Camping is about "pulling your weight" and "playing nice with others".

If you aren't a stressed out wreck then you kids are likely to be the same.

"Here we are now, entertain us" was a big hit when my kids were teenagers, but you are wrong about western civilization.

"Talking" simply means telling the kid what they did was wrong before you punish them, if you haven't told them beforehand then don't punish them. The worst thing you can do as a parent is to be inconsistent, the kids will soon learn the rules are based on your mood and by the tender age of five will be playing you like a fiddle.

I'm a grandfather, when it comes to things like kicking the cat a 2yo has a pretty good grasp of right and wrong, what they don't understand is that sound travels when they are up to no good. Also I would, and have, encouraged a 2yo to play with woodworking tools and a piece of wood. Yes, they will bang their fingers and scratch their hands, but they will persist because they are hard wired to mimic adults, and if the nail stands up by itself in the wood they get a natural rush of reward chemicals. You certainly don't give a 2yo a nail gun but at the end of the day there isn't a tradesman on earth who hasn't hit himself with a hammer.

If you honestly think it's a government conspiracy then you are at least a little bit "broken, psychotic, or socially maladjusted".

Bear spray is quite nasty stuff. It's meant to stop something big and mean, or at least pursuade it to look toward less-equipped hikers.

Would you have had the "is ... a weapon?" response had it been tear gas instead of bear spray?

The last hike of the vacation was the Grinnel Glacier Trail, and at the end I gave my can to someone headed up that didn't have one. Wasn't going to do me any good, didn't need it at home even if I could get it on the plane, and they weren't properly equipped to hike in Glacier N.P. without it.

I'm a pretty good pool player, a few beers makes me a pool champion because it stops me overthinking the shots.

Not really. Certainly NASA has been buying boosters for a long time, but from what I understand those have continued to be on a cost-plus basis, or as some would say, sucking from the government teat. Again, from what I understand, SpaceX is new in that it is delivering fixed-cost launches.

>NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and
>doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science.
>That's why it's done on the public dime.

I won't disagree with you. But I also believe that NASA should be allowing basic launch stuff to go to companies like SpaceX, which reap the rewards of all of that public domain knowledge - the fruits of publicly funded NASA research. It's past time for basic Earth orbit access (and somewhat beyond) to be business as usual.

NASA should be moving on to bigger, tougher jobs, targets that are still beyond the horizon of ordinary business, just like space travel was 50 years ago.

Yes it is free. "Visual Studio Community Edition" it's called.

Email from operations to the shop floor: "Hey Klaus, we've determined that for the following job we need parameters set at P=123.79 and Q=119.11". Klaus prints out out from his email-connected computer. Picks up the printout, walks across to the control computers, and starts typing in the parameters from the printout. Unfortunately he has a typo that causes the entire batch to be not quite up to spec.

Solution: come up with a way for the parameters to be taking precisely from email into production, without the error-prone act of typing them out again.

Yes. All those faults, and still the best science fiction serials ever. Doesn't that say a lot for the potential of the genre?

Yep, he bolts from the swivel chair in the background a split second after the dog takes off. Hindsight is 20/20, but they would all have been safer just standing next to the big pillar.