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...

The idea of there being a database of most citizen dna is not that unlikely, I don't know about the USA but in the UK taking dna samples of anyone arrested (and not necessarily convicted) is routine. Collecting dna is no harder than collecting finger prints and that seems to becoming increasingly something done in schools with little regard to the consequences.

I think it used to be the case you couldn't be catalogued without breaking some law but that no longer seems to be relevant.

yes mail order makes it a lot easier to avoid driving, I need a part for my car i could go to a scrap yard relatively near but still maybe â5 in petrol, get charged about the same as I would at an online discount motor spares place I found which has the part new for next to nothing the delivery charge is slightly higher. If I go to the city I will spend â10 in petrol and pay a premium for what I want even if I can find it. It's cheaper just to order online and wait for the postman to deliver. Heck sometimes I buy things effectively for free since even with postage it's cheaper than the cost of driving to get it.

Have you seen the state of Irelands roads?

well there is dual rate metering, commonly known as Economy 7 in the UK. You just get charged less for electricity during the night when demand is at its lowest.

Unfortunately they charge you more for metering it, even thou its pretty much just a relay which switches metering clocks at set times.

It's fairly easy to be power efficient these days. The annoying thing is its not the unit rate that makes much of a difference to my bills but the standing charge levys and other fee's. doubling my electricity use would probably would change my bill in the order of 10%. If I got dual rate metering my bills would increase.

Another con is the prepayment meter which again brings in a standing charge and higher unit rates making the bills much higher than they would be without it. This tends to mean the poorest people in society are paying the highest energy costs. This is quite hard to escape once you are in this trap if you are living week by week it is very difficult to save enough money so you are able to pay the bill when it comes in.

It's made even more difficult in that the meter rates tend not to be adjusted when the prices go up and so when you attempt to escape all of a sudden you find your prepayment meter which was supposed to help you budget has quietly been building up a debt. suppliers like this because it holds their customers captive as you can't switch suppliers while there is an outstanding debt.