I glanced at her biography and saw that not only had she lived in the US for many decades
FFS she was immersed in the bullshit factory of Hollywood and wouldn't have known a normal US workplace if it fell on her.
None of them share the radical viewpoint of Ayn Rand
That's my point, they are all heirs to George Washington instead of King George or the Tsar.
If you read stuff about or set in 19th century Russia before reading Rand it all stands out like dogs balls - especially little Princess Dagny.
Too bad it became more complicated and scientific
It started that way FFS. Seriously guys, how many PHP cut and paste dudes know assembly for a CPU, any CPU? Programming has got a lot LESS complicated and scientific over time, far less than when Grace Hopper was at the keyboard.
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.
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".
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood