I suspect those are junction points. Will have to check when I get home this evening, unless someone else can beat me to it.

Tangent: I do wonder when MS will announce their next update to NTFS. Or, for that matter if/when they'll natively support mounting more file systems. I'm certainly not expecting WinFS to arrive anytime soon!

That's a tough wager when 90% of PC's natively support NTFS and FAT[32] but not much else. Perhaps you mean exFAT is more "open" than NTFS?

I agree with you in principal, but think that your comment (and the MANY like it) actually miss the point of this new feature. This labs feature is NOT to replace POP or IMAP. It is for people who want to use the WEBMAIL interface even when they have no internet connection. The reasons for this could be many: perhaps they have no POP/IMAP client installed, do not know how to setup a local client, or simply prefer the Gmail interface. I don't know why - but I do know that we all know - and that the Google developers know - that IMAP and POP have been available for a long time!

There is nothing good at all about this kind of plan. Education costs, for one, are already high enough. I remember being a student not too long ago, and it was annoying to have to pay for cable tv that I rarely watched. Now students have to subsidize the music industry as well?