How to prevent laptop from sleep when lid closed

What an absurd limitation and incredible oversite! If you've used any other operating system on a laptop long enough you'll know how convienient it is to be able to shut the lid without it sleeping in certain situations. Two quick examples:

You have a virtual machine running inside you laptop for development and you want to walk half a block away to the other coffee shop. - Seriously? I have to walk down the street with my open laptop in one hand and my coffee in the other to prevent the silly thing from sleeping? What if it's raining? I have to get my laptop wet simly because I can't flip a software switch to tell it not to sleep when I close the lid? MAJORLY dissappointing Apple.

You work in a large building, and you need to show your boss your work, but he/she is in the opposite corner of the building. I either have to walk through the whole building opening and bumping into heavy doors with laptop open, (forget taking my coffee with me!) or I have to make my boss wait while my machine starts back up and re-connects to the wifi, etc. - That's Rediculous!

I'm a little embarassed to be seen with this Macbook now. Such arbitrary limitations seem to be frequent. I can't do the things I could with a regular laptop running any other unix OS.

Apple, I like your ability to make things easy for people who don't know about computers, but that is not mutually exclusive with allowing more technical people to do what they need to do. It's a simple software switch you are choosing not to make available to us.