Hah! I have an account over at BITOG, and it always amazes me how these guys will nitpick spec sheets and theorize about all these things, when in reality you can use any oil that meets your car’s specifications, and as long as you change it and the filter on the proper schedule, the rest of the car will disintegrate around the engine.
And Max Torque the whole flip once thing is geared around getting the best looking patties, not the best cooked. Most good cooking resources say that frequent flipping does exactly what you say.
I spent 2 years after high school on a steak and hamburger grill. Flipping just once is important! Several cuts of steak need to be treated the same way. Each time you flip you loose a considerable amount of fat. 2 flips and you have lost most of it.
Context can be tricky to ascertain in headlines. Perhaps reading those links will make it clearer. None of those are pro-abortion. Neither do they refute RTFirefly’s point that nobody wants to have an abortion (or wants to force women into having an abortion), therefor pro-abortion is a lousy descriptor for what is, for all intents and purposes, a pro-choice position.
I get why people are passionate about this. You’ve got the intersection of religion, cultural traditions, sexuality, child welfare, personal identity, medicine…
Those are all issues that people get pretty passionate about.
So you’ve got a gun for protection or for hunting. You’re a responsible adult and nobody wants to take your gun from you. Why is this the most important issue for you?
Whether or not chili is supposed to contain beans. I don’t care for chili, but I once intervened (tongue-in-cheek) in a thread somewhere else, saying obviously (to me) the word means a different thing in different places. I did get a couple of swear words thrown at me. I was amused but also surprised I got any.
Not a gun owner here, but there are a significant number of people who DO want a widespread gun-confiscation campaign. That’s not a straw man built by NRA-ers; some folks do, in fact, want to take their guns.
Now, sure the problem isnt as bad as many single issue gun owners think (Obama was not coming for their guns), but if the far left gun grabbers would just cut it out and shut the fuck up, we could get some reasonable gun control laws and maybe get those voters to stop being single issue.
Look, the whole reason Heller came about is that Wash DC imposed a total ban on handguns, and that any other gun had to be kept dissembled and locked up.
Chicago also banned handguns and other firearms, and demanded every other gun be registered and re-registered every year with a fee of $100. If you accidentally lapsed, you could never register that gun again. The sale of all guns was prohibited, as was any transfer of ammo.
SCOTUS struck all these down. In fact the whole Heller dec was because these crazy gun bans. SCOTUS had traditionally left gun control laws alone.
So, yes, gun owners do have the right to think that some areas might take their guns away. They are not crazy or paranoid.
I think the issue people have with changing Harry Potter isn’t just that they’re localising it. I mean, no one would care if they changed certain details of a British book to make it more palatable to certain Asian or African audiences, for example. I think the problem is that people in the English speaking world are bombarded with American pop culture every day and pretty much forced to accept it. And I’m ok with that because the average person is perfectly capable of interpreting what it means either through context or by looking it up (something which could be done long before the internet). But if the UK or Ireland or Australia or New Zealand makes something, it seems like they need to make sure those poor Americans will understand what the hell is being talked about.
I know Americans get a bad rep worldwide, but I believe they’d be smart enough to deal with non-American references in books/film/tv. And, as others have said, Sorcerer’s stone doesn’t make any more sense than Philosopher’s Stone.
Some cyclists are the same way. Tthere are those that have to have the absolute lightest shoes, pedals, crank arms, derailleurs, shifters, … I stopped paying attention to the weight of my bicycle years ago and don’t care what everything weighs as long as it’s not outrageously heavy. Personally, give me the most robust stuff, parts that will last the longest before they break or wear out.
A passion that really surprises me is the whole Pluto/planet thing. Who’d a thunk people would get so excited about what classification we assign to an iceball that’s 7.5 billion kilometers away?
Here, as an example of the desire of some people to confiscate other people’s guns, you present a program that, from your description, confiscates NO guns.
Sure, it drastically restricted what guns could be owned, and put onerous requirements on the owning of those. But the thing absent from your description of this program is any mention of its confiscating any guns.
“Gun grabbers” apparently grab no guns, but you’re upset about it anyway.
Similarly Velocity’s claim that “there are a significant number of people who DO want a widespread gun-confiscation campaign.” So significant that they’ve got how much representation in Congress? Please list the Representatives and Senators that have come out, not for restrictions on what guns may be sold in the future, but for taking actual guns away from actual law-abiding gun owners. And please identify the specific legislation they’ve authored or co-sponsored.
Mind you, I am a ‘gun grabber.’ But it’s a recent thing: I finally said the heck with it, if pro-gun people are going to call me a ‘gun grabber,’ then fuck it, I’ll advocate for the confiscation of guns and other weapons that only belong on battlefields. What are you going to call me now, huh? You’ve already used up ‘gun grabber’ on me when I wasn’t one.
At any rate, I see essentially NO political support for my position in favor of confiscation of certain classes of guns. The notion that “there are a significant number of people who DO want a widespread gun-confiscation campaign” is bullshit, though I devoutly wish Velocity was right. I’ve got my torch and pitchfork ready, but I’m not seeing the rest of my mob.
I get the complaints against American Cultural Imperialism, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Last I looked, the British title of the book is still …Philosopher’s Stone. And indeed, the kids say “Philosopher’s Stone” in the British editions of the movies.
From a marketing standpoint, Philosopher’s Stone made slightly less sense than Sorcerer’s Stone. Keep in mind that American kids are likely unfamiliar with the concept, whereas European kids are probably more likely to be familiar with it than American ones. Bemoan the state of American education all you want, but it is what it is.
Now immediately I see two benefits for changing the title. 1) To an American kid not familiar with the Philosopher’s stone, the word “Philosopher” suggests an old man sitting in his study, pontificating about his grandiose ideas, where “Sorcerer” suggests an evil practitioner of magic. 2) It’s a bit of nice alliteration.
Whether or not grave injustices were committed against Ms. Rowling, and indeed Language Itself, I’ll leave to another thread. But likely Ms. Rowling cried all the way to the bank.
Not to start some kind of huge argument, but that’s not what the science says. I’ll put my faith in Harold McGee, Kenji Lopez-Alt, Heston Blumenthal and Nathan Myhrvold, instead of silly old wives’ tales.
If you’re pressing on the meat, which is a bad idea, you are correct. Otherwise, you’re going to have to explain the physics to me, because I’m not seeing it.
