[there]

fwiw, because of this discussion, i just got "@jcs" from a user that had it since 2007 and only had one tweet (the account was obviously fake).

i opened a support ticket with twitter and asked them about reclaiming the username. their auto-responder said they will only take an active account if it's due to a trademark claim, but if the account is inactive (meaning no logins or other activity on the backend in a long time), they will free up the username. they won't directly assign the inactive username to you, they just make it available for registration.

the auto-reply said they will investigate how inactive an account is if you ask them to, so i asked them to for this account. two days later they replied and said it had been made available, so i quickly went into my settings and changed my username to it. all of the followers and everything migrates to the new username, but any old links or tweets referencing the old username don't forward. hopefully my old username is not released back into the pool for at least a while.