Facebook, Google, Ruby on Rails and Wikipedia could have been built using.NET, de Icaza claimed.
This is true in the trivial sense that anything any computer can do can be done on any platform that allows control of the same I/O facilities and supports at least one Turing-complete language.
OTOH, I don't see that any substantial argument has been made that.NET would have been an attractive platform for any of these things instead of their actual platforms if Microsoft had done things differently.
flame me but can't we just let countries choose their own path? there is no reason we need to force the American world view down everyone's throat.
Wait, I am confused.
Is your contention that: 1) Countries should be free to choose their own path, or is it 2) Countries should not be free to choose the path of shoving their worldview down everyone's throat
Because you can't have both.
Furthermore, even if we accept that what China is doing is legitimate in terms of "choosing their own path" (rather than a case of "shoving their worldview down everyone's throat"), why does that mean it has to be free of consequences? China chooses its path. Google, GoDaddy, and who knows who else looks at that path and says, "you know what, we're not willing to do business on those terms" and stops doing business in China. Do you think that not only should countries be able to choose their own path, but that private entities should be actively compelled to continue to do business in countries that they no longer wish to do business in?
"It works as a Wi-Fi hotspot, supporting up to 8 devices;"
Wow! That's insane, considering that laptop wireless sharing is only now just becoming mainstream.
How many people will buy this phone, and ditch dsl, cable, etc? Smaller than any dsl or cable box, uses less power too I'd bet.
Yeah, but its more expensive in up front cost, and almost certainly more expensive for the ongoing cost as well if you use it significantly (data plans typically have caps on the order of 5-10GB/mo where additional charges kick in), so its probably not a good choice for a replacement for an always-on home connection.
OTOH, it sounds like it would be nice as a mobile "personal access point" if you've got other WiFi-enabled gadgets -- like the many other devices that do the same, but with the advantage that WiMax is faster than 3G.
A phone that records 720p video and plays it out via an HDMI jack? WHY?
Because its a handheld computer/digital camcorder/phone combination unit for people who want to do lots of things, but don't want to carry lots of gadgets.
If the question is "why HDMI?", my guess is the reason is "because HDMI is what you can most count on being supported on HDTVs, which are the most likely thing people are going to want to plug in their phone to play their 720p videos on" (for computers, presumably, they'll just download the video to the computer.)
A corporation's goal is to increase its profits & market shares.
A corporation's goal is to serve the shared interests of those who own it, particularly those with voting rights. Usually, especially for a publicly traded corporation, those shared interests are effectively limited to financial returns (and particularly short-term ones) in one form or another; OTOH, when Google went public, they structured the stock ownership so the class of stock held by the original stockholders held disproportionate voting rights. Hence, the shared interests of Google's owners -- particularly when weighted by voting rights -- are more likely to include longer-term and non-financial interests.
Re:This is why you need version control on laws
on
Full ACTA Leak Online
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But then they'd only need half as many politicians to accomplish the task.
Actually, no. It wouldn't affect the number of politicians needed. What it would reduce is the depth of analytical staff needed to comprehend laws, which would then shift the balance of power away from groups with lots of money to spend on policy in a particular area, because then they wouldn't be as easily able to mislead as to what legislation would actually do.
Why should the US be different than everywhere else on the planet?
Because "everyone else does it" isn't a good excuse.
In the US it is today entirely different and we are getting our asses handed to us because of this difference.
No, its not different in the US. The US has very clear and documentation requirements (the I-9 requirements), which had no effect on the problem, because the problem with US immigration policy isn't work documentation requirements, its the basic structure of the immigration policies.
You can say the border should be completely open and there should be no obstructions to free movement of people, goods and services.
True, I could say that, but I didn't. I said we need to fix the fundamental structure of our immigration system to deal with the underlying problems, and that until we did that, the repeated efforts to deal with the problem by rejiggering documentation requirements for work based on the presumption of illegality were going to continue to inconvenience law-abiding workers and employers without doing anything about the problems they are notionally aimed at fixing.
A simple first step would be to, without changing overall legal immigration limits, remove the cap on immigration in the limited categories from any one individual country. That cap, alone, causes countries where there are large numbers of people who both want to come to the US and who are sponsored by family here to face decade-plus queues for legal immigration. If we are going to have an immigration policy that notionally prioritizes family unification (because having more family here reduces transfer payments, because it gives immigrants and naturalized citizens already here greater ties to the country, and because people having stronger family support networks here are less likely to consume public resources) it makes no sense to have structure our policy so that, with all the features that exist to promote that priority, there is one that absolutely frustrates it.
Shifting to soft caps in the legal categories, where applicants could pay a fee (which could be paid on their behalf by, e.g., sponsors in the U.S.) to bypass the queues might also help reduce the incentive to immigrate illegally while mitigating costs associated with the absolute level of immigration.
US lawmakers "are proposing a national identification card, a 'fraud-proof' Social Security card required for lawful employment in the United States.
This essentially is just furthering the "presumption of illegality" -- the presumption that a person is not allowed to work in the United States.
This is a fairly intrusive, insulting to the legal worker, and unnecessarily burdensome on business set of requirements that have all come into place because Congress writes immigration laws that are broken-by-design, and fails to enforce them effectively.
If we'd fix the fundamental structure of our immigration system to deal with the underlying problems, there wouldn't be the problems that we keep getting these kinds of band-aid "fixes" (like I-9 requirements) for, which never work.
I should have phrased it as "How can a free nation decide to do business with a totalitarian country.
Well.. the problem with your revised question is that.. a free nation hasn't.
Are you arguing that the United States of America hasn't, through various acts of Congress and ratified treaties, decided to trade with totalitarian states including China, or are you arguing that the U.S.A. isn't a free nation?
I'm not sure how in the hell capitalists here in the U.S. decided we could do fair business with a totalitarian communist nation. They don't value workers rights, free speech, or even a fair marketplace.
Capitalists, as a class, aren't particularly known for being supporters of workers rights, free speech, or a fair marketplace. In fact, they are the class against whom advocates of workers rights are usually struggling, the class that seeks to suppress negative comments on their products through the legal system, and a class that seeks to lobby government to protect their own interests by creating barriers to entry to the markets in which they have established themselves.
I'm not saying those things are true of Google's owners, in particular, but certainly the idea that capitalists wouldn't deal with people for the reasons you describe is, well, hard to reconcile with most of the history of capitalists.
They'd have to offer some reason to choose Opera over Safari. As Safari already does a good job of rendering pages it'd have to be features. Maybe better prediction of what I want in text fields.
I don't know about Opera mini, and I know even less about Opera mini for the iPhone, but Opera has the best support of any browser that I know of(iPhone Safari is a close second) for HTML5's specialized input fields in forms, so I wouldn't be surprised.
Apple will say that it duplicates existing iPhone functions and will refuse to accept it.
But lets all keep saying Microsoft is evil.
Apple has made that rule clear [...]
They've stated it lots of times as a reason for rejecting things, sure, but often while allowing other things that are just as duplicative of the same core functionality as the the thing rejected with that stated reason.
So, either they are just extremely inconsistent in enforcing the rule, or the "rule" is just an excuse.
Need a massive render farm to do a proof of concept showing a four minute preview of Toy Story 4? Cloud computing. Need a massive render farm to actually generate every CGI frame for every movie Disney or Lucas is going to produce the next four years? Buy your own environment.
You seem to be comparing remote application hosting vs. in-house application hosting; cloud computing (dynamic server provisioning by divorcing logical instances from physical servers) is somewhat orthogonal to that. While certainly its popularly used by companies that want to offer remote application hosting, there are solutions available (including open source ones) for companies that want to use cloud computing in their own data centers.
Oh yes... remember how RAM "disks" would soon rule once we got to a gig of ram, and all that extra ram was unneeded?
Um, no.
RAM disks -- being RAM -- aren't permanent storage, and were never held up as a replacement for any kind of permanent storage. They were always a work around for permanent storage being too slow for applications that had a demand for responsiveness and could accept the risk of data loss to acheive it, and even then were largely useful for applications that had been designed for older (relatively) constrained RAM situations, and therefore did stuff "on disk" not because it needed stored at that point, but to avoid keeping too much in RAM at once.
While most computers come with bigger disks (because the cost of making spinning disks makes the marginal cost bigger, and bigger numbers are always easier to sell), I've had 30-40 GB Linux setups on dual-boot machines where the primary was Windows, and never really had space problems. And lots of the things that eat up space on consumer machines (like video) are stuff that is better on a hard disk anyway. So I could easily see computers that aren't heavily used for video or similar applicaitons going to SSDs if 32-40 GB SSD are affordable, and computers with a 32-40 GB primary SSD as well as an HDD, where the HDD is mainly used for things where sequential transfer speed rather than random access time is key. The trick for the latter is getting a good configuration/UI setup that makes it "just work" for the most common applications without the user manually choosing locations (mapping locations appropriately, and maybe implementing MIME-type-based defaults for download locations), while giving power users precise control.
If you want to argue about Federalist 10, I'll be happy to.
If I wanted to argue about Federalist 10, I probably would have been the one to introduce it into the debate. I'm just pointing out that the bit you clip out of it doesn't support your point. Especially if you read the two sentences preceding it.
You are getting bogged down with the language as if you were in an English class.
When you make a an argument that is inherently semantic ("The US is a republic, not a democracy"), you shouldn't be suprised that the correct technical use of terms becomes an issue.
A representative democracy *IS* a Republic. It's describing the TYPE of republic.
Wrong. Some representative democracies are also republics. Some are rather emphatically not republics. The set of representative democracies overlaps the set of republics, but is not a subset of it.
You cannot have a representative democracy that is NOT a republic
Yes, you can. For instance, All 16 of the Commonwealth Realms of which Elizabeth II is the monarch are representative democracies, and none of them are republics.
In my opinion, linguistically it's oxymoronic to define something as "representative democracy"
Yes, its quite clear that you don't understand the meaning of most of the terms used to describe governments.
You need to looke at phrases like "Republican Democracy" as a single word rather than "Democracy being modified by Republican" like you were in an English class.
In all the time I spent getting a political science degree (and before and since), I've never seen the phrase "Republican Democracy" used anywhere except in your post. I'd prefer not to look at phrases like that at all.
But I can assure that "democratic republic", when used to describe a government -- by people who actually know what they are talking about, even outside of "English class" -- is "republic" modified by "democratic", "representative democracy" is "democracy" modified by "representative", "federal republic" is "republic" modified by "federal", and "constitutional republic" is "republic" modified by "constitutional". And all of them are terms that apply to the United States.
What the GP was referring to was a quote about democracies. Our form of government (in the US) was chosen specifically because our founders feared democracies.
No, it was chosen because our founders feared what are variously known as "direct", or "pure" democracies.
Read Federalist 10.
I would suggest that you do so.
You quoted this line:
Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Note the qualifier "such" in that sentence? It means the author is talking about a particular kind of democracy. Which subset? Well, lets read the two sentences before the one you quote:
From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.
You go on with:
You can say that our republic is a liberal democracy -- But it's just a term to describe the type of REPUBLIC it is, not what type of DEMOCRACY it is.
Well, know, that's wrong. If I say its a "liberal democracy", then "liberal" is obviously describing the kind of "democracy" it is. Just as if I say, more relevantly to this threat, that it is a "representative democracy", "representative" is telling what kind "democracy" it is.
If I say, on the other hand, that it is a democratic republic, then "democratic" is saying what kind of "republic" it is.
A system can be a "liberal democracy" (and even a "representative democracy") without being a republic, and it can be a republic without being any kind of democracy.
If this appropriately meets FAA guidelines than this is fine.
In our system of government, regulatory agency guidelines don't govern Congress, it works the other way around. FAA guidelines are adopted within whatever regulatory authority Congress grants the FAA.
If it worked the other way around, we'd have some kind of weird bureaucratic dictatorship instead of a representative democracy.
No one outside hardcore rightwing Americans thinks that a Republic is an entity distinct from a democracy.
More precisely, no one who knows what they are talking about thinks that being a Republic excludes also being a Democracy. The two are definitely distinct, just like being, say, green is distinct from being a car. But just because green and car are distinct doesn't mean you can't have something that is both green and a car.
The USA is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.
The US is a Constitutional Republic. Its also a Democratic Republic. Its also a Federal Republic. Its also a Representative Democracy.
Republic and Democracy aren't exclusive sets.
The UK is a Constitutional Monarchy (with a parliamentary implementation of executive powers). It's essentially a Republic.
No, its not "essentially a Republic". One of the essential feature of a Republic isn't elected representatives, its not having a monarch. Monarchy and Republic are, unlike Republic and Democracy, mutually exclusive.
However, while being a Constitutional Monarchy, the UK is also, like the US, a Representative Democracy (and, unlike the US, a Parliamentary Democarcy.)
No, we bought it for $5-$10 on a floppy in a retail establishment.
While its true that you could buy shareware --the payment was notionally for the media and duplication, not a license to use -- it could also be freely redistributed, and generally was, so that while some people might buy it in stores, most people didn't (that was, in fact, key to getting it into lots of hands of people who might choose to pay for a full license.)
That's pretty much the opposite of paying for a "expanded demo" download, where you are paying specifically for the license.
No, shareware was free (as in beer) either limited demo or sometimes full-featured software with an evaluation or limited-time-use term (sometimes with some enforcement mechanism, sometimes not), which could be upgraded to full-and-unrestricted use by paying a fee.
So, pretty much like conventional free-demo software. Not much at all like "pay-for-a-demo, then pay-more-for-the-full-product" software that is proposed here.
Also, the courts are granting one of the masterminds leniency in exchange for prosecuting their underlings? Isn't that the opposite of how it works? Reducing the sentence of a drug kingpin in exchange for testimony against 2 of his street dealers, really?
You are looking at the small picutre of the individual instance, where, yeah, maybe it doesn't make sense.
Part of the big picture, though, is this: if you do this, then the small fry have more motivation to preemptively turn in the top dog, because they know if the top dog gets caught for other reasons, he has a motivation to turn them in. Which makes it more likely that someone will turn in the top dog in the first place.
The FLAW of the whole thing is the BRITISH GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE which decides that a fall of more than six (6) feet SHOULD BE DEEMED LESS URGENT, AND EXCLUDED FROM AN EIGHT (8) MINUTE CATEGORY A TARGET RESPONSE TIME " !!
No, the flaw is that the way the system was set up to implement this decision, the "fall of more than 6 feet => Category B" rule overrode the "presence of life-threatening condition => Category A" rule, such that a fall over more than 6 feet (that should, per the British rule, be a Category B by itself) with a life-threatening condition (that should, per the rules, be a Category A) resulted in the incident being treated as Category B, rather than Category A.
More specifically, the system flaw is that the system doesn't treat any condition which results in a higher-priority category as automatically trumping a condition which would result in a lower-priority response category.
Interesting. Has there ever been a case requiring the use of new, patented technology before?
I'm not specifically aware of a case turning on the failure to use a specific patented technology under general product liability law (rather than a specific government requirement.)
OTOH, most safety cases turn on the failure to use some approach that was available on the market, and which would have cost the manufacturer more than the approach they in fact chose.
? I mean, if a product was considered safe enough before the technology came out, how could it be considered unsafe afterwords?
The likelihood of harm, the availability of options for mitigating the harm, and the expense of those options are generally factors weighed in these cases. Obviously, the availability on the market of a technology that was not previously available can have an effect on the availability and cost of mitigation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true in the trivial sense that anything any computer can do can be done on any platform that allows control of the same I/O facilities and supports at least one Turing-complete language.
OTOH, I don't see that any substantial argument has been made that .NET would have been an attractive platform for any of these things instead of their actual platforms if Microsoft had done things differently.
Wait, I am confused.
Is your contention that:
1) Countries should be free to choose their own path, or is it
2) Countries should not be free to choose the path of shoving their worldview down everyone's throat
Because you can't have both.
Furthermore, even if we accept that what China is doing is legitimate in terms of "choosing their own path" (rather than a case of "shoving their worldview down everyone's throat"), why does that mean it has to be free of consequences? China chooses its path. Google, GoDaddy, and who knows who else looks at that path and says, "you know what, we're not willing to do business on those terms" and stops doing business in China. Do you think that not only should countries be able to choose their own path, but that private entities should be actively compelled to continue to do business in countries that they no longer wish to do business in?
Yeah, but its more expensive in up front cost, and almost certainly more expensive for the ongoing cost as well if you use it significantly (data plans typically have caps on the order of 5-10GB/mo where additional charges kick in), so its probably not a good choice for a replacement for an always-on home connection.
OTOH, it sounds like it would be nice as a mobile "personal access point" if you've got other WiFi-enabled gadgets -- like the many other devices that do the same, but with the advantage that WiMax is faster than 3G.
Because its a handheld computer/digital camcorder/phone combination unit for people who want to do lots of things, but don't want to carry lots of gadgets.
If the question is "why HDMI?", my guess is the reason is "because HDMI is what you can most count on being supported on HDTVs, which are the most likely thing people are going to want to plug in their phone to play their 720p videos on" (for computers, presumably, they'll just download the video to the computer.)
A corporation's goal is to serve the shared interests of those who own it, particularly those with voting rights. Usually, especially for a publicly traded corporation, those shared interests are effectively limited to financial returns (and particularly short-term ones) in one form or another; OTOH, when Google went public, they structured the stock ownership so the class of stock held by the original stockholders held disproportionate voting rights. Hence, the shared interests of Google's owners -- particularly when weighted by voting rights -- are more likely to include longer-term and non-financial interests.
Actually, no. It wouldn't affect the number of politicians needed. What it would reduce is the depth of analytical staff needed to comprehend laws, which would then shift the balance of power away from groups with lots of money to spend on policy in a particular area, because then they wouldn't be as easily able to mislead as to what legislation would actually do.
Because "everyone else does it" isn't a good excuse.
No, its not different in the US. The US has very clear and documentation requirements (the I-9 requirements), which had no effect on the problem, because the problem with US immigration policy isn't work documentation requirements, its the basic structure of the immigration policies.
True, I could say that, but I didn't. I said we need to fix the fundamental structure of our immigration system to deal with the underlying problems, and that until we did that, the repeated efforts to deal with the problem by rejiggering documentation requirements for work based on the presumption of illegality were going to continue to inconvenience law-abiding workers and employers without doing anything about the problems they are notionally aimed at fixing.
A simple first step would be to, without changing overall legal immigration limits, remove the cap on immigration in the limited categories from any one individual country. That cap, alone, causes countries where there are large numbers of people who both want to come to the US and who are sponsored by family here to face decade-plus queues for legal immigration. If we are going to have an immigration policy that notionally prioritizes family unification (because having more family here reduces transfer payments, because it gives immigrants and naturalized citizens already here greater ties to the country, and because people having stronger family support networks here are less likely to consume public resources) it makes no sense to have structure our policy so that, with all the features that exist to promote that priority, there is one that absolutely frustrates it.
Shifting to soft caps in the legal categories, where applicants could pay a fee (which could be paid on their behalf by, e.g., sponsors in the U.S.) to bypass the queues might also help reduce the incentive to immigrate illegally while mitigating costs associated with the absolute level of immigration.
This essentially is just furthering the "presumption of illegality" -- the presumption that a person is not allowed to work in the United States.
This is a fairly intrusive, insulting to the legal worker, and unnecessarily burdensome on business set of requirements that have all come into place because Congress writes immigration laws that are broken-by-design, and fails to enforce them effectively.
If we'd fix the fundamental structure of our immigration system to deal with the underlying problems, there wouldn't be the problems that we keep getting these kinds of band-aid "fixes" (like I-9 requirements) for, which never work.
Are you arguing that the United States of America hasn't, through various acts of Congress and ratified treaties, decided to trade with totalitarian states including China, or are you arguing that the U.S.A. isn't a free nation?
Capitalists, as a class, aren't particularly known for being supporters of workers rights, free speech, or a fair marketplace. In fact, they are the class against whom advocates of workers rights are usually struggling, the class that seeks to suppress negative comments on their products through the legal system, and a class that seeks to lobby government to protect their own interests by creating barriers to entry to the markets in which they have established themselves.
I'm not saying those things are true of Google's owners, in particular, but certainly the idea that capitalists wouldn't deal with people for the reasons you describe is, well, hard to reconcile with most of the history of capitalists.
I don't know about Opera mini, and I know even less about Opera mini for the iPhone, but Opera has the best support of any browser that I know of(iPhone Safari is a close second) for HTML5's specialized input fields in forms, so I wouldn't be surprised.
They've stated it lots of times as a reason for rejecting things, sure, but often while allowing other things that are just as duplicative of the same core functionality as the the thing rejected with that stated reason.
So, either they are just extremely inconsistent in enforcing the rule, or the "rule" is just an excuse.
You seem to be comparing remote application hosting vs. in-house application hosting; cloud computing (dynamic server provisioning by divorcing logical instances from physical servers) is somewhat orthogonal to that. While certainly its popularly used by companies that want to offer remote application hosting, there are solutions available (including open source ones) for companies that want to use cloud computing in their own data centers.
Um, no.
RAM disks -- being RAM -- aren't permanent storage, and were never held up as a replacement for any kind of permanent storage. They were always a work around for permanent storage being too slow for applications that had a demand for responsiveness and could accept the risk of data loss to acheive it, and even then were largely useful for applications that had been designed for older (relatively) constrained RAM situations, and therefore did stuff "on disk" not because it needed stored at that point, but to avoid keeping too much in RAM at once.
While most computers come with bigger disks (because the cost of making spinning disks makes the marginal cost bigger, and bigger numbers are always easier to sell), I've had 30-40 GB Linux setups on dual-boot machines where the primary was Windows, and never really had space problems. And lots of the things that eat up space on consumer machines (like video) are stuff that is better on a hard disk anyway. So I could easily see computers that aren't heavily used for video or similar applicaitons going to SSDs if 32-40 GB SSD are affordable, and computers with a 32-40 GB primary SSD as well as an HDD, where the HDD is mainly used for things where sequential transfer speed rather than random access time is key. The trick for the latter is getting a good configuration/UI setup that makes it "just work" for the most common applications without the user manually choosing locations (mapping locations appropriately, and maybe implementing MIME-type-based defaults for download locations), while giving power users precise control.
If I wanted to argue about Federalist 10, I probably would have been the one to introduce it into the debate. I'm just pointing out that the bit you clip out of it doesn't support your point. Especially if you read the two sentences preceding it.
When you make a an argument that is inherently semantic ("The US is a republic, not a democracy"), you shouldn't be suprised that the correct technical use of terms becomes an issue.
Wrong. Some representative democracies are also republics. Some are rather emphatically not republics. The set of representative democracies overlaps the set of republics, but is not a subset of it.
Yes, you can. For instance, All 16 of the Commonwealth Realms of which Elizabeth II is the monarch are representative democracies, and none of them are republics.
Yes, its quite clear that you don't understand the meaning of most of the terms used to describe governments.
In all the time I spent getting a political science degree (and before and since), I've never seen the phrase "Republican Democracy" used anywhere except in your post. I'd prefer not to look at phrases like that at all.
But I can assure that "democratic republic", when used to describe a government -- by people who actually know what they are talking about, even outside of "English class" -- is "republic" modified by "democratic", "representative democracy" is "democracy" modified by "representative", "federal republic" is "republic" modified by "federal", and "constitutional republic" is "republic" modified by "constitutional". And all of them are terms that apply to the United States.
No, it was chosen because our founders feared what are variously known as "direct", or "pure" democracies.
I would suggest that you do so.
You quoted this line:
Note the qualifier "such" in that sentence? It means the author is talking about a particular kind of democracy. Which subset? Well, lets read the two sentences before the one you quote:
You go on with:
Well, know, that's wrong. If I say its a "liberal democracy", then "liberal" is obviously describing the kind of "democracy" it is. Just as if I say, more relevantly to this threat, that it is a "representative democracy", "representative" is telling what kind "democracy" it is.
If I say, on the other hand, that it is a democratic republic, then "democratic" is saying what kind of "republic" it is.
A system can be a "liberal democracy" (and even a "representative democracy") without being a republic, and it can be a republic without being any kind of democracy.
In our system of government, regulatory agency guidelines don't govern Congress, it works the other way around. FAA guidelines are adopted within whatever regulatory authority Congress grants the FAA.
If it worked the other way around, we'd have some kind of weird bureaucratic dictatorship instead of a representative democracy.
More precisely, no one who knows what they are talking about thinks that being a Republic excludes also being a Democracy. The two are definitely distinct, just like being, say, green is distinct from being a car. But just because green and car are distinct doesn't mean you can't have something that is both green and a car.
The US is a Constitutional Republic. Its also a Democratic Republic. Its also a Federal Republic. Its also a Representative Democracy.
Republic and Democracy aren't exclusive sets.
No, its not "essentially a Republic". One of the essential feature of a Republic isn't elected representatives, its not having a monarch. Monarchy and Republic are, unlike Republic and Democracy, mutually exclusive.
However, while being a Constitutional Monarchy, the UK is also, like the US, a Representative Democracy (and, unlike the US, a Parliamentary Democarcy.)
While its true that you could buy shareware --the payment was notionally for the media and duplication, not a license to use -- it could also be freely redistributed, and generally was, so that while some people might buy it in stores, most people didn't (that was, in fact, key to getting it into lots of hands of people who might choose to pay for a full license.)
That's pretty much the opposite of paying for a "expanded demo" download, where you are paying specifically for the license.
No, shareware was free (as in beer) either limited demo or sometimes full-featured software with an evaluation or limited-time-use term (sometimes with some enforcement mechanism, sometimes not), which could be upgraded to full-and-unrestricted use by paying a fee.
So, pretty much like conventional free-demo software. Not much at all like "pay-for-a-demo, then pay-more-for-the-full-product" software that is proposed here.
You are looking at the small picutre of the individual instance, where, yeah, maybe it doesn't make sense.
Part of the big picture, though, is this: if you do this, then the small fry have more motivation to preemptively turn in the top dog, because they know if the top dog gets caught for other reasons, he has a motivation to turn them in. Which makes it more likely that someone will turn in the top dog in the first place.
No, the flaw is that the way the system was set up to implement this decision, the "fall of more than 6 feet => Category B" rule overrode the "presence of life-threatening condition => Category A" rule, such that a fall over more than 6 feet (that should, per the British rule, be a Category B by itself) with a life-threatening condition (that should, per the rules, be a Category A) resulted in the incident being treated as Category B, rather than Category A.
More specifically, the system flaw is that the system doesn't treat any condition which results in a higher-priority category as automatically trumping a condition which would result in a lower-priority response category.
I'm not specifically aware of a case turning on the failure to use a specific patented technology under general product liability law (rather than a specific government requirement.)
OTOH, most safety cases turn on the failure to use some approach that was available on the market, and which would have cost the manufacturer more than the approach they in fact chose.
The likelihood of harm, the availability of options for mitigating the harm, and the expense of those options are generally factors weighed in these cases. Obviously, the availability on the market of a technology that was not previously available can have an effect on the availability and cost of mitigation.