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abstract

Physics as freedom

Published: 17 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We live in a world full of "things". Much of what we do everyday involves reenacting verbs on things. For example, trimming a piece of paper may be described as reenacting the verb "cut" on the piece of paper. Just as we reenact verbs on things, we often times reenact verbs on files. But for the average person, reenacting verbs on files tends to involve many more steps, and takes a much longer time to complete. Yes it's true that you get faster as you get better with the tools, but that's not all. Software tools are usually much more expensive than their physical counterparts. To be fair, software tools typically do a lot more than one thing to justify their cost. But the real difference is not in the speed or the cost. It is in having the freedom of choice. In the physical world, if we don't have a knife to cut with, we can choose to use our own bare hands. If our hands are tied up, we can even use our teeth. Nobody can deny us of this freedom of choice that physics affords us. Why should the digital world be any different?

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cover image ACM Conferences
OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications companion
October 2010
352 pages
ISBN:9781450302401
DOI:10.1145/1869542

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 17 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. choice
  2. freedom
  3. humaninformation- interaction
  4. information
  5. operating system
  6. physics
  7. things

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