Are you saying that Chris Christy is machinima? Move over Max Headroom, that's really good shit! Where's the Kickstarter for their next digital marionette?

And yet, in spite of your accurate assessment, there are still legions of dogmatic libertarians and "conservatives" who resolutely insist that Big Government is inefficient and evil but Big Business is saintly and svelte and can efficiently solve all the world's problems where those inefficiently evil governments are doomed to fail.

To those dogmatists I ask a simple question: when have you ever seen a business who customer base was exactly the size of the entire United States population? Or asked another way, if we scaled your eternally efficient business up to the size of the networking nightmare required to serve such a huge clientele such a diverse array of products and services, would your business still be more efficient?

Ummmm... just a thought: Google?

... we don't glorify hackers, we glorify good people doing good things that benefit the common good. It just so happens that some of those people accomplish that goal by hacking.

Just WHY?

I have a working '486 VLB motherboard system myself, 4 MEGAbytes of RAM, wow! I had the parts mothballed for decades and last year finally rebuilt a working system from it. I should be one of the people selling that stuff on eBay....

Yeah, I didn't know. Did laws change or did I hear it wrong in the first place?

Or, as other folks have corrected me, in a 7-inch square in the opposite corner,

Except ironically that would require repealing laws in California since windshield mounts were made illegal many years ago. I can't recall whether dash mounts were similarly criminalized. California became a nanny state a long time ago and that nanny is a German fraulein bitch.

Hey, they looked American to me! Doesn't Dell have a patent on fan grills and such?

That is contrary evidence that I'm not prepared to dispute, but I still have to wonder where all the CRTs and American-looking PC chassis in TFA's photos might have come from, if not the United States?

Are you just baiting us or do you really not know? Overseas is EXACTLY where all that stuff goes. Virtually none of it remains to be processed in the United States. Much of it also winds up in similar locations in China.

FTFY.

The VA folks you have encountered are all rank-and-file types and none of them top brass, correct? If so then your analogy is misleading, since the people we are discussing here are in fact the decision-makers and the adverse consequences of their decisions. While the rank and file folks may be very humane people, experience has (or should have) taught us that the majority of top brass in every human hierarchy are sociopaths, not humane people. Your anecdote is not representative of those people, and they are the subject here.

Obtuse and dogmatic in the same breath. That takes talent.