Well, sort of. But people started using money, loosely defined, pretty damn quick. Talking about the third and early second millennia BC:

So basically, even before there was actual money, people were using the abstraction of it in order to make their barters.

[1] Saggs, H.W.F. The Babylonians: A Survey of the Ancient Civilisation of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. (London: The Folio Society, 1999), 215.

I'm showing my ignorance, I know, but why don't we just aim the ISS's trash towards the sun and give it a push? Since it's trash, we shouldn't care how long it takes to actually get close enough to burn up, even if that's measured in millennia. Is there a reason we don't do this?

It's not theft; it's copyright infringement. Though they both violate the social contract, they do so in different ways, and the difference is important. When I steal from you, I violate both your natural right to property and the law. When I infringe copyright, I violate your legal—and only legal—right to control copies of your work. Theft would still be a violation even if there were no law against it. The same is not true of copyright infringement.

That said, merely disagreeing with the law is not grounds for disobeying it, in my view.

In fact, it doesn't. Or rather, the downsides outweigh any potentially useful measurements you can extract. If you play games with them, eventually even your good employees will concentrate on the games (or they won't, and they'll either quit out of annoyance and pique, or be fired for insubordination). That's not to say you shouldn't have standards, but that isn't the same thing. Leadership and motivation, as always, are the primary things.

But I don't know why I'm even bothering to argue with you, since you're clearly only interested in shilling your product.

If everybody's into it, it can work—military decorations are a good example, in addition to the company you talk about. But I'd say it's the exception rather than the rule. At a company, all it takes is one new guy to start thinking out loud that "Man, these nails are so dumb. And it's not like they have any sort of objective metric to give them out" repeatedly, and now your morale's the in the basement.

One thing that gets missed in a lot of company discussions about customer service (at least, the places I've worked) is exactly this; and that sometimes—rarely—"customer service" means telling some jerk who won't be satisfied to go to hell so that you can provide good service to everyone else. That doesn't mean that you should be rude to people, only that, at a certain point, "Sir, I'm afraid I can't help you anymore, and I must ask you to leave," becomes entirely appropriate.

The biggest problem with this is that you want your employees to care about helping the customer, not about getting some arbitrary score. The real solution is to hire employees that actually want to help customers and fire those who don't (or, I guess, those who want to, but are bad at it). Gamification doesn't help you do that.

Which Mozilla has announced will go away.

Oh, you're (largely) talking about diets for people who are already overweight, to help them get to a healthy weight. I, on the other hand, am interested in diets for people, like myself, who already pretty healthy. Those may well be the same, but they're not necessarily so.

Amply demonstrated where? I've seen that claim a lot on Slashdot (and elsewhere), but nobody ever gives me a citation—not even one to a clearly-biased source. I'd really like to know what study or studies you're talking about.