Am I forcing you to reply when you have nothing to say? I'm quite sure I don't have that ability. If I had it, I would not see a good use for it.

Apparently, I pissed you off enough for you to admit that indeed you don't vote at all. Thanks for playing. Feel free to ask for your door prize on the way out.

You sure are selling your anti-voting strategy hard, here. Apparently to you, skipping elections makes you completely infallible in regards to disagreeable decisions made by politicians. Some of us, however, rather value participating in the voting process.

It is nice to see someone not calling me crazy over doing such things. I wouldn't do this in a production environment, and suspect you likely wouldn't either. Sometimes free entertainment is a funny thing in what some people find entertaining, I guess :)

Have you had any luck getting responses from Chinese ISPs when you report abuse? I used to do it fairly regularly but for years now it seems like I might as well just send the report to /dev/null instead. While the lack of response doesn't mean they aren't doing anything, it doesn't support any notion of the email being read by a human being, either.

I distinctly recall you still calling for impeachment after the 2012 election.

Why do you even bother to hit reply when you don't want to participate in a discussion? I even went into the rabbit hole for you and addressed your off-topic questions.

Reagan deserves no more credit for the fall of the USSR than does David Hasselhoff

You really aren't much of a student of history, are you?

Gorbachev was head of the USSR almost as long as St. Ronnie was in charge here. However neither of them are particularly important to the case I had in mind.

You didn't even set your trap on the right pathway.

I was particularly thinking of the Velvet Revolution, which took place in November 1989. You just named three people who had quite nearly nothing to do with it in any direction.

You are very plain on how badly you want the POTUS removed from office before its natural expiration date, at any cost. You used to call for impeachment. Now you still call for removal but you admit that you are not calling for impeachment any more. My only question is at what point did you formally make that change? You have written far too many comments on your desire to see him removed for me to search through all of them to find when you switched. I'm not asking for an exact date or anything, I'm just curious to know at what point you came to accept that time had marched along too far for impeachment to be a useful tool for removing President Lawnchair from office.

If you want to claim that your ambitions are somehow "patriotic" - or even just merely legal - you can even make that claim if you want. I'm just interested in knowing when reality struck you.

Well, I can't seem to get you back to the topic. I might as well taunt you over your rampant abandonment then, right? Feel free to return to the topic of the JE at any time...

Me. I don't really expect that anyone else is reading at this point. Once in a while you chime in but mostly it's just smitty and I. Actually, an argument could be made that it is just me, as smitty is mostly a write-only participant here.

I am comfortable stating that the script kiddies are most likely attacking my system by IP address alone, not by its domain name. I say this because I have yet to see a single one of their IP addresses show up in both my system and httpd logs. Of course, they may have seen the website and then attacked it by name from another system but that seems like more effort than it would be worth. I have also searched for their IP addresses before and found other blog entries from other people online - generally people not hosting web pages at all - which also suggests these kids are just going through IP address ranges and running their scripts on any system that responds.

I do like your approaches, I may keep them in mind in the future. For now, I actually view the failed attempts as amusement. My ISP doesn't seem to care at all (even though I have a residential cable modem) and it doesn't hinder my ability to do what I need to do, so it doesn't really make a difference to me at present. I could certainly see that changing in the future, though.

I should have been more verbose, I am fully aware that they don't care about my server specifically. Indeed they would almost certainly try a lot harder if they did.

I am aware that it is quite common. I was not intending to come across as "cocky", I'm not sure why you came to that conclusion.

If someone wants badly enough to get in, they will get in. Indeed as you said most of the Chinese attempts are just looking for highly vulnerable systems that they can easily get in to. I have my system open in the way it is open for a reason, and I accept the risks that go with it. So far it has worked out for me; nobody has felt it was worth the effort to get in (and if they did get in, they would likely conclude afterwards that it wasn't worth the effort!). I know a lot of the script kiddies are doing this to try to build botnets; if my server suddenly started going apeshit in the middle of the night, it would be time to power it down and reinstall the OS from scratch.

I have a web server at home running openssh, open to the world (for reasons that are not critical here). I regularly have various idiots trying to hack in to it, which I find amusing.

The majority of attempts are done on root. It is not unusual to have thousands of attempts in 24 hours. They'll never get in that way; not because the root password is difficult (it is difficult enough that a few thousand guesses would not likely be sufficient) but rather because like any sane person I don't allow root to log in through ssh.

Occasionally I see "white pages" attempts, going through long lists of common names. They make usually no more than 3 attempts at each name (I presume one attempt is blank, haven't bothered to see what the others are). The problem with that strategy is that they pretty well never hit a valid name. Being as my ssh server won't respond any differently to a valid name than to an invalid one, they never get any useful feedback on that endeavor.

Now, important systems (say at large corporations) are probably targeted by more dedicated attempts than what gets directed at my server. I mostly see script kiddies from China who give up after 24-36 hours. These kids certainly won't benefit from this bug.

That said, I will still patch my server.

I'm generally curious as to how you reach that conclusion. In fact I see the conservatives as the ones who are tilting at windmills, here. You and others are constantly trying to find new and clever ways to justify system turnover without recognizing the people's voting privilege or their right to petition the government (or term structure - or the legal system itself and its promise of the right to a fair trial - for that matter).

Would that be a civil war, finally reducing our nation of 50 states to more than one independent nation? It does seem that one side is arming itself for a war, though it certainly isn't the "liberal" side. It's really a shame here that the US isn't the "communist" state that you claim it to be, as there is precedent for ex-communist states to dissolve into multiple countries without bloodshed. Unfortunately run-away capitalism and hyperconcentration of power doesn't tend to unwind in such a peaceful manner.

Though of course if you are afraid that a war is coming, you are - as I stated before - free to leave this country to live somewhere else. You keep telling people who disagree with you that they are free to leave, perhaps you should look in to taking your own advice.

When in doubt, insult me, right?

The audience has a question for you, though. Now that you claim to no longer be trying for impeachment, at what point would you say you had that change of heart and decided to commit instead to extralegal removal of the POTUS? I had told you some time ago that you had run out of time for impeachment, and you replied by claiming that not to be the case. I've seen some waffling and revisionist history from you before, I'd like to know what degree of that is present in this new line of thought you are presenting.