Hmmm, I was a nicotine addict, and an alcohol addict, so really I think I have to disagree with you, and with another person up above who said that addiction was the need to repeat a pleasurable experience. Cigarette smoking is not, in and of itself, pleasurable. The results are not noticeably pleasurable, it just stops the desire for a cigarette by providing one. (or a drink as well) The true test that I use when talking about addiction is what happens when you do stop: For me, when I quit I suffered extreme discomfort and dislocation of my sense of self and connection to time and space. Basically I was both in pain from withdrawal and confused and dislocated from the present experience.

Now to point out why marijuana is of a different nature entirely, when I quit smoking pot, after 25 years of daily use, I had no withdrawal symptoms, no desire to smoke afterwards at all. It was over, I quit and have never looked back. While I have no desire for any of these three drugs at this point, the reason I will never smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol again is that I don't want to go through withdrawal and pain/confusion like that again. I won't smoke pot again cause I just don't want to, not afraid of anything, just over it.

agreed. I am, right now, sitting next to my son as he watches YouTube videos on the many channels he subscribes to. When something he thinks is cool he shows it to me, right now its something asbout a woman who had titanium horns attached to her forehead, we talk about how stupid you have to be to do extreme body mod in general, not just this case. That is what parenting is, sitting, chatting, and sharing some judgmental shit.

OK, but be sure to disable the GPS in your phone because that is all that OnStar is doing is tracking where you are. I find it helpful, the interface to be a little smoother and the people on the other end to be helpful people. The interface also connects to the Chevy diagnostic software that tells me stuff that is useful to me. Like I don't need an oil change for over 25,000 miles, and what is my gas mileage over whatever period I choose to keep it for. And when maintenance is really needed (as opposed to when the douchebag dealer says I should come in). All these things are things I could do myself, but I choose to let Chevy do it for me. The cost to my privacy is minimal, no worse than filling out a questionnaire about my buying experience at Amazon really.

don't you mean apostrophes?

Yes Leslie, it stopped being a rule with Winston Churchill back in the 30s: (and I quote) "that is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put."
You will not find it in any reputable textbooks since the 70s, although the British textbooks might have been a little behind on that because they tend to change more slowly. Asian produced textbooks are the slowest of all by the way, they are very stodgy.

So, while no one will mark you down for doing the onerous work of syntactic convolutions required to move your prepositions from the end, you no longer need to. (yes, that was deliberate)

My wife is a TCM herbalist and acupuncturist. In Europe, her prescriptions are just that, prescriptions that must be filled at a pharmacy and she has to be licensed and certified. Here in the US she can walk into a Chinese supermarket and buy the herbs off the shelf. They are the same herbs, often from the same companies, but they are also active medicines. The US is just plain weird. They don't regulate dangerous drugs (and make no mistake, just giving drugs that are "herbal" that label doesn't make them safe for general use or give people tha ability to self diagnose or self medicate.)

Again, as I ranted earlier, the role of the government is to provide safety and protection to the citizens of that country. Our government is no longer even attempting to do this, partly because they don't have the (tax) resources and partly because of corporate pressures to not regulate industry.

Calm down folks.
My first partner and I homeschooled our two kids for the first two years of my son's elementary and the firs year of my daughter's. results:
My son was reading and doing math and science and writing at a sixth grade level, but he sucked at social interactions. Part of this was just personality, but still ithurt him when he went to school since he couldn't abide the stupidity of the other kids and the teachers. By high school he knew history better than his history teachers and had just blown off math for so long he forgot how to do it.
My daughter was entirely different. She was a social butterfly and quite comfortable when she got to school, it was her place entirely. She still is quite good at social arrangements, in fact too good. She is the go- to person for all kinds of things when she would rather not be.
Many years later, a step-daughter needed to homeschool when we lived on a small fishing island off the coast of China. She failed most of her courses and had to redo a lot of work in the summer because she really was not up to motivating herself and her mom couldn't help her in English.

So, while homeschooling is possible, it doesn't work for social interactivity, which is really all that school is good for right now. My son today recognizes this and works on this aspect of school. It works. The learning he does well, top of the class, but he admits it is easy and doesn't always do his best so that he seems to be not the "smart kid" all the time.

No, you're not. What Adams is leaving out is the simple fact that it wasn't the scientists alone who were responsible, they were just "doing science." What happened after science was :
1) marketing
2) media

here is the process:
  scientist A does some research, first person to try something in terms of health, fitness and/or nutrition. He gets results, publishes, looks like decent science, but its the first time anyone has done it and in the science world the publishing is all about "look at this, check it out"
Company A (who may or may not be his employer) sees his results about something that might relate to their business and send it to marketing for a spin job. A marketing guru gets hold of it and makes some commercials with guys in lab coats and people getting desired result (whatever it is). The commercial is brilliant, catching the desires and wants of the public and both encouraging the D&W and providing the "scientific" solution.
Media company A: recognizes the excitement generated by the commercial, traces it back to the scientist, invites him on for an interview. Asks him 40 minutes of questions from which they extract 3 minutes of support for Company A's marketing plan which means that the corporation will pump more money into media advertising. The media and production corporations win, we lose, seriously lose because we not only die early but have to pick up the cost for the diseases which disproportionately effect people who cannot afford the health care cost and society will not allow them to rot in the gutter (which is a good thing, I mean really).

Cutting to the chase, the public has been sold a pile of crap, the scientist has had his integrity sold down the river and the company and the media have sold what they are supposed to sell: product and mindshare. The system has worked beautifully!

The player that has not played a part in this story, the one that should be standing between the consumers and the corporations is the government. While I refuse to Libertarian bash because it is too easy a target, I do want to make clear that this IS the role of government. That without the government providing this service to the public, the public will be raped by the corporations, as they have been. ( "Oh, it is only the stupid ones, the ones that believe the media and the corporations, you should be more thoughtful in your beliefs." And so we are here blaming the poor scientist who was mistreated in all possible ways all through the process while he just did what was right in the world of science.)

Punchline: We need the government to police the corporations. To do that they need money, tax money. We need to pay this because if we don't we end up paying the cost for people in hospital for all these lifestyle diseases that ARE OUR FAULT FOR ALLOWING THE CORPORATE SHILLS THAT WE CALL POLITICIANS TO GUT OUR GOVERNMENT. It is time to return to the understanding that government is an important part of human interaction, that it is good in its role and in its very nature, and that it is only perverse when it is perverted by power mongers who use the power for self-aggrandizement: which is what has happened with corporations since the Reagan came into office. We need to get the corporations out of government, get the corporate money out of government and start to reclaim it by getting real citizens in. This begins with election reform, tax reform and (although I am not a rabid supporter of it, it would at least flush the Congress bowl quickly) term limits.

I am a linguist, a real one not just somebody with an opinion about language. I appreciate the scientific approach to knowledge and the world, I support that approach and follow it as much as humanly possible, but (you knew that was coming didn't you?) the problem lies in the growth of scientific knowledge and in the coercion of the scientific approach by big corps. For these reasons I am wary of scientific research that supports things that are used to illegally and immorally coerce people into mercantile arrangements supported by the scientific evidence of "safety."

What informs my base opinion? The effect of big tobacco back in the 60s when I was growing up 5 miles away from the Phillip Morris cigarette plant in Richmond VA. I heard the cocktail talk about the way cigarettes were being manipulated with flavors, additives and "improvements" to appeal to women and young people. Always the battle over cigarettes and cancer, and the scientists of the companies swearing on their mother's cancer ridden grave that it wasn't the tobacco that did it. You could not "prove scientifically" that tobacco was the cause of all those cancer deaths among smokers. It could be (and must be) something else.

I hear the same language today from the Monsanto scientists about how safe the gene-tech is and how it has not been proved to do any harm. I do not trust them simply because they do work for the big corps. There is no reason to trust them when their self-interest is at the fore. Even in my work, as poorly supported by anyone other than threadbare academics, I don't trust my ideas without a critic, a skeptic, a scoffer to kick dirt on them so they don't look so bright and shiny. This is the failure of science today: we cannot trust science that is propped up by sponsors who have a dog in the fight, and finding people who are reasonable but aren't being backed by someone with a dog is damn near impossible. This is how science has and is failing, and why I can't, in good faith accept much of what I read and hear.

"For all intensive purposes, 'whom' is no longer a word. That begs the question, 'who cares'?"
What the phrase is: "For all intents and purposes" (the problem with a silly mistake is that it makes you look silly and encourages me to either ignore or derogate your entire comment, which is unfair.) I think if you consider the meanings involved you will see how the real phrase makes some sense and your version does not.

Now "whom is no longer a word." Yes, it is. What you mean to say is that "in my version of English I no longer find a meaning for it" because I can either use syntax to simplify my sentences to where it is not called for or use "who" when "whom" should be used (in an objective position, like in a prepositional phrase "for whom the bell tolls" or "to whom it may concern." Or as the object of a verb "The man whom I called yesterday."

OK, so I can see that in colloquial English, even I use "who" in most cases for the object of a verb, but when I am writing something for a research paper where it will be read internationally and judged valuable by colleagues around the world whose colloquial English does still use the "whom," then it only makes sense to not disturb their sensibilities by using something that they can accept as standard. Especially because it is still standard in academic writing here in the US.

So, to put a broad point on the issue of "whom," many people care, and many people who people care about care. So, if you want to be a part of the greater global society you should care too!

I've got the 75/75 plan too, which until I got a firestick for Xmas ($20.00) was a very weak connection. I had an internet speed test on the internet enabled TV which showed more like 5/10 speeds. Then with netflix it jumped and Hulu was crap, now apparently Amazon has paid them off cause the firestick never has problems. Verizon is scum, but the other choice is more expensive for less service. So what can we do until Google fiber comes around?

Yeah, my volt is so quiet that it has a special little horn to tab for a "beep-beep" in parking lots to warn people. The only thing I dislike more than the "meaty rumble" is the stink of the exhaust.

You are exactly right. There is, most cogently, a theory that evolution of the mind moves knowledge and culture forward like this. My favorite example of this is taken from Joseph Campbell, who, admittedly, took some inspiration from Carl Jung. Campbell pointed to the rise of the Romantic tradition in Europe (troubadours, the idea of romantic affection being pre-eminent, love over procreation, etc arising at the same time as similar ideas in Japan without any physical or cultural connection between the societies. Another, more obvious, connection is the amazing rise of similar ideas in Greece (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato in three generations) India, Gautama Buddha and his disciples, China (Confucious and LaoTzu at the same time) . All of this happened in the 600-400BCE range. This confluence is often pooh-poohed based on the possibility of communication between the cultures, not the existence of records of communication.

I have put 27,000 miles on my 2014 Chevy volt, about 5/8s on straight electric, the remainder on gas driven electric. I just changed the oil at 25,000 miles when the car said it still had 20% life in it. I don't rotate tires. I have an account with on-star and myChevy that tracks the parts that need maintenance through on-star and in vehicle diagnostics (it emails me if a tire is low) and sends a monthly report with service suggestions. So far, there have been no suggestions for service. I love that little car and my mileage is running about 80 mpg overall, GM/Chevy sells and services, but it will be out of warrentee before any service is needed, so I will take it to my local mechanic who is thirsting for a chance to work on one and learn them. He sees the future.
Basically the problem is change. Nobody who has gone through the roller coaster of the last thirty years in auto sales, maintenance and manufacturing looks at change positively. Who could blame them. They need to be sat down with the government and presented with a plan, supported by the government, that will give them the support to manage this change and protexct them and consumers as well as moving our process into the future.
Fta effin' chance you say? I agree, but it is what is needed.

Everyone else? Like all hardware is OSX certified? Try putting any old HDD or SSD into a macbook and see how that works.