Cut-and-paste, or pride-and-prejudice

When I was in high school I did a one-week summer program at West Point. They had these nifty graphical X-terminals that used these new-fangled things called "mice". You painted over the text with the mouse and then you could cut text and paste it somewhere. I thought that was really neat.

Later, in college, I had an account on one computer and I could telnet or ftp into other computers in different rooms or cities. I thought this was really neat.

A few years ago I was at a trade fair and saw a program called VMWare, that lets you easily run a virtual computer inside another operating system. I thought that was really neat.

Yesterday I needed some emergency dental work, so now I'm rushing to get some projects done before the weekend. I need to cut-and-paste a lot of text between two pieces of mathematical software. One application is on a remote machine that I can only get to on my MacBook via Windows Remote Desktop running under XP running under Parallels running on my MacBook. The other application is on a remote Mac that I can only use via Mac Screen Sharing. It is running under XP on that Mac using VMWare. Every time I cut-and-paste the data it disappears. I suspect that some scientist in Mongolia is trying to figure out why my model data is appearing on his desktop. I don't think this is neat at all.