Stalizard posted:

Do any of you fine folks know how to remove packing tape from a very old, allegedly valuable copy of Monopoly? MY GIRLFRIEND found one at a thrift store and it is all in pretty good shape except for the large brown piece of tape across the front of the box. We've tried freezing it for a couple days to no avail, and she tried peeling it off with a hair dryer and that hasn't worked either.

Are there any other options? Are we doomed to a copy of Monopoly that is hell of such as torn up on the front?

Stalizard posted:

Do any of you fine folks know how to remove packing tape from a very old, allegedly valuable copy of Monopoly? MY GIRLFRIEND found one at a thrift store and it is all in pretty good shape except for the large brown piece of tape across the front of the box. We've tried freezing it for a couple days to no avail, and she tried peeling it off with a hair dryer and that hasn't worked either.

Are there any other options? Are we doomed to a copy of Monopoly that is hell of such as torn up on the front?

Fig Newton posted:

Or just call them. Why do you have to pay yours on the 16th? Is that a Chase thing? Discover and Citicard give me about 3 weeks.

Domus posted:

Please settle a grammar argument between my husband and I. I saw a stupid sign on our local church that said:

YOU THINK
I MADE THAT ABILITY
-GOD

I remarked to him that I parsed it wrong the first few times I read it, as if it said "You think I made that ability?". We then got into an argument about what punctuation was proper. I say that a semi-colon, dash or a couple periods would be correct. He says in school he was taught that "I made that ability." would be wrong, because it refers to the previous sentence. He thinks a comma would be correct. Please bitch-slap some grammar into him for me, or call me an idiot. Either would work.

Domus posted:

Please settle a grammar argument between my husband and I. I saw a stupid sign on our local church that said:

YOU THINK
I MADE THAT ABILITY
-GOD

I remarked to him that I parsed it wrong the first few times I read it, as if it said "You think I made that ability?". We then got into an argument about what punctuation was proper. I say that a semi-colon, dash or a couple periods would be correct. He says in school he was taught that "I made that ability." would be wrong, because it refers to the previous sentence. He thinks a comma would be correct. Please bitch-slap some grammar into him for me, or call me an idiot. Either would work.

Dudebro posted:

Loki777 posted:

It's purely aesthetics.

Dudebro posted:

If you're wondering why it's "husband and me", it's because "I" is only used when you are the subject of a sentence (performing the action). In elementary school, we were taught over and over again that when you refer to [somoene] and you (first person), you always say "I", and this was thrown at us as if it were an all-encompassing rule. Besides the grammar talk, those church signs serve as a source of amusement for me, poor grammar and all.

Dudebro posted:

My question: I'm wondering if my family made a mistake in installing a fairly comprehensive water softening (purifying/cleaning) system in our house when we first moved here. Of course if you didn't know anything about science and health, you'd think that cleaner water is better. But we have a little faucet in our house that uses reverse osmosis (RO) to spit out its water, which is the source of some of the purest, man-cleaned water in the world. The problem with RO water, as I now know, is that it's so devoid of anything but water that it actually strips minerals from one's body (true?). Obviously drinking mostly this water for the past 10 years hasn't killed me, but I don't think it's helped at all. It feels stupid because this part of the world has the best municipal drinking water in the world.

So it seems as if we were bullshitted into paying for this water softening system, which wasn't cheap. I will say that softer water is better for cleaning anything though, and it doesn't leave behind as much mineral deposits as straight city water.

Besesoth posted:

(In fact, separating them with periods - "You think. I made that ability." - implies that both sentences are of equal weight, when in fact, given the context of the sign, I'd guess that the second sentence is intended to carry more weight.)

BonHair posted:

Fun fact: In Danish (which is my native language), and probably in English too, 'between/from/after/etc my wife and I' is becoming grammatical in the internal grammars of the speakers, and it might just be a matter of time before it's not something anyone would notice. But with all the grammar nazis, who knows?

Mak0rz posted:

Cross-posting from the Windows Software megathread:

I am looking for video player software that:

1: can pan around a video that's zoomed in to a magnification greater than my screen size.
2: can do frame-by-frame increments when viewing.
3: preferably plays m2ts files.
...

Fig Newton posted:

RO water is awesome and you did not make a mistake. RO water does not "strip minerals from the body"; you have been listening to the "it's death to drink distilled water!" Mercola wack fringe.

You do not get minerals from water, you get minerals from food. Rainwater has no minerals in it, and people have been collecting and drinking rainwater for thousands of years. Eat a varied diet, take a daily over-the-counter multivitamin that contains minerals, and you will be fine.

http://www.webmd.com/diet/guide/vitamins-and-minerals-good-food-sources

Your body is very good at regulating for itself the amount of minerals it has on hand for its essential biochemical work. If there's sufficient intake (from food), and if you aren't drinking gallons and gallons of any kind of water, then you don't need to worry about minerals being "stripped" from your body.

I understand where the "stripped" people are coming from, though--they have got hold of the idea of "diffusion", which in chemistry says that molecules of a substance will move from a region of high concentration to a region of lower concentration. The "stripped" people take this to mean that as pure, mineral-free water moves through your body, which is rich in minerals, the minerals will diffuse out of your body's tissues into the water, which is then moved out of your body via the kidneys, and thus, they think, your body has lost minerals because you drank distilled water. However, this is not a problem if you are providing your body with sufficient minerals intake from a normal diet.

The minerals that are found in tap water are in an inorganic form which your body can't use, and they are actually the insoluble mineral salts that can give you kidney stones if you live in certain hard-water areas. Your body can't use them.

The biggest reason to keep the RO faucet is that even the best municipal water can still have things like hormones, Prozac, Atrazine, and antibiotics.

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/pharmawater_site/day1_01.html

This is because municipal water is treated only to kill bacteria so you don't get dysentery from drinking it. They don't have a way to remove the Prozac. Reverse osmosis or distilling the water, however, does remove the Prozac.

This is a good article.
http://knol.google.com/k/reverse-osmosis-water-filter-guide-truth-lies-minerals-your-health

Dudebro posted:

Thanks for that detailed response. But have you heard of the water the IBM uses to clean its microchips? It's literally the purest water in the world. If you drink it, you'll die, this is according to IBM themselves. It's only H20 though. Is that not true?

Golbez posted:

According to Wikipedia and its sources, pure water can be detrimental. You say we collect rainwater, but was that collected in a pure container? Filtered? Rainwater itself isn't pure.

haveblue posted:

That is deionized water, which is done by a different process.

ChubbyEmoBabe posted:

You can try out all of adobes products for free:

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

I would imagine the video editing stuff would have that functionality.

gwar3k1 posted:

How do power supplies work in electronics? Are they adding enough electricity into the circuit for the component demand then blocking incoming power and letting the electric in the system remain in there unless demand increases? If that's the case, what happens when demand decreases (if I remove a hot-swappable drive for example)? Where does that excess energy go?

I feel dumb for not being able to grasp that from the physics I did at school.

IuniusBrutus posted:

How do I keep someone from moving into my apartment without permission? My roommate (whom is one of my best friends) just let his girlfriend move into without my permission. We are both on the lease, she is not. She has all sorts of issues which make not want her to be anywhere around me.

Do I have any recourse? (Michigan).

Anonymous Robot posted:

Thanks guys.

Edit: All of those reports were blank? Like, no score, no real 'credit' info at all. Just my address, name, etc and then legal jargon telling me my rights. No information other than that. The only one with any credit info on it was Experian, which told me who had looked into my report, and that there were 0 negative reports. Does this mean I just have zero credit history? That's definitely a possibility, I'm just trying to find out if the tuition fees my parents took out and then never paid are in my name and have destroyed my credit or not. Experian did note that a collections agency has done a credit check on me.