Where did you get your data on the ramp up?

I don't know, but I wish I did.

I hope some miners learn to have backup plans for when their pool goes down so the network can laugh at such an attack.

A coordinated attack against the major mining pools will leave most miners clueless.

Every pooled miner should be capable of solo mining at the proverbial flip of a switch. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. Many don't really care about the health of the network, they care about a quick, easy buck. (Not realizing the quick easy buck might go away if the network is vulnerable to attacks.)

The ramp up the reported spiked after the difficulty increased. It wasn't real, but only an effect from their bad formula. They assume current difficulty backward past the increase and get a wrong number until enough time has passed to get the inaccurate assumption out of their equation.

But maybe something is going on now. Deepbit is gone?

i will give you that maybe most of use miners dont know how to go solo, but most of use have already switched to different pools, and i have multiply batch scrips so i can switch to a different pool at any time.

That's why I said a coordinated attack against the major mining pools. Meaning switching to another pool will be useless. How many major pools are there? 5?

Which is why I said MAJOR mining pools. You might be able to argue 6.

Deepbit
Slush
BTCMine
BTCGuild
Eligius
Bitcoinpool

The rest are small enough that I'd bet there are solo miners with more hashing power.

Subscribed - is there any guide out there for mining solo as a backup?

Here is some manual for GUI miner -

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10438.msg149818#msg149818

That's a good idea. The pool could not even exist until the attack.

I think over time more and varied pools will emerge, with 144 blocks a day you could easily have 50 pools that average a block a day. But also pools could have agreements with each other to swap percents.

No any authority approval not required.