I bought one of those USB thumb drives, thinking it would be an easy alternative to carrying around cds, plus being able to write to them. I wasn’t sure whether to kick myself or go yell at the system admins when I learned the hard way that every computer on my college’s campus disallows adding any new hardware, including USB drives. The same problem came up when I tried viewing images on my digital camera.
Probably the same scenerio for public computers all over the world. Also true at my town’s public library (which doesn’t even let users save to the harddrive – it’s floppy drive or nothing, making it very very hard for me to do scans of books in the reference department that are over 1.2mb…and as mentioned in my previous reply, by the time I get home and download them to my computer, about 10% of them already have CRC errors)