It's funny, because this illustrates the bigger problem of people not being aware that when they stop taking antibiotics early, they potentially breed resistant bacteria if their illness relapses. *Noone* should have any antibiotics left to throw the garbage, with the rare exception of someone having an allergic reaction to them.

My one coworker ceased her antibiotics when she felt better, relapsed, and had to get stronger antibiotics. In the meantime, she infected two of her family members with the more resilient bacteria, one of whom had to be hospitalized.

Until you can name all hundred thousand of the "planets" in our solar system, we won't be using your definition of planet.

Why do you insist 3rd graders should be able to recite all hundred thousand planets from memory yet refuse to do so yourself even with the Internet as your reference?

If only I had mod points, I'd mod you up, sir or madam. At least you understand what this belief is supposed to advocate, whether or not you personally practice it.

I appreciate your sarcasm.

The political elite class that had anything to do with making those decisions likely doesn't actively participate in this site. The most you're likely to find here are people in denial who are clinging to the idea that by voting within the two-party system, they are somehow exercising anything resembling real choice. That doesn't remotely fit your description of what you're looking for.

I agree that the personal insults are pathetic. A lot of people choose things which are (or should be) beneath them.

Well then, in the context of popular television shows, I do stand corrected.

Yes, Heaven forbid the man occupying the highest office of the land and charged with making important decisions be known as an intellectual. I mean, this IS America...

"Being held accountable" is supposed to mean something along the lines of "people might decide they don't like you, or at least don't agree with you". It's not supposed to mean things like "you mysteriously end up on the no-fly list", or "the IRS gives you lots of special attention", or any other methods by which your government -- that's nominally supposed to be serving you -- is going to find a way to screw with your life.

This is more generally known as refusing to be a coward.

Statists generally prefer one-to-many broadcast methods like the evening news to spread their (largely emotional, fear-based) propaganda. This way they know there will be no equal airtime given to someone who logically questions their proposals and looks at them with a critical view. They are too welcome in too many other, much more convenient forums to actually take up your challenge on anything like a level playing field.

Although, a favorite trick of some flavors of statist is to invite dissenters to call into the show. The host will mute the caller, talk over them, refuse to answer inconvenient questions, and usually entirely take over the asking of questions, respond to complex and nuanced issues by badgering the caller with a series of yes/no questions designed to lead to a predetermined conclusion (an abuse of the Socratic method), changing the subject ("We had no justification to be in Iraq." "Saddam was a dictator! Do you support dictators?!"), and use other propaganda techniques designed to appear legitimate. This will convince the naive that any debate is happening, and that no one can successfully get the host to admit fault because the host is always right.

In summary, you're not going to get an honest debate because these people are afraid of honest debate and go to great lengths to avoid it. With a mere five corporations controlling every major newspaper, broadcast TV news service, radio news service, cable news service, and online news outlets, there simply isn't enough diversity to allow for anything in the mainstream other than an echo chamber. It comes in two flavors: "left" and "right", which are two slightly different methods of reaching the same conclusion that the solution to our problems is to concentrate more wealth and power into fewer hands.

They try again and again to implement the same bad ideas, knowing that defeats don't matter, understanding that they only need to score a single victory and their maladaptive proposals will be forever enshrined in law, never to be repealed. These are people who play chess and as such they learned to take a long view of things, realizing that most Americans have incredibly short memories and are only considering the here and now.

Yes, that is an excellent reason to add even more vulnerability vectors!

At least when it comes to the kernel and networking, I have iptables in between.
With SystemD starting the network stack before starting anything else (including iptables), I can no longer even firewall off potential exploitable services.

Too bad they didn't bother to include a functional services manager inside the systemd "service manager" that could bring up iptables before the network stack, perhaps using some dependency based system.

But I fully understand how no mere mortal can wrap their head around the concept of renaming a symlink so iptables rules are prefixed with a lower number than your network services and thus load in a plain clear obvious order.

Maybe one day computers will be able to know "10" comes before "20" without 250 megs of additional software. One can dream at least.

Yeah, except it started as a init. And the init binary is still called systemd. End result is that there is a logical confusion between systemd the init and systemd the project. A confusion that the proponents don't make any effort to clean up, and sometimes appear to even leverage as a cheap way to make opponents look bad.

But then the script backs away. Systemd comes with a massive warning that any changes done outside of systemd's toolchain will be overwritten by systemd. Meaning that once systemd has assumed control over your firewall, do not for one second attempt to adjust iptables directly.