The solution to low-frequency brute force attempts is Denyhosts. It just blocks any host with repeated failed login attempts. I've been using it for longer than I can remember, probably longer than this "Hail Mary" botnet has been in existence. I'm not sure why this author seems to have never heard of it.

That's fine for you, if you've got plenty of cash sitting in the bank. The people who empty the trash bins and wash the floors probably aren't sitting on a couple of months of living expenses in cash.

And what about the "essential" employees? The police and the park rangers and animal keepers at the zoo? Just what are they getting out of this?

There's nothing for Obama to compromise with here; we're talking about a "continuing resolution", whose function is to keep things running *as-is* until Congress works out a new budget. If the Tea Party wants to de-fund Obamacare, they can put that into the *budget*. Nothing is stopping them, except their lack of votes.

All that stuff's still going to get built, it'll just end up costing us more money because the contractors will bill us for delay related costs. Some clouds just don't have a silver lining.

Well, according to TFA:

It seems reasonable to furlough people if they have no place to work or if they can't get anything done during the shutdown. Which is not to say that Lockheed isn't *also* taking advantage of the situation to do other stuff

Still people have to accept that the bad things that happen after a government shutdown aren't *all* just PR and political posturing. You can't shut down the government and expect everything to continue as if nothing happened, although evidently some people did expect exactly that.

Well, let's take the WW2 memorial barricades. As the linked article says it's supposed to be open 24 hours/day, even though it's only staffed during the daytime. So why put up barricades to prevent people from visiting?

My question is this: do you people think the trash visitors leave behind disposes of itself? Or do you think that groundskeepers should be forced to work without pay?

One does not logically follow from the other. The details matter.

Suppose I'm holding three apples that belong to you. When you ask for them back, I announce that I'm going to keep two of them. By your logic both of us are at fault, because there's a compromise position: I give you two apples and keep one of them. Both of us get less than we want, but more than we might get if we continue bickering until the apples rot.

By *my* logic, I'd be at fault because I failed to do something I ought to have done, namely give you back your apples.

I hear these false equivalency arguments all the time, and quite frankly they're idiotic. They could only be true if both sides in a dispute were always equally right.

I once worked for a company that ran a deficit ten years running, and stayed in business. The secret was that it was growing; income and expenditures were on parallel growth tracks, but income lagged slightly. By the time the bills came due there was cash on hand to pay them.

When governments do this, it's called "Reaganomics".

So -- Obama should order even more national park employees to work without pay? You do realize that the folks policing the barricades aren't being paid, right? Congress holds the power of the purse, and for now the purse is closed.

If it were *your* paycheck that was being withheld, you wouldn't call not being forced to work without pay "pure politics".

It's not a matter of Obama choosing to "cut" some things and not others. He can't pay anyone to work, but as president he can order some of them to work nonetheless. Even that is regulated by Federal law, since making somebody work incurs an obligation that must be paid later, something Obama can't do on his own. At most he has some leeway in interpreting which jobs are essential, and a lot of that is common sense. The park ranger who patrols the WW2 memorial is essential to public safety. The groundskeeper who picks up their trash is not.

with a length of rope.

It's dangerous and futile to assign blame in a suicide to anyone other than a victim. Swartz's death is not MIT's fault.

That doesn't mean that mean that MIT is off the hook for killing a plea bargain deal that JSTOR was happy with. That was wrong, but it would have been wrong even had Swartz not taken his life.

They've furloughed IRS employees. Does *that* make financial sense? They've shut down FDA food inspection. Does *that* make financial sense, if we count the cost to the nation of food borne illness? This shutdown is about many things, but "financial sense" is not one of them.

We live in a country full of idiots who say things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare," without realizing that Medicare *is* a government program. Many more understand that things like the military or NIH cancer research are part of the gummint, but only on an intellectual level. On a visceral level they only associate the government with things they don't like, such as pollution regulation. The stuff they *do* like apparently just happens, as far as they're concerned.

So put yourself in the shoes of the zookeeper who has to take care of the pandas as the National Zoo. Pandas don't stop eating or shitting because Speaker of the House doesn't have the balls to bring a clean continuing resolution bill to the floor. So you've still got to show up to feed them and muck out their enclosure, only now you're not being paid. Your landlord still wants paying; the grocery store still wants paying, the daycare center you leave your kids at so you can go to this job still wants paying, but *you* don't get paid.

Wouldn't *you* pull the plug on the panda-cam? If you *don't*, people *will* say, "look, we shut the government down but things are still working." Yes they *are* that stupid. So you pull the plug so they'll understand that things like the pandas being cared for just don't "happen" on their own. Sure, people get pissed off, but they're not paying for the panda cam so they can lump it. Not seeing Mei Xiang and her cub isn't going to kill anyone. They weren't paying for panda cam anyway; that was paid for with a grant from corporate sponsorship, so if anyone has a beef with this, it'd be Ford Motor Company.

I've been studying this (publishing) for some time, in the context of learning, verifying assumptions, and the scientific method.

It turns out that there is really no bar in scientific publishing. It doesn't have to be understandable, nor innovative, nor even correct. You only need to be ethical (ie - don't lie about the data), cite anything that you got from other sources, and show that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that you are wrong (p > 0.5).

What exactly do we want in a published paper, anyway?

Many cancer studies can't be reproduced. Many studies are statistically significant but valueless (the IQ of people in NYC is higher than Chicago by 1 point: this can be statistically certain but have no practical significance). There are lots and lots of ways to frame the conclusion the wrong way such as confusing correlation with causation, reversed conditionals (if the defendant is innocent, there is a 1 in 1 billion chance that this evidence is wrong), and other logical errors.

Then there's the enormous economic incentive of needing to publish to keep your job, that reviewers will oppose maverick thought and agree with community beliefs, and that no one examines their assumptions.

Would you like to publish a paper? MathGen will write one for you. Pass it around and chances are it will be accepted.

So when I talk to people about my research, the inevitable comment is "you should publish". And my inevitable answer is: why?

What do we want in scientific papers? What are they even for?

Well, I think gunfire on the capitol. grounds *is* a legitimate news story that Americans need to know about. However it's far too early to have an opinion on the events. What bugs me isn't that the event is *covered*, it's that in lieu of facts news outlets spread speculation. There's very little factual information as of yet to report upon.

Whereas you can say condescending things about the intelligence of public employees without suffering the discomfort of ironic self-awareness. Smells like freedom to me.