You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

I guess I'm "the other guy" because I also liked Pocket (originally Read It Later), though I stopped using it a few years before it got killed. I agree that Mozilla buying it was a mistake, though I try to be charitable and hope it was partly because they wanted to improve the privacy and openness of a product that could, as you suggest, be used to harvest user information. An open web is their mission, if you believe it.

I've looked around to see how much Mozilla paid for it and can only find "an undisclosed amount". Where are you getting the $20M number?

One thing I think most people don't understand about Pocket is that it was more than just a bookmark database. When you saved a site, it really saved a snapshot of the entire page so that it was available even if changed or removed later, and pages were cached so they could be read offline. These were the unique "TiVo" features of Read It Later that made it more than bookmarks.html and also required backend support, which is why the "just make it an addon" argument doesn't really hold water. Someone has to host the service and data, and that (plus the existing userbase) is really what Mozilla was buying.

But all that said, it was a boondoggle and was probably just Mozilla trying desperately to find ways to be relevant in "mobile". They could have easily built this functionality themselves at a cost much less than whatever they did pay for Pocket. Eventually shutting the whole thing down was the shitty cherry on top.

Archive.is is usually pretty good at getting around paywalls.

Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water

If we changed spellings so that they followed how words are pronounced:
* We would have words spelled differently in different countries and also different parts of the same country.
* Over time spelling would change, this would make it hard to read old texts. By old I mean 100 or 200 years; even older would be worse.
* Dictionary compilers would have a harder task than they do today.
* Mechanical (ie computer) analysis of texts would be harder, more errors.

If anything we should use a single world wide English spelling. I am English and so I think that it should be the King's English as spoken & written in England. I do not expect those in other countries to agree with me but it would be good if they saw sense.

Fake news! The glaciers are really growing, CNN just plays the video in reverse, everyone knows it, even backward people know it, I checked with Eric. The atmosphere loves USA gas, it tells me all the time, air loves talking to me just after lunch, telling me how competent I am to a hymn of trumpets and tubas. So grand!

It was a good run, but ultimately Google's giant stomps plus your ability to get distracted has ended the party. I'm not cleaning up the puke.

But what keeps other schools from claiming they are wonderful and doing the same?

put a slight but unknown delay in all transactions so as to make micro-slicing a worthless endeavor.

Some of the banks giving or buying dodgy loans back then claimed fancy new software allowed them to mitigate the risk of questionable borrowers.

Problem was, USA was the beta test.

If it floats, it's a witch

Don't give ICEstapo ideas for transgender purges. They miss medieval "science".

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I often compare with Quebec to get an idea of the order of magnitude:
https://www.hydroquebec.com/ge...

Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...