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?