The Friday night fight designed to get those "Men's rights" types out from under their rocks and looking at whatever ads Dice puts up is late this week.

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.

"Bootstrapped" implies it goes away instead of being an active layer handling memory management etc - so it's incorrect.
MSDOS stayed resident and was used by Win95 etc.

From the article:

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".

"USA Freedom Act" - what evil manipulative piece of shit gave that name to a bill on communication monitoring?

I don't know where you got that from. It ran on an updated MSDOS with 32 bit capability (MSDOSv7) but it was still MSDOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

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.

That makes far more sense than the article I read some years ago about his father being so batshit insane as to give his child the name "Rand".

I just can't see why so many people think of her in an American context when she knew fuck-all about the west. If Stalin had parachuted a writer into the USA with instructions on writing something to undermine democracy it wouldn't have been as effective as the damage that Rand did with her rants about anything that wasn't aristocracy.
It's "twilight" for people who think they were born to rule.

The entire theme was anti-cronyism

How do you explain Dagny if that was the case? The theme was about how nice it would be to have the nobility, such as Dagny, back in charge

Translation for the slow - name dropping tells me nothing especially since what you have referred to has nothing to do with paralysis of government.
So, instead of hiding behind name dropping that has nothing to do with the topic please let us know why you think a government that is unable to function, thus letting the unelected run things, is such a good thing?

Until you have, there is no possibility of having a rational discussion.

Pretending to take offence and be too stupid to get the point is cowardice.

Then what exactly are you saying you want? Don't hide behind the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers and tell me exactly what it is you are advocating that is in some way different to what George Washington delivered.

Again, rather than tossing accusations & insults

Good point, it appears that instead you may be advocating something more like the Iranian model where there are elected officials but they have no actual say in running the country.
Is that more like it?
If not, then say what you mean instead of this childish shit of suggesting we are better of with something other than an elected government.

"Check the facts" from some guy that thinks constipation is an effective form of government? I think you need to heed your own advice instead of blindly handing it out.