You're proposing to give a digital operation the name of a physical action to make understanding it easier. "Yank" is a poor choice because it implies moving something, not copying it. It doesn't matter what you can or cannot do.
The Windows UI specs required (I don't know if they still do) that the UI be useable with just a keyboard. It was awkward, but you could do it. That key replaced a previous arcane key combination that gave you access to context menus.
Me too. Drives people watching crazy because they keep trying to figure out what I'm doing. Occasionally they ask: why are you highlighting things? Answer: to give the NSA something to think about.
The middle button is equivalent to copy AND paste, using a separate clipboard, all in one action. It is a concept that has to be learned by new users and is potentially confusing, particularly when it's explained incorrectly as you just did. Fortunately, if they don't learn it, they'll likely never notice it's there.
I know the youngsters love their focus-follow-mouse, but that really is annoying. That mouse thing is a secondary input device, next to the keyboard. It should behave like one. If I flick the irritating little rodent out of the way when I want to use my primary input device, it shouldn't get to say where that input goes.
There are rare occasions when I would like to have multiple clipboards, but most of the time, like your example, if you're using a multi-window GUI properly it's not an issue. Copy the first bit, paste, copy the second bit, paste. Your example becomes relevant if you're using one of these "new" one window/full screen UIs. Or an 80's era one window/full screen UI. Whichever.
What IS useful is a clipping application that sits somewhere unobtrusively and lets you store random stuff for use later, so you don't have to find it again. Neither select and paste nor copy and paste work well for that.
If your foot is on the brake so poorly that it's going to get dislodged, having your hands on the wheel isn't going to do you much good. It's not dangerous to text at red lights. Annoying to drivers behind you yes, dangerous, no.
"What will society look like at that point, with a massive unemployed underclass?"
Like it does now. Most people doing non-essential work.
Almost everybody used to be involved with growing food. Then mechanization made it so a single farmer could grow food for hundreds or thousands of people. So those hundreds or thousands of people were out of work. What did they do? Became financial analysts, retail workers, service providers of all kinds.
Increased productivity means more wealth. So long as you make sure some of that gets distributed to everybody, everybody is better off. You can use the extra productivity to have more free time or do work that previously society couldn't afford.
No. It's apparently MS marketing speak for a picture-in-picture type feature. The XBox can display it's own output side by side with the passthrough video from whatever you plug into it.
MS seems to be all about the snap now. Snapping tablets, snapping xboxes.
Phones aren't a good defense against a targeted or determined attacker. If I really want to know what's on yours, I'll steal it and read the flash chips.
If I'd just gotten a bunch of press about my product catching fire and had replaced everyone's cheap Chinese ripoff power adapter because of it, I'd be looking to do something like this too.
I see you're not a scientist. Most scientists today have at least a passing familiarity with both the history of their own field and the history of science in general. Far more so that at any other time in history. And yes, I am familiar with the correct definition of "fallacy" and also how it applies in the context of logical fallacies, because I am a working scientist who has fairly extensive knowledge of the philosophy underlying science, how it relates to other methods of producing "knowledge" and how both science and other methods have been applied in the past.
For example, Descartes, who is prominently featured by the OP (however many Gs should be inserted where that O is) came up with a couple of interesting ideas which we've filtered over the years from the large volume of crap. Descartes himself was not a scientist but a philosopher of an age when you could publish books in which you talked to yourself. The OP was certainly implying, if not clearly stating, that because Descartes had something to do with the Cartesian coordinate system we sometimes use, modern physicists should pay attention to his other poorly developed i(and totally untested) ideas; in fact, that those ideas were essentially just rediscovered by some ignorant modern scientists like Planck! That argument would appear to be fallacious in at least two ways, under the general category of "arguments from authority," or "argumentum ad auctoritatem" if you prefer the classical Latin.
Also false. String theory makes all the regular predictions that regular quantum field theory does. Nobody has come up with anything new that it predicts convincingly that is also currently testable.
Which is completely irrelevant since this story relates to quantum field theory, not string theory.
Descartes is a dead guy who thought the pituitary gland was the gateway to a supernatural world and who you wouldn't want to leave your adolescent princess with. He came up with a few things that, with a lot of further refinement, turned out to be useful, but he also came up with a lot of crap. Logic cautions us against arguments from authority for that reason.
Newton is another good example of someone who was in the habit of producing both useful insight and complete crap and not doing much to distinguish between the two.
How so? Modern scientists have better access to knowledge, new and old, than at any time in the past.
The GPs parent spouted a bunch of random stuff, useful mostly for demonstrating the pitfalls of several logical fallacies.
I do enjoy how people with fuzzy thinking like the GGP take a common factor like the word "geometry" and make all sorts of fuzzy headed connections based on it, then inevitably conclude that "scientists are idiots." Then I remember that LOTS of people have fuzzy brains and believe this shit, and that I live in a democracy.
Carroll might be right, but then again he might not be. It is not impossible that understanding physics that is not part of everyday experience might expose mechanisms that can be exploited at lower energy levels.
But that has nothing to do with the current story: it's quite likely that advances in our tools for working with the theories we already have will lead to better everyday technology. As a simple example, if we could better compute quantum mechanical interactions we would be able to predict the superconductive properties of any given material. Then, instead of trial and error searching for high temperature superconductors, we could just pick the material that gave us the optimum mix of properties, and we could be confident that a better one probably doesn't exist. Current quantum theory makes very good predictions, but is very difficult to use, which limits its application in engineering technology.
So? Who says all dimensions have to behave the same?
If you want to uniquely specify a point in the (currently observable) universe you require four numbers. The (currently observable) universe is four dimensional.
Occam's Razor is not a heuristic, nor can it be sometimes true and sometimes false. Occam's Razor simply says that among theories/hypotheses/techniques/formulae/whatever that work, the simplest should be preferred. Unless you like doing extra work, it's pretty straightforward.
Occam's Razor is sometimes used as an heuristic in science, where you might choose to accept or to pursue the simplest working theory/hypothesis/whatever until forced to abandon it by data it can't explain. In that context it cannot be true or false, it's a principle guiding a choice.
The GPs usage is completely consistent. If the simplest theory that works requires the universe be 27 dimensional then Occam's razor suggests we should use that theory - consider the universe to be 27 dimensional - until something that works better or is simpler comes along.
In a broader sense, science isn't about Truth. It's about utility. We cannot discover truth. If you want truth you have to make something up and then believe in it dogmatically no matter what (see religion).
Slashdot Mirror
You're proposing to give a digital operation the name of a physical action to make understanding it easier. "Yank" is a poor choice because it implies moving something, not copying it. It doesn't matter what you can or cannot do.
The Windows UI specs required (I don't know if they still do) that the UI be useable with just a keyboard. It was awkward, but you could do it. That key replaced a previous arcane key combination that gave you access to context menus.
Me too. Drives people watching crazy because they keep trying to figure out what I'm doing. Occasionally they ask: why are you highlighting things? Answer: to give the NSA something to think about.
It's not a yank. When I yank something I remove it from where it was and *move* it to a new location. It's a copy-paste.
Sure. Just modify X and recompile. Leave your kernel alone. And your grandmother.
"It was/is downright painful to watch a Windows user cut/select-n-paste in a DOS window."
I rarely use the middle click copy-paste. I can copy and paste using the keyboard at least as fast as using the mouse. Of course, I know how to type.
Middle button does not equal paste.
The middle button is equivalent to copy AND paste, using a separate clipboard, all in one action. It is a concept that has to be learned by new users and is potentially confusing, particularly when it's explained incorrectly as you just did. Fortunately, if they don't learn it, they'll likely never notice it's there.
I know the youngsters love their focus-follow-mouse, but that really is annoying. That mouse thing is a secondary input device, next to the keyboard. It should behave like one. If I flick the irritating little rodent out of the way when I want to use my primary input device, it shouldn't get to say where that input goes.
But, but, write once run anywhere!
It's a stupid goal for operating systems. It's a stupid goal for all programs.
There are rare occasions when I would like to have multiple clipboards, but most of the time, like your example, if you're using a multi-window GUI properly it's not an issue. Copy the first bit, paste, copy the second bit, paste. Your example becomes relevant if you're using one of these "new" one window/full screen UIs. Or an 80's era one window/full screen UI. Whichever.
What IS useful is a clipping application that sits somewhere unobtrusively and lets you store random stuff for use later, so you don't have to find it again. Neither select and paste nor copy and paste work well for that.
Must be an ooold mac then.
If your foot is on the brake so poorly that it's going to get dislodged, having your hands on the wheel isn't going to do you much good. It's not dangerous to text at red lights. Annoying to drivers behind you yes, dangerous, no.
"What will society look like at that point, with a massive unemployed underclass?"
Like it does now. Most people doing non-essential work.
Almost everybody used to be involved with growing food. Then mechanization made it so a single farmer could grow food for hundreds or thousands of people. So those hundreds or thousands of people were out of work. What did they do? Became financial analysts, retail workers, service providers of all kinds.
Increased productivity means more wealth. So long as you make sure some of that gets distributed to everybody, everybody is better off. You can use the extra productivity to have more free time or do work that previously society couldn't afford.
No. It's apparently MS marketing speak for a picture-in-picture type feature. The XBox can display it's own output side by side with the passthrough video from whatever you plug into it.
MS seems to be all about the snap now. Snapping tablets, snapping xboxes.
Whatever the hell that means. Snap? Like my fingers?
After some Googling, it looks like "snap" is kind of like picture in picture. Whoopdee do.
Phones aren't a good defense against a targeted or determined attacker. If I really want to know what's on yours, I'll steal it and read the flash chips.
If I'd just gotten a bunch of press about my product catching fire and had replaced everyone's cheap Chinese ripoff power adapter because of it, I'd be looking to do something like this too.
I see you're not a scientist. Most scientists today have at least a passing familiarity with both the history of their own field and the history of science in general. Far more so that at any other time in history. And yes, I am familiar with the correct definition of "fallacy" and also how it applies in the context of logical fallacies, because I am a working scientist who has fairly extensive knowledge of the philosophy underlying science, how it relates to other methods of producing "knowledge" and how both science and other methods have been applied in the past.
For example, Descartes, who is prominently featured by the OP (however many Gs should be inserted where that O is) came up with a couple of interesting ideas which we've filtered over the years from the large volume of crap. Descartes himself was not a scientist but a philosopher of an age when you could publish books in which you talked to yourself. The OP was certainly implying, if not clearly stating, that because Descartes had something to do with the Cartesian coordinate system we sometimes use, modern physicists should pay attention to his other poorly developed i(and totally untested) ideas; in fact, that those ideas were essentially just rediscovered by some ignorant modern scientists like Planck! That argument would appear to be fallacious in at least two ways, under the general category of "arguments from authority," or "argumentum ad auctoritatem" if you prefer the classical Latin.
Also false. String theory makes all the regular predictions that regular quantum field theory does. Nobody has come up with anything new that it predicts convincingly that is also currently testable.
Which is completely irrelevant since this story relates to quantum field theory, not string theory.
Descartes is a dead guy who thought the pituitary gland was the gateway to a supernatural world and who you wouldn't want to leave your adolescent princess with. He came up with a few things that, with a lot of further refinement, turned out to be useful, but he also came up with a lot of crap. Logic cautions us against arguments from authority for that reason.
Newton is another good example of someone who was in the habit of producing both useful insight and complete crap and not doing much to distinguish between the two.
How so? Modern scientists have better access to knowledge, new and old, than at any time in the past.
The GPs parent spouted a bunch of random stuff, useful mostly for demonstrating the pitfalls of several logical fallacies.
I do enjoy how people with fuzzy thinking like the GGP take a common factor like the word "geometry" and make all sorts of fuzzy headed connections based on it, then inevitably conclude that "scientists are idiots." Then I remember that LOTS of people have fuzzy brains and believe this shit, and that I live in a democracy.
It's quite appropriate that your post follows immediately a Time Cube satire.
Carroll might be right, but then again he might not be. It is not impossible that understanding physics that is not part of everyday experience might expose mechanisms that can be exploited at lower energy levels.
But that has nothing to do with the current story: it's quite likely that advances in our tools for working with the theories we already have will lead to better everyday technology. As a simple example, if we could better compute quantum mechanical interactions we would be able to predict the superconductive properties of any given material. Then, instead of trial and error searching for high temperature superconductors, we could just pick the material that gave us the optimum mix of properties, and we could be confident that a better one probably doesn't exist. Current quantum theory makes very good predictions, but is very difficult to use, which limits its application in engineering technology.
So? Who says all dimensions have to behave the same?
If you want to uniquely specify a point in the (currently observable) universe you require four numbers. The (currently observable) universe is four dimensional.
Occam's Razor is not a heuristic, nor can it be sometimes true and sometimes false. Occam's Razor simply says that among theories/hypotheses/techniques/formulae/whatever that work, the simplest should be preferred. Unless you like doing extra work, it's pretty straightforward.
Occam's Razor is sometimes used as an heuristic in science, where you might choose to accept or to pursue the simplest working theory/hypothesis/whatever until forced to abandon it by data it can't explain. In that context it cannot be true or false, it's a principle guiding a choice.
The GPs usage is completely consistent. If the simplest theory that works requires the universe be 27 dimensional then Occam's razor suggests we should use that theory - consider the universe to be 27 dimensional - until something that works better or is simpler comes along.
In a broader sense, science isn't about Truth. It's about utility. We cannot discover truth. If you want truth you have to make something up and then believe in it dogmatically no matter what (see religion).