She had a real opportunity to educate people about a proper relationship between people and their government, during a time of creeping totalitarianism and collectivism.
Sadly, she also wanted to create a cult.
The chapter about her in Brian Doherty's "Radicals for Capitalism" most certainly bore this out. My favorite part was when she sat her husband down and informed him that the Objectivist philosophy dictated that she should be allowed to bang her assistant.
When I was in the Bay Area during the '90s dot-boom, it took me 90-100 minutes to get from Fremont to Palo Alto. During the dot-bust, it was more like 40 minutes. I cannot imagine what it's like now.
I regret that I didn't use that time to learn Japanese or something.
Having worked in the memory chip business for 10 years: It's cheap!! Hell, for a while, companies were dumping memories below cost.
I remember a Fry's newspaper ad that said something like: "$50 1GB DIMM, $0 after in-store discount. (Limit 2 per customer.)"
Kind of similar to the old (and possibly apocryphal) Sun Microsystems legend: Frustrated that too many domestic programmers were spoiled with ample CPU speeds, they hired a bunch of Russian programmers who dealt with the export restrictions on computing gear and thus had learned to write tight, elegant code.
I use Linux at home and I managed to sneak a Linux box into work, contra-policy. I realize I'm in the tiniest of market segments.
But the recurring "linux-on-the-desktop" discussion is inane. Are we back to the whole Lindows/Linspire circlejerk of a decade ago?
Linux has won the battles that matter: mobile/embedded and supercomputing. The goal of Linux dominating on the desktop simply doesn't matter as much anymore.