The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws
So, er, if trademarks and similar are abolished, how do you make sure you're voting for the real Piracy Party, and not something with the same name but vastly different policies set up as a stunt by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau?
Since when did 375 light years away classify as "nearby"?
Okay, so that's not big in galactic terms, let alone in universal terms, but "nearby" suggests that we actually have a chance in hell of visiting it. We do not. 375 light years away is well beyond any reasonable trip distance using any well-researched technology for the next few hundred years, at least. Even then, it's not doable in a person's single lifetime. You'd have to have a multi-generational expedition.
The missed point here is: Lego is now so expensive that it is worth stealing. When child's toy bricks get into the same crime bracket as alcohol and tobacco, something is wrong.
This isn't a case for RFID. This is a case for making Lego less expensive.
brejc8: Fortunately in Europe we also have a system of public transport which most environment minded people (like myself) prefer to use rather than pretend we are doing our bit through the purchase of a new car.
No, unfortunately in Europe our population distribution is massively unbalanced, squeezed into tiny mega-cities constrained by historical boundaries, that have great public transport, and everyone who lives in a rural area gets f**ked over.
My local bus timetable (local being two miles away). Yup, that's right; Tuesday-Friday we get 1 bus a day; you can go, but you can't come back until tomorrow. On Mondays we get two busses; sadly they go to different places so you still can't get home. No busses at all on Saturdays or Sundays. None of these busses go within 5 miles of where I work. None allow bikes on board.
Given the total lack of understanding of rural communities by European townies and so-called "environmentalists" (who, ironically, usually have about as much knowledge of the countryside as I have of the Docklands Light Railway), quite frankly I'm just waiting for the day when they draw up the cattle trucks to forceably relocate all country folk to London. No doubt the townies would still complain about the cost of housing even then (CLUE: stop all trying to live in one small space, duh).
squoozer: I find the 3* as much FireFox usage in the US compared to the UK disturbing
I wonder if this is related to bundled services by ISPs? The UK has a very agressive competitive ISP market. There are thousands of ISPs vying for dial-up and ADSL customers, and pretty much the only way they can differentiate their product is by bundled services which invariably only work properly under Internet Explorer.
Is the US market this competitive? Do US ISPs rely so heavily on bundled services? I'm wondering whether the US market is led more by calling plans and cable.
Also could heavier broadband takeup be a factor? I understand that the UK has more broadband users than dial-up users, which I believe isn't the case in the USA (although common sense says that broadband users would be more likely, not less likely, to try Mozilla's large downloads, which doesn't match with the facts).
For people of my generation, brought up with the 8-bit computers of the 70's and 80's, it isn't so much a question of why we switched from Windows, but why we picked Linux as our PC platform.
Myself, I never saw a GUI as something useful beyond desktop work. For remote servers I find Windows cumbersome, bandwidth-hogging and prone to popping up some mandatory modal pop-up upon reboot before my remote control software kicks in- leaving me 5000 miles away with no access.
Servers, IMHO, don't need a GUI.
For my desktop, sure, I use Windows, because that's what my company supplied by default and that's what my games run on at home. But my desktop doesn't matter - it isn't where the real work is done.
I "switched" to Linux - for the stuff that mattered - because it was the most comfortable, familiar server OS that fitted with my commandline heritage and ran on hardware I could afford. I could have quite easily been a *BSD chap too.
Or you could just un-tick the 'auto adjust for daylight savings' checkbox until you've done the ghost hunt?...and if Windoze still cocks up we can call it evidence of paranormal intervention! Result!
Correct. I'm a Brit in the UK; today Friday 28 October we are in BST (British Summer Time) which is GMT+1. It will remain BST tomorrow Saturday.
At 3AM BST Sunday morning, it will become 2AM GMT. It will then be GMT through to the last Sunday in March.
This is even more annoying than usual, because we are using Windoze laptops on a ghost hunt overnight Saturday night / Sunday morning. We are expecting very annoying data logging problems at 2AM BST/3AM GMT as Windoze automatically switches timezone. Which is why I'm recommending we use a Linux laptop which has been forced to GMT hardware clock. We're also recommending that people don't trust clocks on mobile phones or PDAs, lest these also attempt auto-changeover. You have no idea how rare wristwatches are in the UK; everyone uses their mobile phones these days.
constantnormal: If the Brits were looking about for a third-party nation to lease launch facilities from, they could do worse than negotiating with the Chileans
Technically, that's a superb idea. Unfortunately it would be a PR disaster (80's UK prime minister Thatcher was seen as a supporter of Chile president Pinochet who went on to face torture charges).
Which is kind of my whole point about a British space programme. Pretty much anywhere we'd choose to put it, it'd stir up unpleasant memories about something we'd cocked up in the past.
I really think that we're much better off just participating in other nation's programmes, and commercial programmes. If we want to launch satellites, we can give them to the French under the banner of ESA, job done, no flag waving required. But manned space flight is about patriotism, something which we find rather distasteful and gaffe-prone.
Indeed, but if a diplomatic solution was negotiated, it would most likely be an Australian space programme, and not a British one.
I really, really can't imagine the Australians selling us back a plot of land. If the launch site was on Australian soil then our perception would be that it was an Australian programme. The UK already has plenty of places where we are "partners" in a space programme, none of which give us sufficient national pride to care about manned travel. The proud Brit striding aboard a rocket with his Union Jack uniform doesn't seem so proud when he's having to launch from a site which flies a different flag.
All of a sudden it isn't "our" space programme, we're just hitching a ride.
There's also the dreadful uncomfortable sinking feeling that us Brits get whenever we have to ask for favours from our commonwealth ex-empire chums. Y'know how Americans feel absolutely awful about Vietnam? It's kind of the same thing. The fact of the matter is that we did a lot of very unpleasant things in our empire that would be totally unacceptable today, and we'd be grateful if people just accepted our apologies and didn't draw any more attention to it.
The idea of us going around ex-empire nations asking for a rocket launch site brings back some pretty unpleasant memories. The nations themselves may well be happy about it, but we'd feel rather overbearing. It just has a nasty ring of menace about it, as if we'd have the Royal Navy sitting along the coast just in case the "diplomacy" didn't go well. Now you and I may appreciate that we'd never do anything of the sort, but we don't even want to bring up those kinds of images. We'd prefer that those kinds of suspicions were never even stirred up.
Imagine we did buy some land off Australia, that we could fly our own flag on. How long before there is some huge publicty nightmare about the UK returning to the bad old days of stealing land off native peoples? (For instance, I was going to use the phrase "we must be seen to be whiter than white" in the previous paragraph, but even that has a nasty racist ring to it.)
It's not that we don't like Australia, we love you chaps, you're our best mates. It's just that we don't feel it's good karma to go asking for favours, given that we've cocked things up in the past, and in any case we'd get more pride if we could do it on our own.
The answer to both of those questions is: The UK doesn't have any good launch sites. We're in Northern Europe, in case you hadn't noticed, and you can't launch rockets from there (at least, not without considerably higher costs/risks than doing it closer to the equator).
It comes down to empire. The French still exhert ownership over a couple of countries that have good launch sites. The UK does not.
The idea of us ringing up the Australians and saying "What ho! We're going to build a rocket base in your outback. Look, I know you chaps think you're independent now, but Queen Liz says to tell you to bally well stuff off" is just not going to fly, I'm afraid.
True, we're part of the European Space Agency.
But it seems rather pointless to have a space programme when you have to ask other people to launch it for you.
Especially if those other people are the French.
I do hope I don't have to explain quite how horrifying the idea of a British citizen patriotically launching into space to the sound of "Cinq... quatre... trios... deux... un!" sounds to the average Brit.
The UK/France Channel Tunnel security checks use guards with cotton gloves to wipe around the inside of passengers' cars. The gloves are then analysed by computer- this means a complete explosives search can be done in two minutes, rather than having to rip the car's body panels apart. Unfortunately, this has a huge false positive rate for anyone who's been in contact with fertilizers; my uncle, who is a keen gardener, got questioned at the end of an SMG for quite a while before he mentioned that he'd been carrying bags of nitrate fertilzer in his trunk just a few days prior.
Whilst that's inconvenient for gardeners and farmers, its also a safety risk for the rest of the passengers; after all, it gives a convenient alibi for saboteurs. I certainly wouldn't want to board a train in the same carriage as the Falls RoadAllotment Society.
These toys provide useful indicators of where to concentrate resources on, but they should never replace good old fashioned trained security staff.
In the UK, it is a common occurance for an Act of Parliament (a law) to be overturned by the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that it infringes those rights. This is much the same process as a US law being found unconstitutional.
I've no reason to believe the EU and US are alone in having constitutions which grant rights to their individual citizens. In the UK, the concept dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215 AD and I doubt that was the first example in the world, either (although most historical examples, including the original US constitution, had exemptions for various untermensch such as females, slaves etc.).
That said... IMHO the Internet is America's ball. It invented it. It owns it [1]. It can do with it as it pleases. I'm grateful that they let us foreigners on it. But that has nothing to do with any superiority of constitutions.
[1] Actually NATO invented it, but seeing as NATO funding was provided in the vast majority by the USA, as a fellow NATO-member Brit, I'm not complaining.
The ATI Radeon 9600 is also available fanless (in the SE and vanilla range it ships fanless; some reports of success replacing the Pro's fan with a Zalman heatsink); I have a vanilla 9600 and it runs Half Life 2 and Far Cry quite happily on my 2GHz Athlon 2400XP with an impressive feature-set (not maximum, but stuff like grass turned on) at 1024 res. It just has an old-style heatsink.
Re:"Indie Chart" my ass; #56 in the proper charts.
on
The Chumbawamba Factor
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· Score: 1
In other words, their early-90s "hits" in the UK weren't, and I never heard any of them.
Hmm. Although your analysis of the UK Indie Chart is factually correct, I think you are significantly underestimating the power of the UK Indie Chart on popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
The UK Indie Chart couldn't include radio airplay, because of the strict regulation of UK radio stations during the 1980s and 1990s. All stations other than Radio 3 (classical/jazz) played either mainstream music or no music. There was no XFM, no Kerrang! FM, no MTV2 etc. The closest we got was John Peel. Ergo your statement, although accurate, is highly misleading.
The Indie chart was based purely on sales of records from independent record labels, because that was the only data available at the time.
The Indie chart was highly reflective of, and influential upon, the nightclub scene. Chumbawamba's "Timebomb", "Homophobia" and "Enough is Enough" received huge play at indie nightclubs throughout the UK. The Indie chart was also a massive influence on popular culture through youth music magazines such as the NME and Melody Maker.
To discount the Indie chart's importance is to discount a huge volume of work by highly influential arists, such as The Smiths, The Cure, New Order, The Sisters of Mercy, The Prodigy et al. In doing so you deny massive swathes of British popular culture including Punk, New Wave, Goth, Crusty, Shoegazers, Grebo, Jungle and others, all of whom were dependent upon the Indie Chart as their measure of success.
I'm not saying that Chumbawamba were as successful or influential as The Cure, but they were a significant band, and their Indie chart positions are evidence of such.
Recommended reading is Dick Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning Of Style" which is pretty much mandatory for anyone studying the sociology and roots of the British independent music phenomenon, from Punk to Ragga. The UK scene developed entirely differently from the USA; where the USA had radio stations devoted to genres, the UK, due to tight radio regulation, has those genres develop through underground magazines and nightclubs.
How very dare you! I spent many a happy evening as an indie student dancing to "Timebomb", "Enough Is Enough" and "Homophobia".
Seriously though, whilst they may be in the one-hit-wonder category in the USA, in the UK they had a string of indie-chart (roughly synonymous with the US "Alternative Chart") hits in the early 90's (throughout which I remained a member of the Young Conservatives, so obviously their political aims were significantly less effective than their indie-chart abilities). I would have thought that all of their releases from about 1991-1995 would have been in the UK Indie Top 20.
...and unless you're using English English instead of American English. The phrase "green campus" is American English phrase, with no direct translation under English English variants.
I once had a US border security guard ask me whether I spoke English. The temptation to reply "My dear chap, I don't just speak it, I am English!" was almost unbearable, but the nearby box of latex gloves convinced me that the more concise "Yes sir" was more appropriate.
(Anyone who thinks that there is such a standard as "British" English has obviously never attempted a conversation with someone from Glasgow.)
I can assure you that we do too, my dear old chap. After all, we gave you gentlemen a copy of our keys (aren't we jolly nice?). Also our delightful Gallic neighbours have them too- and given France's penchant for "special operations" plus the fact that they've been right royally peeved by the whole Iraq thing, I don't think they'd be quite so happy to give Master George W a set of keys to theirs. And then there's the fiendish Chinese, who've been entertaining seismologists for decades with evidence of their arsenal.
Seriously though, if there is a nuclear balance to the US these days, it's France and China, not Russia. You only need enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world once. Having "not as many" is irrelevent.
The way I think it works out now is that if you sign on to the Canadian Do-Not-Call list you will only receive calls from businesses, political parties, polling companies, and charities.
Seriously though, isn't that just true of landlines in general? Has anyone received a useful call on a landline in the past few years, one where the caller would not have called your mobile if they hadn't got through?
If the call is important, someone will pay 50p/min to call my mobile, or they'll call me on my mobile for free as part of their bundled mobile minutes. If they'll only call my landline, the call can't be important.
The solution to telemarketting is to price them out of the market. One way is to waste their time. Another is; don't answer your landline. Just use your mobile. Heck, half the time I don't even have a handset connected to my landline. It just exists to provide ADSL.
That's not proof that something isn't fun. Fun isn't a matter of statistics.
There are more people who do NOT play Dungeons and Dragons than there are who DO play Dungeons and Dragons. But that doesn't mean that playing Dungeons and Dragons isn't fun, at least for those people who do.
By your same reckoning, there are more people who cannot drive at all; ergo by your "proof", driving cannot ever be fun at all.
I enjoy driving. I own a small manual 4x4 with only a 1.3 litre engine. I enjoy driving it on the motorway just as much as I enjoy driving it across local rural byways. It suits me, it doesn't suit everyone. The fact that my vehicle isn't suitable for the majority of the population isn't an indicator of whether I enjoy using it. I live in the countryside where my little 4x4 is very practical, most people live in towns where a 4x4 is normally a waste of energy.
People aren't uniform. Local conditions aren't uniform. There are different tools for different people and different jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Five digits? Bah! Newcommers.
(-1 offtopic me now, please)
The party wants to abolish all intellectual property laws
So, er, if trademarks and similar are abolished, how do you make sure you're voting for the real Piracy Party, and not something with the same name but vastly different policies set up as a stunt by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau?
smaller than a quarter
A quarter of what? A quarter of a hectare - not very impressive? A quarter of a square centimetre - amazing?
I suspect this is an Americanism, possibly a coin? What is a quarter in this context and how big, in ISO recognised measurements, is it?
Since when did 375 light years away classify as "nearby"?
Okay, so that's not big in galactic terms, let alone in universal terms, but "nearby" suggests that we actually have a chance in hell of visiting it. We do not. 375 light years away is well beyond any reasonable trip distance using any well-researched technology for the next few hundred years, at least. Even then, it's not doable in a person's single lifetime. You'd have to have a multi-generational expedition.
The missed point here is: Lego is now so expensive that it is worth stealing. When child's toy bricks get into the same crime bracket as alcohol and tobacco, something is wrong.
This isn't a case for RFID. This is a case for making Lego less expensive.
brejc8: Fortunately in Europe we also have a system of public transport which most environment minded people (like myself) prefer to use rather than pretend we are doing our bit through the purchase of a new car.
No, unfortunately in Europe our population distribution is massively unbalanced, squeezed into tiny mega-cities constrained by historical boundaries, that have great public transport, and everyone who lives in a rural area gets f**ked over.
My local bus timetable (local being two miles away). Yup, that's right; Tuesday-Friday we get 1 bus a day; you can go, but you can't come back until tomorrow. On Mondays we get two busses; sadly they go to different places so you still can't get home. No busses at all on Saturdays or Sundays. None of these busses go within 5 miles of where I work. None allow bikes on board.
Given the total lack of understanding of rural communities by European townies and so-called "environmentalists" (who, ironically, usually have about as much knowledge of the countryside as I have of the Docklands Light Railway), quite frankly I'm just waiting for the day when they draw up the cattle trucks to forceably relocate all country folk to London. No doubt the townies would still complain about the cost of housing even then (CLUE: stop all trying to live in one small space, duh).
The article also seems to indicate that he didn't trust that his clinic made the correct original diagnosis - his initial reaction was to sue them.
squoozer: I find the 3* as much FireFox usage in the US compared to the UK disturbing
I wonder if this is related to bundled services by ISPs? The UK has a very agressive competitive ISP market. There are thousands of ISPs vying for dial-up and ADSL customers, and pretty much the only way they can differentiate their product is by bundled services which invariably only work properly under Internet Explorer.
Is the US market this competitive? Do US ISPs rely so heavily on bundled services? I'm wondering whether the US market is led more by calling plans and cable.
Also could heavier broadband takeup be a factor? I understand that the UK has more broadband users than dial-up users, which I believe isn't the case in the USA (although common sense says that broadband users would be more likely, not less likely, to try Mozilla's large downloads, which doesn't match with the facts).
For people of my generation, brought up with the 8-bit computers of the 70's and 80's, it isn't so much a question of why we switched from Windows, but why we picked Linux as our PC platform.
Myself, I never saw a GUI as something useful beyond desktop work. For remote servers I find Windows cumbersome, bandwidth-hogging and prone to popping up some mandatory modal pop-up upon reboot before my remote control software kicks in- leaving me 5000 miles away with no access.
Servers, IMHO, don't need a GUI.
For my desktop, sure, I use Windows, because that's what my company supplied by default and that's what my games run on at home. But my desktop doesn't matter - it isn't where the real work is done.
I "switched" to Linux - for the stuff that mattered - because it was the most comfortable, familiar server OS that fitted with my commandline heritage and ran on hardware I could afford. I could have quite easily been a *BSD chap too.
Or you could just un-tick the 'auto adjust for daylight savings' checkbox until you've done the ghost hunt? ...and if Windoze still cocks up we can call it evidence of paranormal intervention! Result!
I wrote: problems at 2AM BST/3AM GMT
Correction: 3AM BST/2AM GMT. See how confusing it is? We really should have picked a better night for the investigation.
Correct. I'm a Brit in the UK; today Friday 28 October we are in BST (British Summer Time) which is GMT+1. It will remain BST tomorrow Saturday.
At 3AM BST Sunday morning, it will become 2AM GMT. It will then be GMT through to the last Sunday in March.
This is even more annoying than usual, because we are using Windoze laptops on a ghost hunt overnight Saturday night / Sunday morning. We are expecting very annoying data logging problems at 2AM BST/3AM GMT as Windoze automatically switches timezone. Which is why I'm recommending we use a Linux laptop which has been forced to GMT hardware clock. We're also recommending that people don't trust clocks on mobile phones or PDAs, lest these also attempt auto-changeover. You have no idea how rare wristwatches are in the UK; everyone uses their mobile phones these days.
constantnormal: If the Brits were looking about for a third-party nation to lease launch facilities from, they could do worse than negotiating with the Chileans
Technically, that's a superb idea. Unfortunately it would be a PR disaster (80's UK prime minister Thatcher was seen as a supporter of Chile president Pinochet who went on to face torture charges).
Which is kind of my whole point about a British space programme. Pretty much anywhere we'd choose to put it, it'd stir up unpleasant memories about something we'd cocked up in the past.
I really think that we're much better off just participating in other nation's programmes, and commercial programmes. If we want to launch satellites, we can give them to the French under the banner of ESA, job done, no flag waving required. But manned space flight is about patriotism, something which we find rather distasteful and gaffe-prone.
Indeed, but if a diplomatic solution was negotiated, it would most likely be an Australian space programme, and not a British one.
I really, really can't imagine the Australians selling us back a plot of land. If the launch site was on Australian soil then our perception would be that it was an Australian programme. The UK already has plenty of places where we are "partners" in a space programme, none of which give us sufficient national pride to care about manned travel. The proud Brit striding aboard a rocket with his Union Jack uniform doesn't seem so proud when he's having to launch from a site which flies a different flag.
All of a sudden it isn't "our" space programme, we're just hitching a ride.
There's also the dreadful uncomfortable sinking feeling that us Brits get whenever we have to ask for favours from our commonwealth ex-empire chums. Y'know how Americans feel absolutely awful about Vietnam? It's kind of the same thing. The fact of the matter is that we did a lot of very unpleasant things in our empire that would be totally unacceptable today, and we'd be grateful if people just accepted our apologies and didn't draw any more attention to it.
The idea of us going around ex-empire nations asking for a rocket launch site brings back some pretty unpleasant memories. The nations themselves may well be happy about it, but we'd feel rather overbearing. It just has a nasty ring of menace about it, as if we'd have the Royal Navy sitting along the coast just in case the "diplomacy" didn't go well. Now you and I may appreciate that we'd never do anything of the sort, but we don't even want to bring up those kinds of images. We'd prefer that those kinds of suspicions were never even stirred up.
Imagine we did buy some land off Australia, that we could fly our own flag on. How long before there is some huge publicty nightmare about the UK returning to the bad old days of stealing land off native peoples? (For instance, I was going to use the phrase "we must be seen to be whiter than white" in the previous paragraph, but even that has a nasty racist ring to it.)
It's not that we don't like Australia, we love you chaps, you're our best mates. It's just that we don't feel it's good karma to go asking for favours, given that we've cocked things up in the past, and in any case we'd get more pride if we could do it on our own.
The answer to both of those questions is: The UK doesn't have any good launch sites. We're in Northern Europe, in case you hadn't noticed, and you can't launch rockets from there (at least, not without considerably higher costs/risks than doing it closer to the equator).
It comes down to empire. The French still exhert ownership over a couple of countries that have good launch sites. The UK does not.
The idea of us ringing up the Australians and saying "What ho! We're going to build a rocket base in your outback. Look, I know you chaps think you're independent now, but Queen Liz says to tell you to bally well stuff off" is just not going to fly, I'm afraid.
True, we're part of the European Space Agency.
But it seems rather pointless to have a space programme when you have to ask other people to launch it for you.
Especially if those other people are the French.
I do hope I don't have to explain quite how horrifying the idea of a British citizen patriotically launching into space to the sound of "Cinq... quatre... trios... deux... un!" sounds to the average Brit.
Yes - and it's even easier than that, surely.
I'd hazzard a guess that the manufacturer will deliver bulk quantities of product that have sequential serial numbers.
Ergo the manufacturer will know that #8897554 through #8898542 all went to Best Buy in Dallas.
Great, so the system can detect farmers and gardeners at longer ranges?
The UK/France Channel Tunnel security checks use guards with cotton gloves to wipe around the inside of passengers' cars. The gloves are then analysed by computer- this means a complete explosives search can be done in two minutes, rather than having to rip the car's body panels apart. Unfortunately, this has a huge false positive rate for anyone who's been in contact with fertilizers; my uncle, who is a keen gardener, got questioned at the end of an SMG for quite a while before he mentioned that he'd been carrying bags of nitrate fertilzer in his trunk just a few days prior.
Whilst that's inconvenient for gardeners and farmers, its also a safety risk for the rest of the passengers; after all, it gives a convenient alibi for saboteurs. I certainly wouldn't want to board a train in the same carriage as the Falls Road Allotment Society.
These toys provide useful indicators of where to concentrate resources on, but they should never replace good old fashioned trained security staff.
You are wrong. See also:
In the UK, it is a common occurance for an Act of Parliament (a law) to be overturned by the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that it infringes those rights. This is much the same process as a US law being found unconstitutional.
I've no reason to believe the EU and US are alone in having constitutions which grant rights to their individual citizens. In the UK, the concept dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215 AD and I doubt that was the first example in the world, either (although most historical examples, including the original US constitution, had exemptions for various untermensch such as females, slaves etc.).
That said... IMHO the Internet is America's ball. It invented it. It owns it [1]. It can do with it as it pleases. I'm grateful that they let us foreigners on it. But that has nothing to do with any superiority of constitutions.
[1] Actually NATO invented it, but seeing as NATO funding was provided in the vast majority by the USA, as a fellow NATO-member Brit, I'm not complaining.
The ATI Radeon 9600 is also available fanless (in the SE and vanilla range it ships fanless; some reports of success replacing the Pro's fan with a Zalman heatsink); I have a vanilla 9600 and it runs Half Life 2 and Far Cry quite happily on my 2GHz Athlon 2400XP with an impressive feature-set (not maximum, but stuff like grass turned on) at 1024 res. It just has an old-style heatsink.
GamePC had a feature on fanless graphics cards about 18 months ago.
In other words, their early-90s "hits" in the UK weren't, and I never heard any of them.
Hmm. Although your analysis of the UK Indie Chart is factually correct, I think you are significantly underestimating the power of the UK Indie Chart on popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
The UK Indie Chart couldn't include radio airplay, because of the strict regulation of UK radio stations during the 1980s and 1990s. All stations other than Radio 3 (classical/jazz) played either mainstream music or no music. There was no XFM, no Kerrang! FM, no MTV2 etc. The closest we got was John Peel. Ergo your statement, although accurate, is highly misleading.
The Indie chart was based purely on sales of records from independent record labels, because that was the only data available at the time.
Chumbawamba were achieving consistent top 5 Indie chart status as early as 1985, and this consistency of performance continued for a decade before "Tubthumping".
The Indie chart was highly reflective of, and influential upon, the nightclub scene. Chumbawamba's "Timebomb", "Homophobia" and "Enough is Enough" received huge play at indie nightclubs throughout the UK. The Indie chart was also a massive influence on popular culture through youth music magazines such as the NME and Melody Maker.
To discount the Indie chart's importance is to discount a huge volume of work by highly influential arists, such as The Smiths, The Cure, New Order, The Sisters of Mercy, The Prodigy et al. In doing so you deny massive swathes of British popular culture including Punk, New Wave, Goth, Crusty, Shoegazers, Grebo, Jungle and others, all of whom were dependent upon the Indie Chart as their measure of success.
I'm not saying that Chumbawamba were as successful or influential as The Cure, but they were a significant band, and their Indie chart positions are evidence of such.
Recommended reading is Dick Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning Of Style" which is pretty much mandatory for anyone studying the sociology and roots of the British independent music phenomenon, from Punk to Ragga. The UK scene developed entirely differently from the USA; where the USA had radio stations devoted to genres, the UK, due to tight radio regulation, has those genres develop through underground magazines and nightclubs.
"Chumbawamba were a one hit wonder"
How very dare you! I spent many a happy evening as an indie student dancing to "Timebomb", "Enough Is Enough" and "Homophobia".
Seriously though, whilst they may be in the one-hit-wonder category in the USA, in the UK they had a string of indie-chart (roughly synonymous with the US "Alternative Chart") hits in the early 90's (throughout which I remained a member of the Young Conservatives, so obviously their political aims were significantly less effective than their indie-chart abilities). I would have thought that all of their releases from about 1991-1995 would have been in the UK Indie Top 20.
...and unless you're using English English instead of American English. The phrase "green campus" is American English phrase, with no direct translation under English English variants.
I once had a US border security guard ask me whether I spoke English. The temptation to reply "My dear chap, I don't just speak it, I am English!" was almost unbearable, but the nearby box of latex gloves convinced me that the more concise "Yes sir" was more appropriate.
(Anyone who thinks that there is such a standard as "British" English has obviously never attempted a conversation with someone from Glasgow.)
I can assure you that we do too, my dear old chap. After all, we gave you gentlemen a copy of our keys (aren't we jolly nice?). Also our delightful Gallic neighbours have them too- and given France's penchant for "special operations" plus the fact that they've been right royally peeved by the whole Iraq thing, I don't think they'd be quite so happy to give Master George W a set of keys to theirs. And then there's the fiendish Chinese, who've been entertaining seismologists for decades with evidence of their arsenal.
Seriously though, if there is a nuclear balance to the US these days, it's France and China, not Russia. You only need enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world once. Having "not as many" is irrelevent.
The way I think it works out now is that if you sign on to the Canadian Do-Not-Call list you will only receive calls from businesses, political parties, polling companies, and charities.
Seriously though, isn't that just true of landlines in general? Has anyone received a useful call on a landline in the past few years, one where the caller would not have called your mobile if they hadn't got through?
If the call is important, someone will pay 50p/min to call my mobile, or they'll call me on my mobile for free as part of their bundled mobile minutes. If they'll only call my landline, the call can't be important.
The solution to telemarketting is to price them out of the market. One way is to waste their time. Another is; don't answer your landline. Just use your mobile. Heck, half the time I don't even have a handset connected to my landline. It just exists to provide ADSL.
That's not proof that something isn't fun. Fun isn't a matter of statistics.
There are more people who do NOT play Dungeons and Dragons than there are who DO play Dungeons and Dragons. But that doesn't mean that playing Dungeons and Dragons isn't fun, at least for those people who do.
By your same reckoning, there are more people who cannot drive at all; ergo by your "proof", driving cannot ever be fun at all.
I enjoy driving. I own a small manual 4x4 with only a 1.3 litre engine. I enjoy driving it on the motorway just as much as I enjoy driving it across local rural byways. It suits me, it doesn't suit everyone. The fact that my vehicle isn't suitable for the majority of the population isn't an indicator of whether I enjoy using it. I live in the countryside where my little 4x4 is very practical, most people live in towns where a 4x4 is normally a waste of energy.
People aren't uniform. Local conditions aren't uniform. There are different tools for different people and different jobs.