Polio wasn't eradicated in the US until 1979. And since Africa is rather bigger than the US, polio wasn't declared eradicated in the Americas until 1994.
Sounds like a revival of the Hippie trail. Checking now, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail says that modern versions avoid Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, by going through Nepal and China to the old Silk Road.
If academic pressures, music and art clubs, AAU teams, school sports teams, and a part-time job don't teach responsibility, how does adding chores to the list change things?
Hmm, if 6 planets can be in the habitable zone of a planet a bit smaller than the Sun, then that makes the Firefly system sound ... possible? Until now I was annoyed about the number of planets so close to each other. Seems I should suspend that disbelief!
Along similar cheeky lines, I could easily see it being used as a default value during test, and the test settings were accidentally used in production. Sure, it could be a hacker. My comment is that we shouldn't immediately jump to that conclusion and consequently believe that Canadian Tire is hiding things when it could easily be a sloppy or goofy mistake. Personally, I think having it come up as "hacksaw" would be more grey hat.
Internal developers make goofy mistakes sometimes. Years ago, a co-worker worked for the Chicago E-911 system. They did a database update which ended routing all calls to one location, rather than the nearest one. Read enough RISKS Digest and you'll see that fat-fingered coding isn't so uncommon that one should immediately assume hacking.
Before any of that, we need to figure out how to have a (nearly) self-sufficient ecosystem. Otherwise, feeding and providing air to those Martians will be very expensive. Building rockets is the easy part - we had that basic technology in the 1970s.
See also https://web.archive.org/web/20140103200557/http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/comment.html?entrynum=3 where a weather historian (!) discusses several record temperature reports.