The point is that you can use -U to specify arbitrary user-agent strings, and -E robots=off to ignore robots.txt. User-agent blocking is completely braindead.

The point is that you can use -U to specify arbitrary user-agent strings, and -E robots=off to ignore robots.txt. User-agent blocking is completely braindead. It does nothing at all. The fact that somebody in 2012 can possibly think it works is astounding to me.