sheet per day, in a startup? Figure the annual burn of the company and divide by 365.
Raytracing is more computationally expensive, but what about human expense? To get high performance while achieving comparable results with scanline rendering you need to prebake shadows, create reflection maps, pick which objects are going to be self-shadowed, and so on... many of these techniques involve selectively applying ray-tracing algorithms where you notice them, along with a myriad of other algorithms that are individually cheaper than raytracing for specific cases. At some point it makes sense to simplify the code and the artists's job and just raytrace everything.
What does Pixar have to do with realtime graphics? Pixar's not DOING realtime graphics.
Pixar has the luxury of controlling every take, and going back after the fact to re-render shots with different settings, or even to use different algorithms (including ray-tracing) to fix any rendoring flaws caused by whatever approximations they're using at that point. Realtime graphics do not have that luxury... if there's a problem in a scene, you can't go back and fix it.
So whether raytracing is more or less appropriate for realtime graphics, whether Pixar uses it or not is irrelevant.
I think that it is a good thing that it is easier to declare someone dead than undead.
I don't think that anyone is asking that it be as easy to declare someone undead as dead, but rather that the extra step of documenting where the mistake was made is an excessive hurdle. If you can provide N pieces of documentation that you are, in fact, still alive then you should be able to be treated as such by the government... even if they can't figure out which clerk made which typo.
I didn't realize spam interrupted a process that is biologically necessary to live...
...
Don't be an ass. You know perfectly well that there are thousands of similar situations. The principle is that there are limits on the ways you can express even constitutionally protected speech, and it's a solid and sound one. Other examples, off the top of my head:
* Posting bills where prohibited.
* Putting leaflets directly into mailboxes.
* Soliciting on private property.
*
You have no absolute right to speech, no matter what the subject of the speech, if the *manner* of the speech is damaging... even if it's "merely" property damage or theft of services.
If you run a blaring loudspeaker van through a residential neighborhood at 4AM it doesn't matter whether the material you're playing is "constitutionally protected speech" or not. You're still subject to noise abatement laws.
The whole issue of freedom of speech is a red herring.
it stands to reason to believe that they would not try to make a working product out of it unless they could make money off of it.
They did the hard part (bringing the algorithm to the point where anyone could implement it, like Phil Zimmerman did for PGP) in 1977 before they even considered applying for a patent, and *other people* were reducing it to working implementations by the time of the math lecture I mentioned. That was in 1979. Hell, the development of commercially viable tools based on the RSA algorithm was done primarily by people other than RSA Data Security: they didn't develop PGP, they didn't develop SSH, they didn't develop SSL, their first major product (SecurID) wasn't based on the RSA algorithm and they didn't reveal the algorithm it used, let alone patent it... in fact they took great care to keep it a trade secret.
You cannot possibly suggest that without that company the banking system would have advanced as it did.
Sure I can. I'm honestly surprised that you'd suggest RSA's patent had any positive impact on banking at all. As far as I can tell, most of the work in cryptosystems post 1985 was based on elliptical curves just because of the potential impact of the RSA patent on any algorithm based on prime factoring.
Name one person who created a new industry from the work for which he was awarded a Fields medal.
* RSA didn't create a new industry from the RSA algorithm.
* The example you gave where I brought up the fields medal had nothing to do with RSA, but was something that would get you a Nobel-equivalent in mathematics.
There isn't a tight binding between rendering and access control. Permissions are controlled at a process level.
.Net tools are already on the machine
They're controlled by the security zone mechanism, in the HTML control. There should not be a mechanism whereby any object that is not explicitly installed as a plugin gets to run as unsandboxed code in the browser, or in any other application.
The DRM is optional.
So I can get a version of Vista that doesn't include it?
And XP drivers still work
XP sound drivers don't work in Vista, because of the changes in the audio subsystem to support strong DRM.
Let's take one of the key features in your high dollar item server product and put it in your $60 desktop os. Anti-trust authorities won't have ANY problem with that.
If antitrust authorities didn't have a problem with Microsoft buying Citrix and putting competing virtualization technologies out of business in the first place they won't blink at this.
That being said, commandline
There's a reason that there's a huge outburst of complaints whenever Microsoft hints that they might want to pull Visual Studio 6 (the last full version of VS).
And no, it won't raise antitrust issues for Microsoft to include the same functionality in Windows that every UNIX vendor (including Apple) does in their operating systems.
Yeah, I can see the headline now -- "Microsoft declairs security optional".
They did that in 1997.
Then they took away even the OPTION of a secure install.
(bother, I left out the "6", I meant to write "Visual Studio 6" in my original post)
* Rewriting applets in something other than HTML is not the goal, it's a necessary step on the goal. The goal is eliminating the merging of the desktop and the internet under a single security umbrella mediated by the HTML control and security zones. Replacing HTML with another markup language (or .NET, which uses the same unworkable security model) does not do anything useful.
* The last time I checked Interix was available for 2000, XP, and the server operating systems... but not Vista desktop other than Ultimate. At least that was what the documentation said.
* I specified Visual Studio 6 for a reason: that's the last version that includes all the pre-dot-NET compilers.
As for my motivation: I explained that already - it's to make Vista more accessible for businesses, which is where Microsoft's market penetration starts. It's driven by the office, not the home, and it always has been. Home users used Apples and Ataris, not IBM PCs, until they were using PCs at work. Home users used DOS, not Windows, until they were using Windows at work. Home users were using Wordstar, not Word, until they were using Word at work. Home users have TVs and DVD players, they really don't care all that much about playing DVDs on their computers... enabling DRM support won't sell Vista, having Vista at work and getting used to it there will.
Microsoft has forgotten the business world. The last really *professional*, business-oriented version of Windows on the desktop was Windows 2000. Which some businesses are still using, because there's no *business case* to upgrade to XP (let alone Vista)!
Microsoft is always in something of a no-win position when it comes to minimum system requirements. If it specifies huge hardware needs, then the opportunity to sell upgrades is reduced since most existing PCs can't handle the new version. If it sets a minimal baseline platform, then it's difficult (though arguably not impossible) to add any features that make upgrading worth the hassle and risk.
It would have been easy to add features to make Vista worth buying: make it modular, make it simpler, make it more rather than less reliable, and make the features that reduce Windows security optional, and look at what your best competitors were doing.
* Make the HTML control optional, rewrite the control panel applets and other shell components that need it to work without it, and change the tight binding between rendering and access control. Provide a "legacy" wrapper for it so that old programs can use the insecure API, but make THAT optional as well.
* Make the DRM optional. Vista without DRM would still use the old XP drivers and remain compatible with XP, but wouldn't have the components to run the latest encrypted media, so give us the option... Basic Vista or Video Vista. If you don't install Windows Media Player, you get WMP 2.0 and a WMV3 codec so you can play most video, but if you want to play HD-DVD you need to take on the full thing.
* Bundle Interix with ALL versions of Vista. They could call it "A better UNIX than Linux".
* Remove the crippling in Terminal Server, allow multiuser use over networks. If you can't afford to upgrade all your computers to Vista you can use the old ones as terminals to your Windows Home Server.
* Bundle Visual Studio, in the package, the way Apple bundles XCode and all free UNIXes bundle their compilers. Windows is the last hold out of the horror of the '80s... the compiler-less OS.
These might not sell to home users, but it would sell to business, and don't forget that what got Windows into the home for a lot of people was the fact that they were using it at the office.
But this would all be diametrically opposed to Microsoft's "we know better than you what you want, and that's *our* OS, not yours" policies. Hell, even Apple gave up on the idea of unbundling access to UNIX from Rhapsody, and if it's not too scary for APPLE users it's not too scary for Windows.
You can move the world *and* get the Fields medal.
As for RSA, you'll have to explain that one.
* It was developed before there was any reason to believe that a software patent was viable. The first "software patent" was the setuid patent, applied for in 1972, granted in 1979. RSA was published in 1977.
* It was only patentable in the US because they didn't file until months after they published.
* The biggest effect of the patent was to kick off a search for a non-patented alternative, leading to the DSA algorithm being explicitly released royalty-free world-wide in 1991.
* The next biggest effect of the patent was to create nearly as big a split in the crypto community between the US and the rest of the world as ITAR did.
* It wasn't economically valuable for years because nobody could afford hardware that could actually manage to run it fast enough to be economical: I remember a lecture at UNI in 1979 where the prof started an RSA encryption with a fairly short key at the start of the lecture and it finished at the end.
* By the time RSA was making money from RSA, rather than from venture capital, the main reason that RSA was in wide use was PGP... and RSA managed to screw PGP up in the process. The history of RSA is a mess of acquisitions and speculation.
So the work clearly wasn't motivated by software patents - the patent itself seems to have been an afterthought, and it's at the very least questionable that the RSA patent has in fact advanced the state of the art. So where's your point?
Maybe in a better-defined way, but if they are abolished, software will be hindered severely.
Can you point to a single software patent that has worked the way you think they should?
I may have an idea of how to SOLVE the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time.... Again, not prove that it's impossible, but solve it. It's not my direct are of expertise. So I would need to invest at least a year to iron the details of my idea. I have no intentions of doing it just to publish a paper.
Not even for a crack at the Fields medal? I suspect that a solution any problem of this magnitude would be a shoe-in.
To summarize: no patents=no solution to an outstanding problem.
If that's the case you should have no problem coming up with an answer to my first question. For my second, well, that's between you and your tenure committee.
Crocodile-skin print on the case, nothing. When Sony makes a machine with a case of recycled aluminum cans, and a keyboard using material from old piano keys and bakelite telephones, then I'll be impressed.
The way they're releasing it requires a fairly large high resolution screen even to read, due to the way the web page is laid out and the image-based page viewing. I can't imagine reading this even on a full-time connected handheld... so it's missing the largest potential pool of readers.
If someone with an iPhone or equivalent could comment on how readable it is on the small screen I'd be interested in knowing how far off the mark I am.
I don't have to be a drug user to be appalled by the War on Drugs.
I don't have to be a "pirate" to be appalled by the RIAA's tactics.
Some people have this thing called empathy, and this sense that the punishment should fit the crime. When you have people being ruined for life for what would, if it involved a physical CD, get them a few hundred dollars fine and a suspended sentence... that's just outrageous.
When Microsoft release the source to Interix (their BSD-derived UNIX-on-NT) or Apple starts putting "non-commercial-use-only" restrictions on things like launchd, THEN you can start talking about Apple and Microsoft's support for open source being in any way similar.
In Beta they enabled their full drag and drop by default, but turned it off-by-default after a storm of protest on the Parallels forums. The reason for the protest is that they implemented the ability to do Mac-Windows drag and drop everywhere (instead of just to and from the Windows desktop) by creating a special magic UNC path that provided full local-user access to the root of the OS X file system.
As far as I know that's still in there, for both drag-and-drop and, if I recall correctly, for their "Coherence" mode where the Windows run in a pseudo-multi-window mode integrated to the Mac user interface.
VMWare Player is free too, and supports limited video acceleration. It's what I use to convince Photoshop 4 to let me run it when I need to poke around in actual .PSD files (it freaks out and tell me that I need more than 256M RAM if I run it with the full 2GB).
A lot more people use the desktop versions than you seem to think, and quite a few folks use them for testing of software they think might be suspect. I don't know why you would use shared folders in that environment but it's a good thing to be reminded that shared folders are inherently a security hole (albeit one not so large as this, normally).
My gasoline? I'm in Houston, TX, and my first full-time job was in the oil and gas industry. :)
Gasoline wasn't a buck a gallon in 2000: it started rising from the buck-twenty average in the '90s during 1999... before Bush took office. Much as I would like to blame everything on Bush the man is not that competant a villain.
And 40c a gallon tax isn't what's making gasoline in the US cost 3 bucks a gallon. A lot of it is simply the weak US dollar... or, if you prefer, inflation. In 1980 dollars, in fact, gasoline is only $1.20 a gallon, and the rise in gas prices over Bush's term in office is half as great when you adjust it for inflation.