I believe there was a time when connecting unapproved telephone equipment to the public network was quite a serious punishable offence.
Apart from nasty privacy risks to the owner, in what way is a compromised machine abusing others on the network any different?

The effort required to fix the number of infected machines is just so overwhelming that any ISP cannot cope, even if they wanted to.

Some ISPs do a valiant job, but sad to say, the vast majority of them don't appear to care this >< much about their users, and the grief they cause.
These are probably the worst from my perspective:- Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine. Curiously, Iran appears disproportionately highly too.

If one could actually get the key, then all someone would need to do is sign a command using a serial number of MAXINT, and the botnet would be toast...
I would be very surprised if they hadn't thought of that already.

I suppose they can use a dns query to a number of short lived and deterministic domain names active for the day (though this can be defeated using superhuman efforts to preregister or block creation of those domains, if known), or query any number of bulletin boards containing encoded messages in various places. Querying BBSs is probably safer as http or https traffic blends into general traffic very well, given that users use of the web isn't unusual! It may even use google searches known to return 1 result.

The possibilities are endless, and it probably uses many methods of picking up instructions and peer lists.

The breakthrough came when the British realised that tail fins had to swivel to maintain control - elevators just couldn't cut it against the shock wave.

You are correct - any time an article appears on any mainstream blog or newssite about anything remotely related to AGW or CAGW etc, the hordes of deniers pounce to try and corrupt popular support to their twisted minority view, then move on to the next. They appear to be highly organised.

On forums that support comment voting, messages that you and I would deem to be rational and common-sense will quickly get a wildly disproportionate negative score if it appears to contain any whiff of truth supporting the reality.

Good example of this here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17126699 swamped by some recognisable WUWT followers.

Almost as if they just exist to trash the science. I can see through it, but the average Joe probably can't.

Scientists by and large are rational and analytical people, passionate about their work and motivated by discovering answers to the problems they investigate - the rewards of discovering the truth of a mechanism or process, or creating something new are intrinsic. Financial reward is very much secondary. I suspect that they don't easily comprehend that other kinds of people don't, won't or can't see the world in the same way, that have belief systems not based on logic and are able to selectively deny evidence if it doesn't support their agenda - I guess all sides can be guilty of this to some degree, but AGW denial is getting particularly nasty, and especially sad that Republican politicians seem to be abandoning their duty and disowning GW in order to win votes. Nature doesn't respect party divides - ask King Canute.

There are a few activists that care enough to try and counter the denialists threat, but they are outnumbered. The average guy doesn't feel as compelled to act as the sockpuppets, perhaps they are busy dealing with more immediate worries of paying the bills, but after all, their futures are also at stake, which is a teensy weensy bit more important that the short term profits of those with an interest in seeing that Humanity doesn't do the right thing and transform to a sustainable future.

DNFTT

One word: IGBT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulated-gate_bipolar_transistor

It's a lump of silicon about as big as a car battery, easily handles 5MW, and has revolutionised the connection of solar/wind/wave energy to grid.

Equipment costing hundreds OR thousands dollars now replaces what used to cost hundreds OF thousands, so connecting the battery to the grid is probably one of the easiest and cheapest problems to solve.

Your observation is inaccurate, we don't pretend! :-)