Thanks. That makes me feel even stupider than I was already feeling.

Seriously, you can see the “Croquet” thinking implicit in all this from way back when. . .

Yeah, David is smart as heck, and has very clear sense over time of what he wants to achieve.

Of course, the other approach to feeling stupid is to wrap your head around Tea Time, which is the technical foundation that would allow the David/Colony stuff to work with a replicated state between multiple collaborating computers. Croquet uses a so-called Simplified Tea Time, which even I can understand: http://www.wetmachine.com/i... STT is simply elegant. But the full blown thing was David Reed's 1978 MIT PhD thesis: “Naming and Synchronization in a Decentralized Computer System”. (Byzantine Paxos anyone?) At the time he wrote it, neither computers nor networks were fast enough to implement it. So Dr. Reed had to go ahead and “invent the Internet”: he's sometimes referred to as the guy who put the slash in TCP/IP. (In other fields, Harold was citing him just yesterday. http://www.wetmachine.com/i...) Anyway, the story goes that Croquet came about when Alan Kay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...) realized that maybe now things had developed to the point where this stuff could work, and so he brought David and David together, along with maybe the wisest software engineer I've ever known, Andreas Raab. TEA-time refers to the penultimate letters of their last names. Anyway, I remember David Reed giving a presentation on Teatime (http://www.opencroquet.org/...) on the day that I met him in person. I was sitting next to him before and after and he seemed perfectly normal and comprehensible. But during the presentation I felt I couldn't understand anything he said.