bladedtoys

Absolutely excellent, kudos!

I only wish Aaron Swartz had lived to see it.

Why write them? Because games are play which is the most vital activity humans, indeed mammals, engage in. Without it, not only would I not have this very alphabet I'm writing in (which descends from drawings), but I and everyone reading this would still be sitting in a bush very practically gathering as many berries as we can to survive.

And as the gaming population becomes older, gaming will account for a larger and larger percent of human play.

To make it searchable on your password, someone would have to go through the Adobe set and use the hints to manually figure out the clear text form. Off hand, it's hard to see how posting that on the web could be done responsibly.

But until someone does, you could just Google "most common passwords" and if yours is in the set, you win!

Meta answer: because we still use a calendar that was designed to track Roman feast days.

If you chose a single non accelerating frame of reference outside of any gravitational fields. (a highly theoretically thing no doubt) you'd be ok. All other observers, those with a different relative velocity, will obviously disagree about simultaneous events etc. but they will have undergone acceleration at some point and so be non-definitional.

The problem is that time may not function correctly in the early universe, (say around plank time).

Another maybe more practical idea is to take the average temperature of the background radiation and peg time to the way it (or the average temperature of the universe ) cools down.

Or peg time to the Hubble flow. Since we now know the Hubble flow changes over time, you could peg a measurement of time to that.

Neither of these can give us datetime numbers for the very early universe but time may be screwed up then anyway: time maybe nonsense then.

I mean we, chimps and, dolphins evolved on the same planet at the same time and have vast tracts of DNA in common yet the gap is huge.

So anything evolving at a different time period in a different environment (in the unlikely event it developed intelligence at all) would be so far beyond us, we would be, at best, as interesting as dolphins. Even if their development were ahead of us by only 1/100 of one percent of the time stars have been around, that still put them a 1.3 million years in advance of us. About the divergence time between us and a chimp. And chimps do make things, they clean twigs to scoop edible bugs and use leaves for umbrellas. But we have no interest in these things and they have no understanding of our idea of commerce even if we did.

But aliens per se? Sure. Indeed there maybe even bacteria as close as Mars and Europa.

Yeah but the US and India, which the OP is comparing were both part of the British Empire.

Indeed former British holdings span all extremes of corruption from the Sudan to New Zealand and every flavor in between.

I conjecture the odds that humans will colonize other stars is close to 100% (it's what living things do, expand maximally)

But the odds that we will find an alien species that happens to be on a level of development interesting to either party looks less likely. We don't carry on commerce with chimps or dolphins and they are obviously much closer to us than any alien would be. Of course we may as well look for them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Also, I enjoy using the word silly at every opportunity.

Comparative advantage when the commodity is ideas? Intriguing.

How it works for physical good is clear. But how can one society produce one category of ideas cheaply while another produces a different category of ideas cheaply?

Yeah, they could just ship hydrogen back. They could also beam lasers at us although I image it would be awfully wide by the time it got here.

Also, so as long is the energy to ship it is less than the energy to create it by fusion, it would be economical to ship elements heavier than iron. But that would mean annoyingly slow speeds.

The really annoying thing is that by adding trillions of people to the universe, we apparently won't really improve the rate of idea creation. I really hope I'm missing something on this.

Indeed. And Apple my have been trying prevent apps from being overly vulnerable from the start: the approval process will reject:

2.7 "Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected"

2.8 "Apps that install or launch other executable code will be rejected"

If it we were discussing a greater interstellar human civilization, (and let's face it, the idea of aliens is silly) there is one additional interesting problem: the time dilation colonist experience will mean they will be permanently behind the Earth by a number of years equal to the distance they travel. And their knowledge will be double that obsolescence.

For example: they leave at the speed of light for a star 50 light years away. On Earth 50 years pass but no time passes for the colonist. So when they arrive they are technically where the earth was 50 years before. They set up shop and transmit their wonderful ideas and technology, which takes 50 more years to be received. Which means it's 100 years out of date.

Meanwhile the Earth beams its ideas to the colonists. Even on they day the land, the colonist can tune into their favorite sitcom without missing an episode (because of course they were traveling side by side with those transmissions and the subsequent fifty years were following behind in a lovely tail of vapid entertainment). So the Earth's information is still quite useful to them.

And this disparity in value can never be corrected. If the Earth moans about the uselessness of the colonist 100 year old ideas and sends suggestions, the colonist will have been listening to the Earth for 100 years anyway before they hear those suggestions and will already moved far beyond them. Yet still be 50 years behind.

So a trade in ideas also seems unworkable.

The article mentions sales/VAT/IVA tax. Perversely I think the US actually does this right:

In the EU, VAT tax is included in the displayed price while in the US, sales tax is not. As the article mentions this is convenient for EU consumers who clearly know the price of their purchase in advance.

But I think it has a bad side effect: consumers do not notice the size of the vat/sales tax as strongly and as a result, I conjecture, there is less resistance to hikes in that tax (which is roughly 20% now). Being a regressive tax, it is quite uncharacteristic of the EU. So I conjecture it may have gotten that high partially because it is not annoying consumers at every purchase.

Firefox and Mozilla core are games?

Surely it would be unwise to agree to an outlandish contractual item purely on the grounds that one hasn't seen it invoked yet.

And surely it is a good thing to bring it to the attention of people who aren't likely to read every word of a 20 page contract just to buy a domain name.

There maybe some axioms that are analogues to rules of a game and so are neither true nor false.

But in practice, the bulk axioms are chosen and retained because the inventor thinks they or their consequences have some mapping to reality. This mapping is tested through applying the resultant math to some field and getting predictive success. In this regard the bulk of axioms are the same as any other beliefs except they are not arbitrary beliefs, and they are useful or believed to have the potential of usefulness.

And part of the problem is merely semantic. The word "belief" differs from the term "axiom" in other critical ways: "belief" regularly involves a call to action and includes concept that do not go though any tests for consistency let alone predictive success. If one asks "what is the difference between an assumption and an axiom" there is a lot less excitement.

Most interesting, I think, is the idea that basic axioms should be different than assumptions at all. That they can be definitively decided or the part of reality they map to is real and can be found.

I do not see why we would necessarily have evolved the mental equipment to work out every law of nature. No other animal has that, and while we clearly have better mental capacity I can't see why we would have evolved _every_ mental capacity.