50-60 year-olds are more mature than teenagers. That should come as no surprise. Do you think those 50 year olds were as disciplined thirty-five years ago as they are today?

Well as simulation, AD&D was pretty bad. But as a role playing game it was fairly good.

Realism is an illusion in tabletop gaming. What produces that illusion is having to make choices that have consequences that play out. There's a certain *rhythm* to a game that's working well. It goes like this: decision (attack the creature), immediate result (creature is not surprised), string of action rounds, second decision (run away), result (party gets through the door) then problem (how to secure the door?).

Adding detail to a system in terms of a broader selection of alternatives at each point does add something to the game, but until you master all that detail it bogs the rhythm of the game down. Later editions of D&D seemed to me to be fine for people who'd played continually since the original AD&D, but bogged down the game for people who wanted to play casually or were coming to it new. I think from a *design* standpoint the subsequent changes narrowed the appeal of the game.

That's not to say I'm against making things more complex. For example played under house rules that added a decision after the initiative role; you could take the initiative or you could cede it for a bonus on a counter hit. It didn't slow the subjective pace of the game because it was a simple decision with immediate consequences.

That isn't anything new. That's just immaturity, which (surprise) is characteristic of children. The problem in this world isn't childish children. It's childish adults.

Well, speaking as a parent with actual direct experience with my kids and their friends, they have *way* more work than I did when I was their age in the 1970s.The day is so stuffed with curriculum schools have cut the lunch period to under fifteen minutes, and "study hall" is something kids have never heard of, replaced with special content boosting classes to help them through statewide testing. The time pressure has spilled over into homework. Even as elementary students they seldom had less than an hour of homework per night, and often had two.

And, if I recall what kids were like in the 70s (as opposed to how I'd like to believe we were), these kids have a work ethic far beyond anything I ever saw back then. If anything I think we've gone to far toward instilling work ethic in these kids, who don't have the self-directed time we did. Compared to my kids' highly scripted and controlled childhood, my own feels like something out of Tom Sawyer.

Where videogames fit into this picture isn't stimulation. My kids look at videogame time (strictly limited in our house) as precious decompression time. If kids reach young adulthood less socially mature (which I'm skeptical of) it's probably not gaming per se. It's more likely that so much is expected of them and so little spare time given to them they don't have enough experience directing their own activities with their friends.

So far as I can see, this attitude is much more characteristic of *adult* Americans these days than it is of our kids -- at least the ones who are old enough that they should know this. We adult Americans don't want to plan for the future or to face anything unpleasant. When that neglect comes home to roost we want a quick fix and we want it yesterday. And if we can't get a quick fix we demand a scapegoat. If it is true kids are ignorant and lazy, does it make sense to believe the *kids* are responsible for their faulty education? It's not like the infants we got in this generation are somehow inferior.

But I don't think that kids today are no good. I look at the kids *I* know, and I see a generation that is brighter, more knowledgeable, and harder working than my generation was. If that's not what *you* see, then don't blame the kids. Blame the adults who raised them and the politicians you elected to set education policies..

Wrong. With something like a photograph, the right commercial customer may come along and find it ideal for a marketing campaign, etc. The photographer - who has not yet licensed it to anybody else - can then license it exclusively to that company, and charge appropriately. If the image has already been appropriated and used out of context by some other infringing part, that can cause problems for the photographer's later ability to license it as he sees fit. You're not understanding how this works.

And as an attorney and someone who publishes stuff herself, she should know that every work is subject to copyright, and that if she can't see where someone has granted her license to use it without asking, she can safely assume that running off with it and using it as part of her own material is infringement, plain and simple.

So, how have the big traditional space contractors like the Rockwell, Boeing, Lockheed, etc., of old, and now United Space Alliance and United Launch Alliance not delivered on their contracts? Saying that it might cost too much by some measure is one thing, but in terms of space launch to LEO you don't get a better record than ULA. Note, too, that SpaceX is using a significant amount of government infrastructure and personnel to launch and manage its space systems — not to diminish what they're doing one bit.

Those goals reasons exploration of the solar system a higher priority than settling the Moon.

Lack of insects is one of the reasons that a moon base is a low priority. True, some insects spoil crops or spread diseases, but others pollinate crops, recycle decaying matter, and are food for birds, fish and yes, people. They're a critical component of any sustainable ecosystem that works remotely like Earth's.

Somebody who can't see the positive aspects of insects is not qualified to make judgments about the role of space colonization in humanity's future, on the basis of irrational cultural biases and nature-phobia.

Now to answer your question of why we don't build a base on the moon, you can't judge whether something should be done on its own faults and merits, you've got to look at the merits of things you won't be able to do as result of pursuing it. In economics this is called "opportunity cost". Investing $1 at a 5% return when another, equally safe investment would yield 10% is like throwing away a nickel.

So when you look at whether the *government* should be investing in moon bases, you have to look at the other things it could be spending money on. Even if you think a government funded moon base is a net win in itself, you have to consider whether that money would be better spent exploring the Solar System so we know what's out there.

They didn't have the notion of national sovereignty, and probably not even land-property, so I guess they probably said something like, "Hey, there goes a bunch of mastodon! Let's go catch some!"

Then later the Europeans arrived. They *did* have concepts of land-property and national sovereignty, and we *know* what they said: "All these uninhabited lands belong to us! Now let's go catch some slaves."

I once interviewed a retiring Navy officer to become my boss. His name (I am not making this up):Captain Jack Hammer.