I guess it depends on the parent but homework seems to something that involves parents with their kids lives you know where they talk to them.

I think that beats sitting in front of the TV and just providing meals and a change of clothes. It also involves the parents with the kids progression through school. Teachers don't really have enough time in a lesson to make sure the kids are actually learning what they are supposed to be learning.

It seems to get worse as the kids get older, teachers tend to become baby sitters rather than educators. Its great when you find a teacher who manages to raise an interest in their subject for a kid but we all pretty much know which teachers educated us and which were in the same room for a year or two.

I really don't get on with these studies that try to say homework is worthless it isn't and just gives parents an excuse not to spend time with their kids.

I think you forgot about the 1% or so of useful information from our friends and family, that is the reason for having a facebook account, but the internet is not facebook, most people I know don't use slashdot for example but slashdot does cater to some of my interests. Soylentnews is now overlapping quite nicely with slashdot similar subjects but a lot less spammy trolls. It's probably not going to stay that way.

There are quite a few other sites I use as well such as photography sites , gardening sites and others ebay is useful to me for buying relatively obscure items that are not available locally. there are local market place sites to use as well for example donedeal.ie is good for finding cars in ireland adverts.ie can be a handy place to find items locally.

So honestly facebook is just a feed to me of things i might actually care about and a lot i don't. I don't think i am unusual in using it that way. The instant messaging side of facebook is also handy when there is something i want to talk about with a particular person.

I honestly don't believe facebook has what it thinks it has, because most of the stuff that matters to people is not done on facebook and g+ is a complete failure because it doesn't provide anything that is of any use. one feed of mostly useless crap is enough.

That might be the case, I've seen conditions that say something like by entering the event you are concenting to be filmed ect. This was for a rock concert in the uk at sheffield arena. This was posted at every entrance into the place. I would imagine it would be part of the terms and conditions of tickets for the Hungarian GP.

Incidentally a lot of places require you to have public liability cover of several million as a photographer or you will not get access. which kind of makes sense even if most of the time its never needed. (was a case of a photographer stepping back knocked into an old lady who went over and cracked her skull freak accident but it was worth his premium) Track side photography has even higher insurance requirements.

This new law in Hungary is ripe for abuse, never again can compromising pictures of politicians and celebrities be taken.

On the otherhand you could argue that there are some times it would be better for people involved if there was no picture. On thursday i was on my way home and came upon a car on its roof that had just crashed, I stopped and helped unfortunately one lad died later at the scene. There are photo's of the car on several news websites and it feels quite raw seeing it there just for me and it must be worse for the families of the kids that were in that crash. Feels a lot different when you crawled in through the window and found it impossible to do anything to help the kid trapped inside. does there need to be a picture?

It is a boarding school, maybe 35 hours might be spent in a classroom, just a small fraction of the 168 hours they are at the school for during term time. Some might not even go home during the shorter breaks like a weeks half term.

The school has the responsibility for those kids 24/7 most of the year. It may seem a little harsh but these kids are not destined to work in factories or Mcdonalds. Their parents are paying a lot of money to have them study there.

It is a difficult role the school has to take on the role of parent or guardian which does mean filtering the content the kids are exposed to. If a parent wants to provide an unfiltered connection they probably could afford to do so but would be discouraged from doing so. It's a guilded cage for the kids but when they are adults and have their own kids they will probably make the same choice.

It's not so daft allowing some prisoners to vote in elections. Think about why you are locking them away and why you are releasing them.

People go to prison for breaking our societies rules, it's pretty pointless releasing them if they have no way to re engage with society in a lawful way. It's better for society for prisoners to be released and get jobs and become a productive part of society again. If these prisoners can't be integrated with society then its likely they will prey on the community instead. Then we end up paying to keep them locked up instead this time for longer and even less chance of being able to reintegrate.

If your saying to people you have no part in our society then what reason do they have to have any regard you your family your property ever.

384 although my preference is (32 x10) + (32 x 2) I was figuring out cubic concrete say 4.5 * 5 * .1 2.25 but twice as deep 4.5 .15 deep 3.38 near enough. There is a lot of mental math that you can breakdown this way.
 

some of us haven't bothered using our mod points one way or the other. Think of it as a taster of what beta is going to do to this site. The boycott starts tomorrow. For a week.

Hopefully Dice will get the message, without the many people who contribute to slashdot the site is worthless.
How do you think slashdot is going to be without its core contributors? I think you're starting to see it already.
next week will be worse much worse.

slashdot always has been a noisy site.
slashdot beta is awful and not what any of the people who contribute to the site want.
There really is only one place to organise any form of protest against the proposed changes and that is slashdot.
Even the trolls are protesting slashdot beta, I tend to think more in the nature of trolling than protesting. on the positive side there seems to be less of the usual trolling posts.

It's out there now that there is going to be a boycott of slashdot from the 10th to the 17th
I don't think it matters by how much the traffic drops more who decides to boycott the site and that really needs to be the registered users who contribute to the site.

What makes Slashdot good is the writers who contribute on a regular basis. We may not get paid and we don't always get modded up to +5 but without us slashdot becomes a sewer with no redeeming features. At least for a week. Even if you can't give up slashdot for a week, don't post don't moderate. Just let the anonymous cowards do their thing. Apologies to the ac's that do make positive posts as ac but even as an ac don't
bother commenting. let the trolls run riot for that week.

A week of no posts worth reading should make dice realise that without the freely given contributions from us slashdot is worthless.it will be effective. What can dice do? get the editors to post while all of slashdots real writers take a break. Set timothy and soulskill the task of moderating the entire site and without positive content what will they moderate?

Like christmas future in a christmas carol let them see what slashdot can become, just for a week.

There is a value in slashdot but like myspace that value can go down as well as up.

To be honest I think Dice need a preview. I suggest a weeks boycott of slashdot

I think I can last a week. If enough of us stay away then they should notice the drop in traffic. prior to forcing us into slashdot beta.

I started getting the we are going to start forcing peope into slashdot beta notice today. Is it telling on a site where you can just hit reply and write. The link to tell us what you think is a mailto link?

so in order to send a message to dice I think a boycott is the only way to go and show we are serious.
so thats it for me till next wednesday. After all if they change to slashdot beta I'm out of here for good.
feel free to pass the word. If we do not work together on this its going to be unstoppable.

i use the oldest version of the interface of the site i can, it works.
I'm surprised at a lack of comments on this story because there have been plenty universally disliking slashdot beta on many other stories, perhaps it is because nobody wants anything to do with slashdot beta it has no value.

Why not abandon it?
Seems probable that you will lose users by implementing it. which means less interesting posts, which means less reason to come here.

I have to say it is the comments that are interesting there are always new things, new software , recurring problems and peoples experience with these things, views, opinions methodology and insights help differentiate between whats worth spending time on , whats not and perhaps the best way to skin a cat.
by the later i mean problems you may have solved one way, someone else came up with a different way thats faster or easier or just inspires you to try something new.

of course there is a flood of crap that comes in other comments, and the usual troll posts but you skip them and find the good ones.

anyway that is the value in slashdot the comments and it's kept me reading and informed for years many years.
This beta program threatens to reduce the value of this site so perhaps you should reconsider before you lose the value in this site. Thats my opinion anyway and I actually care enough to say the beta program sucks because it will only lead to more crap and less insight. I guess slashdot will likely crash and burn eventually if the crap becomes too much but there is no need to put it into a nose dive, instead of gliding while you think of something to make it better.

If you want to make slashdot better how about a noise or spam filter, I don't mean site wide censorship. I mean a list of keywords that users can supply so say I have the filter "gay nigger" in place then I can have that comment removed from my page view maybe adjust the moderation downwards towards -2 maybe grey the text so i can see its there and read it if it makes some other post out of context. Or perhaps once a post infringes my crap filter all replies to it can also be greyed out.

Anyway my thoughts for what its worth.

one thing microsoft don't want to be compatible with is pdf i was looking for a pdf print driver today but all seemed to have issues with cost or adware. seems the easiest solution is to use libre office or open office for conversion.

There is an American company with a British subsiduary named wonga with a apr of that sort of figure apr.
There was an interesting documentary about bank of dave a small bank set up by a businessman called dave. In this documentary he looked into the payday loan companies and actually went round to the uk offices of many of these companies all of which were just mail forwarding addresses and all pretty much run by American companies. Some offices were just empty buildings.

Britain does have a problem having a government unwilling to regulate in anyway. There is even an industry body for these payday loan companies and they will not even contemplate a figure for an apr which would be considered excessive.

Dave actually did put money into giving loans at reasonable rates and he was getting the payments back. As these high risk clients were more than willing to pay for loans at reasonable rates.

I honestly don't find much difficulty with office suites in general, I use what's available on the pc at the time, if it's linux then generally it's libre office if its windows tends to be office 2010.

Office suites are pretty much the same as web browsers, I might prefer one over another but they all get the job done.

I do see a potential problem that when you set people up in a mono culture there tends to be more difficulty in coping with change. Even if you restrict your self to microsoft office it's got so many flavours now that having only ever dealt with one version users will find it harder to adapt to a newer version.

Isn't microsoft finding the new windows 8 a hard sell because it is different from what came before?
It's easier to admin a mono culture , but is that a good thing for users? Personally I think no because it is all subject to change and if anything our past experience should tell us even 5 years is a long time in IT so it is probably a good thing to keep users flexible.

There isn't just a choice between office google docs and open office there is a whole lot more open office/ libre office microsoft office has 97, 2000 2003 2007 2010 2013 then there are a bunch of other office type programs on mobile and tablets. Most of us on this forum will be able to work with any of them because of who we are and our own interests. For people less into IT its a nightmare for them. It would be better for them to learn on a range of different variants then they will quickly adapt to the next version. There was a time when people were demons with wordperfect5.1 but it was soon consigned to the scrap heap (about all i remember is F1 was help , i think) It was a useful skill at the time but a complete sea change when the switch came to office 97. But that probably was the last time things changed so radically.

So it doesn't really matter a deal which office program you use most of the time. As its write once, read a few times. maybe 1000's If your writing a document to be printed or to be a pdf it is irrelevant what word processor it was written with.

Cows and pigs are pretty easy to contain within an area, dogs and cats not so much. Cows and pigs are pretty docile animals and both regard us as a source of food and not as a food source. Although pigs will eat anything so you could be a food source... Chickens and rabbits have personality too. Used to have a rooster which hated people and would attack generally when you were not looking. On the other hand there was another rooster who would attack that one if he saw it was about to attack you.

I like animals , I also like meat. I prefer for animals to have a good life and a good death. Most people only really come in contact with pieces of meat or animals raised in nice conditions you don't really see factory farmed animals if people were aware of the life of a factory farmed animal they might be reluctant to eat it. However still tastes good however it was raised. We re really good as a species at being able to see even people as valueless outside of our own social group we only have empathy it seems when it suits us.

what dissuades me from buying through Amazon is the inability to get them to deliver to ireland, it's not everything but since there is no amazon.ie web site you have to use amazon.co.uk trouble is it's not till you get to the checkout you get the message we can't deliver to your location.
They won't filter out products that can't be delivered to your account address till you try to buy it.
ok Ireland is a relatively small country but as an EU country it might make sense to have an amazon.eu site so sellers willing to sell within europe can sell their products win win you'd think but no thats not what Amazon want to do...