Stupidist things youve heard people say
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It's a dumb question if you live somewhere that sales tax not being part of the normally quoted price is a regular thing, and the person asking is someone you would expect to be cognizant of such (i.e. clearly local and has been for some time). Otherwise, you're expecting a reasonable human being to somehow psychically ken the workings of a dumb and unintuitive system.Beautiful End said:
At least that's how I see it, living somewhere that actually makes use of all the massive and embedded computing power of the modern world to simply display the price including tax (which, although it's the same nationally, does vary depending on what type of product it is) on the shelf edge stickers for each product. Nice and simple. If you're buying something on a business-to-business basis, then tax technically isn't chargeable, but you still have to pay the full amount, get a receipt and then claim it back as a rebate at the end of the financial year.
How the hell are you supposed to budget properly and make sure you're buying things you can afford when the very price stickering system itself is set up to show things costing an abitrary proportion less than what you will actually hand over to the teller? No wonder your country's in the financial shitter... :-/
PS I was in my late twenties when I first got wind of things working this way in US stores. If I'd come across the pond before that - say on a university gap year or similar - it would have been news to me, probably at the first point-of-sale I encountered when trying to buy something and finding I had to dig out more money from my wallet than I first anticipated.
Normally I'm all for forcing people to use their brains, but that system seems needlessly complicated.Krantos said:
here's a radical idea; why not let each store pricemark their own merchandise.
Where I'm from, every price is sales-tax included, listed right there on the shelf, no need for people to worry about what kind of sales tax they have in the area on that particular item, no need for doing math more complicated that simple addition.
On the rare occasion a store sells to both consumers and businesses they usually list both prices.
You can argue about different counties all you want, but when it comes down to it I rarely see prices printed directly on to the stuff in the store, stores usually have to tag everything themselves.
As mentioned Transparency of cost is important
OT:
Some years ago during a class the discussion came upon the different tests products need to go trough to get released and as an example the teacher mentioned that every car we buy have to go trough something called the elk-test which basicly is a test of how easily a car can avoid an elk on the road without crashing.
To which one girl commented; "That's stupid we don't have any Elks here in Denmark" completely with her little posse nodding in agreement.
Not that the question itself is the stupidest I have heard, but the fact that it took almost an hour to explain to the girls, that while we don't have elks in Denmark we would still like to be able to avoid things on the road without crashing.
Maybe they're not very good at estimating sizes from measurements? Or are more familiar with metric?Samantha Burt said:
Actually you want at least 150, preferably 200Hz. At least, if you're using shutter glasses, so you get 75~100Hz per eye. Otherwise... Oh god, the flicker.Res Plus said:
I kind of miss the viewing angles and colour richness of CRT, but I would walk over broken glass to get the world's last LCD screen if suddenly all the others broke along with all the high-refresh CRTs and we were stuck with 60Hz beamscanners. I simply cannot stand anything other than a regular TV (which has much slower-response phosphors than a PC monitor) that scans at less than 75Hz... 70 at an extreme push. 85+ is very nice. I had to use a 56Hz SVGA once, I swear I could see the individual retraces, especially when I blinked. Turned the brightness and contrast down and still ended up with streaming eyes.
So yes, you CAN tell the difference between 60 and 120 at least on a near-subconcious level, and DEFINITELY between 30 and 60. I can SHOW you a noticeable difference between 25 and 50, for definite - e.g. the live broadcast version of a BBC program vs its iPlayer version. Never mind the eminently noticeable difference between 24 and 48FPS in the cinema...
(Oh yeah, and modern LCDs are so much thinner and lighter whilst offering larger screen sizes AND finer resolution... but that's all by the by when put next to the reduced eyestrain)
The gold standard would be 600Hz. Then you have a screen that will render almost any existing common framerate standard (24, 25, 30, 50, 60) with (near-) zero frame sync jitter (the thing that makes a 24fps film look so shoddy when replayed on a 30 or 60fps screen, and means I can tell BY EYE when an advertiser has been cheap and merely scan-converted an ad produced in the states for the european market rather than reshooting it), and will even replay 48fps with acceptably small jitter without needing to replay it at 50 instead. And even if it's scanning rather than just updating the twist level of some liquid crystals, it'll look rock-solid to anything but the fastest and most violent of saccades. But there are very, very few screens which offer that. Not "none", but so few as to be very niche.
So I was walking down the hall one day, and pass a few kids talking, they're a group of fluent Spanish speakers, so of course they're having a conversation in Spanish.
Some girl then proceeds to walk up and, I shit you not, ask "Are you speaking British?"
The facepalms had that day were legendary.
Some girl then proceeds to walk up and, I shit you not, ask "Are you speaking British?"
The facepalms had that day were legendary.
Actually it's customary in Europe (which would explain why he doesn't look "like a foreigner" to you) to have tax included in the price tag, so if it says 4.99 on the tag, it costs 4.99 period. This leads to a lot of irritation when visiting the States because for some reason you guys don't have the common sense to put what the actual cost is on the price tags.Beautiful End said:
Also I can't think of any good, funny stupidity. Memory like a sieve.
We in the Netherlands don't want to practice maths whilst in stores, so we just have the price (say, 5.00) on the label. The actual price would then be 4.75~ ish, but the stores add the tax on that, so you can just go buy stuff without having to count out how much it'll actually cost you. Which is kinder, faster, and smarter if you ask me. You can see on the receipt how much it would have costed if the tax was not added (the 4.75).Gabanuka said:
I think the dumbest things I've heard were probably from some bigoted racists, like WBC, or A nice (true) story from a teacher of mine, who said something like :" So these students were doing a basic maths test, in order to finish their carpenter study (he was filling in there) and they had trouble answering the question: 'how many square meters of wood go in a 2x3 wooden board ?'. Some answered 5. some answered other dumb stuff, one even answered with 6000, because he used the zero key on his calculator wrong."
If you can't do basic maths, you have no place in this society. Even people who are not smart at all should be able to do 2x3. That's age 5 work.
While you are correct that a body is the same weight dead or alive, he is correct that it easier to carry a live one, even if the person it belongs to is unconscious because they muscles support some of the body's weight.lechat said:
Wow, I cannot believe that he can even function as a human being, he must just be some genius satirist, out to show the way society now holds up in admiration the stupid.Grouchy Imp said:
I had a girl tell me evolution meant we where direct descendants from trees.
Just to clarify the above: in some places, e.g. older houses in the UK, ovens are for the majority of cases fuelled by natural gas, which for all its dangers is a lot more efficient. Generally the grill / broiler as well.aba1 said:
It's still pretty crazy that someone wouldn't be aware of the existence of electric ovens at that age, but if it's all they've known, and you've just introduced her to a new cooker without pointing out that it's a different type, there's plenty of scope for a forgiveable brainfart as she first notices the lack of an auto-ignite spark button, and then nowhere to manually light it after opening the door...
ANYWAY
Let's get back to what's becoming the main thread here.
Lots of people arguing over high-refresh LCDs whilst clearly not having the first fucking clue how a typical computer video system works, both in the signal generation/transmission, and its display on the screen.
First up, shall we attempt an empirical demonstration? A lot of digital cameras these days offer high-framerate "slow motion" modes, typically at least up to 240fps if not further.
Using your favourite video editing software, make a 60fps video (as low or high rez as you like, it's unimportant), which is a simple alternating-frame of full white and full black (obviously, don't do this if you have photosensitive convulsive epilepsy), or better yet complementary colours like green and magenta, red and cyan, blue and yellow...
Set it to run full screen on yer 60Hz and 120Hz LCD monitors, and also CRTs if you have 'em. Record this display with the highest available framerate on the camera. Put THOSE videos into the editor and play them back frame-by-frame. Can you see a difference between the two? You'll likely see a sort-of tearing effect rolling down the 60Hz ones quite obviously, and depending on the camera's actual recording rate either not at all, or at higher speed / in a more limited fashion on the 120Hz ones.
Because of the nature of video image transmission - analogue or digital, VGA DVI Displayport or HDMI - and of how LCD and LED matrices are addressed, an image going between your video card's VRAM and your eyeballs IS STILL "SCANNED" in some way whilst being rendered. Yes the LCD monitor has a framebuffer, and yes the thin film transistors tied to each picture cell are able to hold their state for a few fractions of a second without flickering or needing to be actively updated, but how does the data get from card to buffer, from buffer to transistors?
A: It's scanned. Rastered. Pumped pixel by pixel, and line by line, and eventually frame by frame (after enough lines of pixels have been sent), down a serial interface between card and buffer, and down a serial-to-semiparallel interface from buffer to transistors. There is a difference that typically an LCD will render a whole line at a time because of the actual electronic organisation of the display hardware, rather than pixel-at-a-time as in a CRT, and it's got at least a one-line delay (which for XGA at 60Hz is all of about 1/50,000th of a second, or 0.02ms) between the video card starting to send data and it appearing on screen (because the buffer has to fill up that line before showing it) instead of it being near-instantaneous and completely pixel-synched...
...but it certainly doesn't render an entire frame all at once, with basically zero latency between frames other than the time taken for the liquid crystals to twist. The framebuffer chip doesn't have infinite bandwidth. It will in fact have just-enough bandwidth. Which for, say, a basic 60Hz, XGA resolution LCD, is about 48Mhz as a minimum, or 144MB/sec for 24-bit true colour. (Actually, if the same line is also responsible for each of the red, green and blue instead of it being split to separate chips, 144Mhz is your baseline)
For a really high end screen, like an Apple Cinemadisplay juiced up to run at 120Hz, it'd need about a 500Mhz (or, 1.5Ghz for combined RGB scanning) framebuffer and 1.5GB/sec memory transfer speed assuming it's not "super high colour". OK, that's maybe not great shakes in the wider computing picture, but in terms of a nowadays relatively cheap peripheral like a monitor, where the price of each component can be crucial, such things class as premium hardware.
Incidentally, you're pushing the limits of HDMI with high-rate rendering as well. It can just about manage 1080p at 120Hz in extended colour depth with the latest versions and specifically designed cables AFAIK, but it was originally only ever meant for 1080i at 30Hz or 720p at 60Hz... It doesn't transmit the whole image at once, but just about squeezes it into one sixtieth or one hundred-twentieth ... by sending the data pixel by pixel, line by line, at relatively very high bandwidth (for a cheap, parallel-wired cable).
Apparently the SXGA monitor on my desk can do 75Hz as well as 60Hz. I think I'll have to get hold of a slo-mo camera and see if it's actually doing it for real - changing the rate at which it updates the panel - or is just up- or down-converting somehow. I figure it's probably using the chip from a larger panel, which can handle higher rates, and always outputs at an effective 75Hz speed... but takes a rest for the equivalent of 1/5th of a frame before starting over when receiving data at 60Hz...
TL;DR version: Don't confuse a flicker-free panel for one that updates rapidly. CRT updates are necessarily 1:1 as they are unbuffered, and scan rate = update rate (apart from some very exotic things like the Commodore 1024-line monitor for the Amiga which had a buffer and received actual image data at about 15Hz down a standard-def cable). LCDs have a buffer, and don't rely on a flickery scanning electron beam in order to actually render the image, so they give a much more stable-seeming image than the CRT. This does not, however, mean that they UPDATE the image any faster, that they're able to, or even that they don't update it in a "scanning" fashion...
it may not be the stupidest thing i've heard throughout my life but my worker said yesterday " baby Tadpoles are called Guppies" now i know most people dont know alot about animals, but at least please know that Tadpoles are baby Frogs. A Guppy is a colourful fresh water fish that kinda reminds me of a none violent betta fish.
The first one that came to mind is more opinionated, I personally think it is stupid but it is technically an opinion.
Someone in my family believes that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim extremist who supports the Taliban and has a secret agenda to make the United States a completely socialist nation due to his jihadist beliefs.
I understand how some people may agree with parts of that statement, but to believe all that is pretty stupid.
Someone in my family believes that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim extremist who supports the Taliban and has a secret agenda to make the United States a completely socialist nation due to his jihadist beliefs.
I understand how some people may agree with parts of that statement, but to believe all that is pretty stupid.
That seems like a fair enough question to me. Not everyone is tech savvy. Certainly the average layman probably doesn't know the ins and outs of how the Internet works.his1nightmare said:
'What's the Cold War?'.
This is something we've learned about in both primary school and high school quite thoroughly. And we live in an ex-Soviet Bloc country.
All the facedesks.
This is something we've learned about in both primary school and high school quite thoroughly. And we live in an ex-Soviet Bloc country.
All the facedesks.