Sharing devices "out of the box"

[Paul Michael Reilly]

I've made my FC6 laptop available to family members (including grandma) 
as a shared machine.  I've taught them to log into their own session 
using "switch user" so that they are on their own vt session.  Works 
nice until they want to share devices, like audio and the CD burner. 
For FC6 I have to take pains to set up permissions appropriately but it 
does occur to me to ask how Rawhide should deal with this.  There seem 
to be two schools of thought:

1) Sharing devices automagically is a no-brainer; it must be turned on 
by default.

2) Sharing devices is a security weakness and no self respecting distro 
would enable such a thing by default.

It's all well and good when the PC is set up by a someone reading any of 
the Redhat lists but should there come a day when Dell (or some such) 
ships RHEL this issue and lots more like it will be on the table.

It does occur to me that maybe the current user (the one who currently 
owns X, the "selected" user for lack of a better description) should 
dynamically own devices but this is not very satisfying: perhaps the 
various users set their own special IM sounds in which case the distro 
is setting policy rather than mechanism.  So the issue does get 
complicated quickly.  Left to my own devices, I'd share the devices by 
default and build in the ability to graphically configure device sharing 
which smacks of a desktop (Gnome/KDE/Xfce/?) solution which might just 
already exist and I haven't come across such a beast.

-pmr