I just built mine last week. That was a first for me in ~7 years. The box it just replaced was around 4 years old (needless to say, I'm not a gamer either). I went back and forth with TomsHardware, Newegg, etc. reviews narrowing it down. Ended up with a fairly cheap system ($500'ish) that does me fine. All items with a cost came from Microcenter:

Case: Gutted system but reused my previous Asus microATX case.
PSU: Reused same PSU. Little 400w thing seems to be okay. It's not powering much.
RAM: 4x4GB sticks, bought within the last year when I upgraded from 8GB. Reused those also.
Mainboard: H97M-Plus ($114)
CPU: Intel i5-4590, quad-core@3.2Ghz up from my previous i5-650 dual core. ($200).
Video: Integrated CPU video card. I'm fine with it.
SDD: Samsung 250GB EVO840 ($139)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda, 2TB ($78. I don't need much space. Coupled with my old 1TB drive, I'm good for awhile)

Not all hearing aids work for all ears. It sounds like the people next to your parents have a very moderate hearing loss whereas your father has a level higher than that. I wear a BTE in one ear (other ear is just there for looks these days...doesn't work at all) because the inside-the-canal HA's simply aren't strong enough for me. If I had to guess, and this is purely a guess, it was a perfect situation of your hotel-mates didn't need stronger HA's and your father does. Neither one had a need to know of the other options available because the option THEY needed was the one that suited them.

True on the insurance part, not so much on the gov't part. I get a digital hearing aid for 100% free (thank you, taxpayers) every two years from the VA. They rolled to full digital HA's a long time ago.

How about fail2ban? We use it to block multiple SSH attempts. It blacklists IP's for a user-defined amount of time and then unblocks them again. Works like a charm, every time. Hell, it's even locked me out on more than one time (because I didn't update the whitelist file for my workstation's IP).

"Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address."

http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

>If they skimmed money the traditional way (bribes and scams) would we call them a "financegang"?

No, we'd probably call them "Congressman".

They already paid for your time in class and the expense FOR the class. Their obligation is done. You should be doing it for yourself. Don't expect it to all be handed to you.

Ask your interviewers how long they've been with the company, and why do they stay? The second one is more important if you're in a current "hot" field where people jump ship quite a bit. It tends to give a little more insight into the corporate culture and those you'll be working with, in my experiences.