It is never too early to get into the concept of different dimensions!

Really? When it gets to 0 degrees celsius it snows, rather than some arbitrary number like 32 degrees. This has an impact for ~20% of human kind who live in areas where it snows and probably a higher percentage of Americans.

Also, Americans make up 5% of the population of the planet, and _everyone_ else (except for Libya and Burma last I checked) uses metric. If you are implying that this 95%+ of humanity is the "cream of the crop", then yes, we wish you would join the 19th century and use a measurement system that make sense.

This seems to be a common attitude coming out of the USA. What you often fail to realise is that others are effected by your actions, or the actions you actively encourage your government to partake in, which is much the same thing. I work for an ISP in Australia. The level of security work that we have to go through because the US and China have started this undeclared war costs me significant lost sleep. Of course, this is nothing compared to the suffering the USA has instigated in other nations as it plays it political games with nations as pieces. _Everything_ the USA does outside its borders reverberates around the world, but responsibility for actions is something that the USA seems to lack.

September 11: 3000 dead. War in Iraq 100,000 dead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War) and _still_ counting. How many in Afghanistan? So if I punch you in the nose it is ok for you to butcher me and everyone I know or ever have known?

The US is very big on rights, but very small on responsibility. Responsibility is much harder.

For the record: I would say that Australia is similarly bad in this respect. The difference is that with the US the scale is much larger.

Of course China is fighting the US on the only battlefield where it has much of a chance at present. The US' response to that will dictate what occurs in the future when the equality becomes economic, then military. The US needs to step very carefully here because the lives of many more people in foreign countries depend on what you do. Mine included.

The problem with explaining role playing games is that everyone is different. More so that movies, books or other such media, a roleplaying game can be what ever you make it. I have friends who will flatly refuse to play any game that actually involves dice rolling, whereas others still like the dungeon bash style games which are essentially elaborate board games. Some like melodrama, others like politics, others simply like the problem solving. All of these aspects can be included.

To answer the original question, I would start by sitting back and thinking about what you get out of the game and explaining that (like godrik did with his excellant explination of fashion, which taught me some things). Then attempt to explain that the style of a game reflects the people playing it and the person running it. A game about child-like fairies is going to be quite different from a game about spy vs spy action at the height of the Cold War, which is going to be different from a classic D&D dungeon bash. Just as a horror film is very different from an action film.

To me it is all about the wide variety of human interaction, reguardless of genre, setting or style of game, so I can enjoy nearly any type of game.

Actually, for most of these people, having a lot of children is the only for old age pension that they can ever have. They have 6+ children so that the odds of at least one of them reaching 20 years old is reasonable. Infant mortality rates in some parts of the word are greater than 20% and this is a big improvement over the last few decades. I am astounded you don't know that. Perhaps a little more empathy for these desperately poor people would help come up with better solutions. This is why education of women is the only cure for over population: it allows the women to make informed decisions about health and family planning. It also gives them a degree of independance making them not entirely dependant on their reletives.

Acutally, the secret is that it is easy to hire bad admins. There are a lot of simple basic jobs that need to be done to support any sort of desktop machines, and these are the sorts of jobs that fall to people just starting out, or people who are not especially good at the job. Thus: the need for a lot of bad admins.

The key factor on how long a patent should last is the amount of effort required to generate the knowledge/technique/etc that is being patented. Of course, that will vary drastically dependent on the target of the patent. Software _might_ be as little as 20 minutes (e.g. the 9 lines of code Oracle vs. Google are fighting over at the moment) or out to 30 years for a full process of pharmaceutical development and testing. It would be great if we could simply say that took X years/dollars of effort, thus you get Y years/dollars (revenue) of protection, but that is unlikely to work as it is impossible to compare someone working in the garage to a modern biotech lab. The comparison just doesn't work.

My suggestion would be to use an industry average. Have a government group that is responsible for defining different industrial sectors (software, electronics, movies, etc) that sets an average product life expectency for that industry. Patents must be submitted under an industry sector by the patent submitter and can be rejected on the basis that they don't match the industry group. These life expectencies can be review periodically.

In fact, this idea is unlikely to work if done by a single country (as it would lead to much patents being filed for in the duristinction that had the longest patent duration), but it it was run be a group such as the WTO, it might be workable. At very least it needs to be tied to International trieties.

The system as it currently stands creates enormous trade distortions, but is protected by very powerful and rich vested interests. To benefit the "person-on-the-street" would be a very hard political road to tread.