If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.

If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.

At least this story is not about "The Russians!"

It's like how Sharp sold off all of its business divisions...
...or how IBM sold all of its divisions.

If it's bringing in money, why not let it happily chug along?

That double equal sign doesn't mean what you want it to mean. In most languages, it is an equality *operator* which means that both sides are evaluated for truth. So you can just as well post "1 == 2" which is entirely correct and evaluates to be FALSE.

Erm, according to the plaintiff's sorry excuse for a blog, the legal counsel has pledged to continue until they are disbarred or they make a "success" of the case, whatever that means.

You know what's funny...and I'm going to be modded down for this...but if you look at the millions of man-years spent wasting everyone's time on the litigation versus how much time it would take to write a *decent* OS entirely from scratch, you're looking at a 1000000:1 effort.

This is like spending 50 years in the court system over someone jaywalking when he never jaywalked in the first place.