Yes I know some of the MRA types got that way from not being able to see their kids or something - rant at the courts and not some feminists who still can't get into a movie awards night without wearing high heels - go for the people with real power instead of the almost totally powerless.

who just opposed renewal of the Patriot Act ... by filibustering it at a crucial period prior to its renewal.

Not critical enough that such a delay achieved anything other than sending a message.
BTW, I completely agree with your text I cut out, but my point is that it's the actual votes against it that matter and various proceedural games are mostly pointless unless they influence that in some way.

I see the filibuster as a flaw in democracy (like the shutdown trick Cruz pulled) and not the person, despite my rants about an author that it turns out he wasn't named after, and disagreeing with some (but in no way all) of his policies. It's sad that he can't just vote against it and get media attention for that, but instead has to be a roadblock for ten hours to get the message out.

Indeed.

Oh, yes. Just replace Patriarchy with Matriarchy. That will solve all problems. Not. It will be a bit different, but it will be evil fuckery just the same.

Far more men than women are interested in joining the sciences as a career.

So really, Science is predominantly male and that is by choice of the women. The good thing is that any woman that wants to be a scientist and has the talents and skills can be one in the western world. The reality is that most do not want to. Deal with it.

Now, there are parts of MS-DOS that are unrelated to file I/O. For example, there are functions for allocating memory, parsing a string containing potential wildcards into FCB format, that sort of thing. Those functions were still handled by MS-DOS

So in terms of actually getting stuff done (eg. memory management) MSDOS was there to do it - thus for all practical purposes the Win32 was running on top of MSDOS. It wasn't "just a bootloader" as various people in this thread have been ranting about.

it's quite clear that everything is deliberately vague beyond the borders of the US

It's her ignorance of the USA, especially functioning capitalism and a functioning state with elected officials where she has such breathtaking ignorance. Atlas Shrugged could be renamed "Bring back the Tsar and his petty nobles to run the place", so much of it is about the horror of dirty little serfs like the science guy having positions of power.

And seriously, how is Rand supposed to have undermined democracy anyway?

Her aristocratic manifesto was taken seriously be far too many people who take it far more seriously than a shallow SF book should be.

I note that we in the US currently have a president who is the antithesis of anything Rand believed in,

If you pay attention you'll notice that they have ALL been that from George Washington onwards. IMHO that shows more about Rand's lack of understanding of the USA in the years when she wrote the novel than anything wrong with the United States.
It's a European novel about aristocracy (screwing their way to the top as jailbait no less), highly critical about egalitarian colonials like the people who built the United States and those who carry on inspired by them. It's had a LOT of influence on people who didn't know better and it's distorted their view of reality.
If you want to read something to defuse such shit try some Joseph Conrad - well written, lots of it is short, and he made sure he had a very deep understanding of the topics he wrote about. "Under Western Eyes" shows what Rand had to be afraid of in her earlier years and it's a pity she never wrote something like that instead of her big insult to the west "Atlas Shrugged".

LAN Manager was multiuser. The client wasn't but that doesn't make much difference as the non-multiuser smartphones phones using apps and websites today proves quite well.

I see turbidostato below made the same point.

OS/2 had networking (really good networking) and multitasking. Lan Manager (based on OS/2) as well as Novell (worked with OS/2) had file permissions. So they produced a product with those 3 facets.

Windows was not a true OS until Windows 95

That ran on MSDOS as well, all the way up to Win ME. WinNT was the cut down VMS inspired thing that finally got us off the cut down CP/M clone.
Microsoft have always been a "me too" company, which is a description not a criticism since it was often about doing something involved on far cheaper hardware than the competition.