Interesting -- I didn't realize this either. I mean, I had always done this in terminal sessions, but I always thought that was a "hack" because it was so common in a terminal. Never realized that was a global behavior.

Not that anyone wants to hear my two cents , but as a UI metaphor, that's sort of unfortunate -- seems to me there's a pretty big difference between selecting and copying. What happens if you want to copy a block and paste on top of another block? In Win/OS X, it's copy block 1, select block 2, paste. If select is copy, though, I would think you'd lose the original copy when you select the 2nd block? What do the Linux word processing apps do in this case? I hope the answer isn't to change the copy/paste procedure, because that's even more unfortunate.

Java programmer never like to here the phrase "it doesn't work like that on my OS" by the way