Very true. Local councils, especially, seem to only run IE6. There's a persistent 15-20% of our users who remain stubbornly on IE6 - this hasn't changed since this time last year, and all the inroads being made by IE8 are at the expense of IE7.

The word "republic" has a few more shades of meaning; from the Latin "res publica", or "public affairs", it implies that the affairs of the nation are the collective interests of its public citizens, rather than the private domain of a despotic monarch. The US system of government is basically the British parliamentary system from c. 1780, replacing the monarch with a president and with greater and more formalised democracy. Certainly you guys seem to treat your presidents with far more respect that we treat our cretinous prime ministers... :)