The only independent claim specifies "receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; ".

This could be debated, but the way I read this is that the client sends a request to the server to subscribe. Of course podcasts are not subscription based (although the client software usually makes this illusion). Podcasts just check an RSS feed for new episodes. The server never has any clue about "subscriptions".

Of course to fully evaluate this one would need to dig into the specification of the patent to see how it used the terminology, but it's not at all clear to me that traditional podcasting is covered by this patent.

Yes and no.

What kills you is the energy delivered to your heart. Of course the energy delivered to your heart is P=I^2 R. So yes, in a way, the amps kill you.

Here's what you are neglecting. In the situation where you are talking about mains power, the maximum current limit is VERY high, but the voltage is fixed. The current delivered through your body will therefor be determined by good old Ohm's law (E=IR).

Unfortunately if you double the voltage in this situation you also double the current through your body. So 240 is much more dangerous than 120.

By this logic we can't prove anything -- EVER. I'm not saying it's a completely unreasonable argument, but I prefer to have beliefs justified with evidence.

If some being claiming to be god did things that I couldn't remotely understand I would start to consider the possibility of god's existence to be pretty good. Of course I would also consider the advanced alien options -- but in the end, is a sufficiently advanced alien race really that different than god?

This is why the reasonable option is to justify beliefs with evidence, and never hold anything to be 100% true. My beliefs change whenever I receive new evidence.

That's a bit hard to say. But here's a way of thinking about it:

The Shannon-Hartley theorem states that the channel capacity (e.g. the data bandwidth, measured in bits per second) is related to the channel bandwidth (measured in hertz). If we assume a very pessimistic signal to noise ratio of 1:1, the SH theorem says that the cable's bandwidth in hertz will be the same as the cable's bandwidth in bps.

So if we want a cable capable of transmitting information at 1tbps, the cable will need a bandwidth of roughly 1000 GHz. That means that it would be impossible to carry that amount of information using even microwaves. We're talking about at minimum infrared light. Or in other words -- we're talking about fiber optics, not cat5.

Is this a serious answer, though? The vast majority of the land area of the US is almost unpopulated. But *MANY* people live in highly populated areas.

For instance:
San Francisco: 6688 people per square km
New York: 10482 people per square km
Chicago: 4816 people per square km

For comparison, Tokyo has a population density of 5847 people per square km.

So, to re-ask the grandparents question: Why are our urban areas so far behind Japan and South Korea's urban areas?

Yes, the SDK has serious restrictions. But how can you compare this to microsoft? The whole point with regulating microsoft was the fact that microsoft has a monopoloy. I don't think anyone is going to argue that Apple has a monopoly in the mobile phone market. That's rediculous. If you don't like the iPhone or the iPhone SDK -- go elsewhere. There is plenty of competition. I personally will accept these drawbacks and keep using my iphone.

GCJ will survive because it provides a facility that doesn't exist in the standard JDK (i.e., ahead-of-time compilation).

Well, that would be a reason. But on the other hand, the main developer of GCJ is RedHat, and they may well not feel like continuing it now.

Kaffe will survive because it's BSD licensed.

Kaffe is GPL.

Classpath will initially try to survive by copying large amounts of original Java code into itself, but I suspect will eventually become irrelevant as patches for classpath-using applications become available to allow them to use the original Java class library.

Well, then you know more than I do. And I'm a Classpath dev. :) There are no Classpath-using applications that don't run on the original class library. Classpath is not Mono - we've never accepted any incompatibility against Sun's java, and certainly haven't promoted working around our bugs.

Anyway, there's a good six months or so before we'll be seeing the classlib code from Sun. Yes, if we do continue development (or those who do) will probably be incorporating parts of it, but not large swaths of it. There are some fundamental differences in how the two libraries have chosen to solve certain things, and it's hardly a matter of cutting and pasting some code.

There's also a likelyhood that parts of Classpath are going to end up in Sun's libaries. There are actually things that Classpath does do better. There are also parts of the classlib that aren't going to be open-sourced because Sun doesn't have ownership. Classpath may provide the replacements for those parts.

But all in all, it's a big win for Classpath, regardless. We're getting what we wanted, under the license we wanted it. And we even got Sun to talk to us and ask advice before it all happened. (And judging from the details of their actions, I'd say I they listened well)

In your analogy, it would be Sony causing the backlog, not the people in line. You have a producers and consumers problem and the consumers are actual consumers. It seems fairly trivial to figure out who the producers would be.

Are you arguing, then, that Sony should release the PS3 because people are waiting for it?