Krantos:
He was referring to the "Total cost = List Price + Sales tax" Model. Not the sales tax model itself. Since tax varies so much from state to state, it's more efficient to just have people be accustomed to mentally adding sales tax than printing actual price on everything.

While it's probably confusing to people not familiar with it, when you grow up with it, you learn to mentally apply the sales tax to anything you buy pretty easily.

Also, it's not "lying" to the customer in anyway, the sales tax thing is well known to anyone from the US. Also, the stores don't see any of the tax. It all goes to the Govt.

I understand what a sales tax is, we have GST in New Zealand of 15% on every sale... but the prices are always calculated displaying that included in the total cost.

If the amount varies from state to state you won't just be able to calculate them as you won't know them and some of the percentages I saw when I was there were arbitrary at best.... 6.45% or something.

It isn't more efficient to have people have to calculate the thing, that's the opposite of efficient - especially if you're then dealing in pennies after. Fucking useless things as they are. Only good for shoving into a sock to beat people who want to give you pennies.

The final paragraph is just a scary way of thinking - "the stores don't see any of the tax", well, yeah, it's why it's called a TAX. I guess you've grown up used to such things, most other places have laws stating that what is displayed is what you pay.

Told my ex the deputy mayor of New Delhi was killed by monkeys who knocked him off his balcony: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2007/10/22/monkey-attack.html

She said "was it political?".

My mate at work went to a 3D film. How was it we asked, "interesting", she said, "but it's weird they don't seem to have any effect when the film isn't playing"

My (immature) mate was banging on about a porn film called "Nailin' Palin", why would anyone want "Michael Palin in a porn film" said another friend (you have to be English and aware of Sarah Palin to understand this one).

We were talking about how expensive war is and how much Russia was in debt because of it in History last year. The class idiot pipes up with "Why don't they just print more money?".
I sometimes think, and always hope, that she just says stuff like that for attention. That probably isn't even the worst thing she said in that class.

SonOfVoorhees:
Anyone who uses the term "african american" to describe themselves eventhough they were born in America. Your just American regardless if your black. If your African born and come to America, then your an African American. Overall the term is stupid, in the UK we dont say a person is African British.

If you're going to post in a thread about stupid things you've heard it's best to make sure you're spelling "you're" correctly. Otherwise your friends here will think you're being a bit hypocritical.

"Well in my experience with children..." - Every mother in my college classes who say this, always.

Doesn't matter what comes after. It is guaranteed to be stupid. One time I heard this one woman argue that children weren't people, that you could say anything up until they were considered teenagers, and it wouldn't affect them in the long run. She was divorced and had lost custody of her three children, naturally.

Half the time what the professor is talking about has nothing to do with children, and people will still interject with their opinions on children.

Abomination:
*snip*

What are you on about really? I was clarifying his statement. I don't really care if you think our system is dumb, ok? It's what we're used to, we're ok with it. You're used to something else, you're ok with that. Are you really that opposed to people doing something differently than the way you do it?

For fucks sake, you're trying to have an argument on the internet about how sales tax is displayed on items. Is that really something you want to take time out of your day to argue about?

Really?

Rastelin:
Was at a party. We where talking about Holocaust. After avail some blonde girl in her early 20'ts leans over and shouts over the voices!

"Who is this Holocaust dude? He sounds like a real prick."

Is one of those moments when words seems inadequate.

You talk about the Holocaust at parties? Your parties sound different, maybe I am doing it wrong, it would explain a lot!

Good Forum name mind!

Hoplon:
it's a software limitation to avoid frame tear, this is cause by the response time of the LCD, you will see this advertised as "2ms" usually, though this is the grey to grey response time rather than the black to black response time which tends to be more like 16 ms or so, from this the "refresh" rate is calculated.

So, you have the marketing bullshit of the response time compounded with the marketing bullshit of the "refresh" rate. what you actually have is an 9 ms black to black response time screen.

Hmmm quickly tried to diver the topic from refresh rates to response times eh? Meh, it happens :P
Firstly the GTG response is irrelevant. Secondly please don't try to explain to me what I have, I know what I bought...building gaming rigs is what I do.

The prime advantages of 120hz are drastically reduced ghosting/blurring at high movement speeds, almost non-existent screen tearing and the lowest possible input lag. At 30 fps you have an input lag maximum of a whopping 33.33ms, at 60 fps you have 16.6ms, and finally at 120hz you have 8.3ms. You can keep yelling "the refresh rate is a lie!" but that's not going to change the facts of framerates vs input lag, it's not going to change the fact that a 120hz monitor shows all 120 frames per second that a 60hz monitor cannot. Then there's of course the 3D capability to play games or movies in 3D, but that's not why I bought my monitor :P

A Smooth Criminal:
There's such a minor difference between 30fps and 60fps that it's hardly even worth the argument...

The only flaw is that 60fps will sometimes dip to about 50, while 30fps will sometimes dip to about 20, which is when there it starts to become annoying.

And no, your eye cannot perceive anything over 60. It definitely can't perceive 120fps. If you think it can then I can guarantee it's a placebo effect.

Wow, I didn't think an example of my original post would show up in this very thread. Well here you go folks XD

Both of you above posters, watch this and learn well (skip to 1:50):

Yep, probably one or both of you will yell "that guy is a lying cheating marketer, he's part of the establishment maaaaan" because you don't have an inkling of a clue who he is, and that's fine, you can also believe that the sky is yellow and the sun is pink. Whatever. As a PC builder I can only present people with valid info, it's up to them what they want to do with it.

I'm done here, have fun ^_^

A couple of months ago, an elderly woman fallen over at the ramp of the store I worked in (she wasn't seriosuly hurt). Her friend made a complaint that the ramp is too steep and that we shouldn't have one in the first place.
Yeah that right, let ignore the disable people and people with pram who want to check the read part of the store who got to used the only ramp there.
Yes I get she was angry and I do agreed that the ramp is abit steep (but still accessable) but she was inconsider to others who do used the ramp!

Krantos:

Abomination:
*snip*

What are you on about really? I was clarifying his statement. I don't really care if you think our system is dumb, ok? It's what we're used to, we're ok with it. You're used to something else, you're ok with that. Are you really that opposed to people doing something differently than the way you do it?

For fucks sake, you're trying to have an argument on the internet about how sales tax is displayed on items. Is that really something you want to take time out of your day to argue about?

Really?

Yeah, imagine that... a discussion on a forum.

Does someone disagreeing with you upset you so?

Abomination:
Yeah, imagine that... a discussion on a forum.

Does someone disagreeing with you upset you so?

I'm not even sure what we're disagreeing about. I don't have a strong opinion on it. I'm just shocked that you (a New Zealander) cares so much about American Tax policy. Why does something that doesn't directly affect you, bother you so much?

It's the pennies, isn't it? Did a penny hurt you? Would you like to talk about it?

"I wanna vacation outside the US... somewhere like Hawaii."

Some model a couple years ago.

Same people who quoted her also noticed most American people could not locate Alaska on a map.

I heard this while in a takeaway restaurant waiting for my food to be cooked:

"How big is a 10" pizza?"

I did a literal double take. Like... seriously?

A Smooth Criminal:
"Isn't Slovakia in Germany? You know, the place with the Slovakians"
"Silk comes from dolphin blubber doesn't it?"
"Do we eat turkey at christmas because it was Jesus' favourite meal"
"People say dolphins are mammals, but they live in the sea so they're fish"
"sharks are mammals too aren't they?"

Aaron Sylvester:
There are a number of people out there who firmly believe that the human eye cannot tell the difference between 30 fps, 60 fps or 120 fps (fps = frames per second or framerate) when it comes to watching videos or even playing videogames.

There's such a minor difference between 30fps and 60fps that it's hardly even worth the argument...

The only flaw is that 60fps will sometimes dip to about 50, while 30fps will sometimes dip to about 20, which is when there it starts to become annoying.

And no, your eye cannot perceive anything over 60. It definitely can't perceive 120fps. If you think it can then I can guarantee it's a placebo effect.

120 is required for 3D, you need 60 per eye! 120mhz does stop that screen tearing as well.

I once had a full-blown conversation with a friend who insisted on building "rockets the size of Kenya on the x-axis and y-axis" in order to move the world.

I have great conversations with that guy.

sagitel:

Arfonious:

sagitel:

well one could prove that a ton of feathers have more mass.it goes as the feathers having lower density take up more space. because of the Archimedes principal (and the fact that air is a fluid) there is an upward force for each one. feathers take up more space so more upward force is applied to them. now some math: a-x=b-y. x>y => a>b. so a ton of feathers actually has more mass!

Well, while it's true that the mass of the feathers would be larger than the mass of the bricks the weight of a tonne feathers would be the same as the weight of a tonne of bricks.

Mass and weight are not the same thing

thats why i used mass in my post! :D

also in normal chit-chat people mean mass when they use weight

Yes but the original question was about weight not mass

Also not really as mass is basicly only relevant in science and weight is a more mundane concept

"Pokemon is for little kids!" *goes back to playing Cawadoohteh black ops 2, and is 14*

"Nintendo are running out of ideas of Pokemon, face it, Pokemon died after the (insert any generation here)"

"Halo is exactly like any other shooty game" (this came from someone on this site)

"All fps are the same"

"Bethesda have never made a good game"

A girl in my RE class once asked the teacher "will humans one day evolute into robots."

Dangit2019:
One of my classmates said that lightning came from the ground, and was adamant about it even after being shown a video of it striking from the sky.

Ground to sky lightning happens. In some variants two streamers are one from the cloud and one from the ground. When they meet discharge occurs.

Beautiful End:

Okay, there are some states here in the US that don't charge tax. Places like Oregon or Montana or Alaska don't charge sales tax. So if an item is advertized at $4.99, you only pay $4.99. The rest of the US, though charges sales tax; 8 cents or so per dollar (and by that logic, I realized the item this guy was complaining about was probably like $5.40). Of course, the cost of living is higher in those sales-tax free states.

In this region I'm at, the only neighbor states are New Mexico and... a lot of Texas. And Mexico. He had a Texan accent, though.
He COULD have been from Mexico because they don't charge taxes there. But again, it's not like he just came to the US to buy a cheap game and only that.

I dunno, it was kind of a silly question to me.

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.

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.

Hoplon:

No. there is no refresh rate on an LCD monitor. Response time is the actual hardware limitation. As for how this relates to frame rate, at very high frame rates it might cause minor ghosting, but everything is still displayed, a lower response time just makes artefacts like this less noticeable. They do not limit frame rates.

CRTs had limited refresh rates but response times of under 1ms. Frame rates where limited by this because the refresh rate was how many times a picture could be painted by the electron beam on the screen as it swept back and forth. LCDs do not have this limitation, refresh rates on them are nonsense.

I'm not even going to bother trying to correct you here, all I feel up to, in order to make sure no-one makes the mistake of believing this tosh, is:

No, sorry, that's all wrong. Try again.

Krantos:

Abomination:

Apollo45:
It's a slightly more efficient way to do things over here.

I don't see how having different taxes for different COUNTIES is a more efficient way to do anything. Transparency of cost is such an important fiscal growth system

He was referring to the "Total cost = List Price + Sales tax" Model. Not the sales tax model itself. Since tax varies so much from state to state, it's more efficient to just have people be accustomed to mentally adding sales tax than printing actual price on everything.

While it's probably confusing to people not familiar with it, when you grow up with it, you learn to mentally apply the sales tax to anything you buy pretty easily.

Also, it's not "lying" to the customer in anyway, the sales tax thing is well known to anyone from the US. Also, the stores don't see any of the tax. It all goes to the Govt.

Captch: Keep More Money. I swear to god Captcha is Psychic.

Normally I'm all for forcing people to use their brains, but that system seems needlessly complicated.
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.

Samantha Burt:

"How big is a 10" pizza?"

Maybe they're not very good at estimating sizes from measurements? Or are more familiar with metric?

Res Plus:

Aaron Sylvester:

There's such a minor difference between 30fps and 60fps that it's hardly even worth the argument...

The only flaw is that 60fps will sometimes dip to about 50, while 30fps will sometimes dip to about 20, which is when there it starts to become annoying.

And no, your eye cannot perceive anything over 60. It definitely can't perceive 120fps. If you think it can then I can guarantee it's a placebo effect.

120 is required for 3D, you need 60 per eye! 120mhz does stop that screen tearing as well.

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.

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.

Terminate421:
"Pokemon is for little kids!" *goes back to playing Cawadoohteh black ops 2, and is 14*

"Nintendo are running out of ideas of Pokemon, face it, Pokemon died after the (insert any generation here)"

"Halo is exactly like any other shooty game" (this came from someone on this site)

"All fps are the same"

"Bethesda have never made a good game"

I'm guilty of one of those quotes. I was convinced that Pokemon was headed down the crapper after gen 5, but now that gen 6 has been announced, I'm interested in the new pokemon game for the first time in 6 years.

Beautiful End:
"What do you mean this game is $5.25! It clearly says here it's $4.99!" We're in Texas, by the way, and this guy didn't look like a foreigner.

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.

Also I can't think of any good, funny stupidity. Memory like a sieve.

tahrey:
Enormous post about frate rates

Now that was a post! Very interesting. I won't pretend I can notice anything like that level of difference. I have a 27 inch IPS at 60MHz (Xmas prezzie!) and it's great (for me!). : )

Gabanuka:

Beautiful End:
snip

Wait. You guys dont add tax to the shown price?

Why the hell not?

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).

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.

I work at a grocery store one of my customers walked up to me with a jug of milk and said "this says its a good source of calcium that doesn't make any sense" I did not know how to respond so no witty come back it was more speechlessness.