[firstimecaller]

will try this out.

anybody else find the avatars in the first two posts kinda hilarious / ironic?

Jesus... looking right, green death looking left... lulz

edit:
Just a tip: If generating a .htaccess deny block is the goal, perhaps it might be easier to use this tool: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_country_block_htaccess.php

If, like me, you need to block just about everybody BUT Europe and the Americas, it's easier than editing and removing a bunch of ampersands, even if you use find/replace in selections in your favorite text editor, since you'll be doing quite a bit of selecting, paging down, etc.

Plus you'll end up with a much smaller file to parse. I don't know what the overhead is for a bunch of comments in a .htaccess file. Another tip would be to put this into your Apache config file if possible to avoid it being loaded/parsed with each and every server request. I know not everyone has access to this on shared server accounts.