You and your pen are crazy--A student at Oklahoma State
Tom and your pen!
About the deal with the Zune sharing profits with Universal; that is crazy talk. If you really want to get down to charging the hardware device that does the illegal duplication or transmission of the files, they should just go have profit sharing with all PC manufacturers. However, I was wondering about this part where the Zune can transfer files to another Zune for three days. I haven't heard anyone talk about the legality of this, but it sure seems like music companies wouldn't like it. Could it be that Microsoft is trying to make the record companies fine with the fact that copyrighted music will be transferred to someone else's MP3 player?
Just a thought.
Love the show.

Actually, petroleum does not come from Dinosaur dookie--James F.
Petroleum does not come from scat of dinosaur. It is a by-product of the decomposing bodies of the dinosaurs, plants, and animals. If you check out this or this, it will give you more information, just thought I would let you know. Have a good great Friday and weekend from UK.

South Africa whooping U.S. in broadband too--Jean
I heard you get depressed about HSDPA in Korea--well, maybe you'd want to notch up that depression a bit since we in (so called) third world South Africa have had HSDPA support for a few months already and in fact are busy upgrading to the next-faster technology, HSUPA, where the uplink and downlink speeds are equal (HSDPA has downlink being faster-- as is traditionally the case). The cool company making this possible is called Vodacom and I work for them, but would get no benefit for selling the name in the U.S. (or anywhere since I'm a kinda-back-office developer).
Cheers.

Regarding the bogus patent claim--Brandon the attorney but not yet patent attorney
I believe Tom said something to the effect that it was shocking that the Patent Office didn't catch this little slip-up (or attorney malpractice, whichever term you'd like to use), and I immediately had the same reaction. Every Office Action I've ever worked on has been very, VERY meticulous in pointing out the shortcomings of the patent application at issue. It turns out that the Ishihara application was published before an examiner at the PTO ever looked at it, and this is fairly normal practice as the PTO is required to (read, "should in most cases") publish patent applications within 18 months of receiving the application (not necessarily examine the application). Furthermore, it appears that the attorneys who wrote the patent application were listening to BOL as well. On November the 7th, as a preliminary amendment (attached to this e-mail) was filed canceling claim 9. Check out page 11 of the amendment where the attorney takes the responsibility for not removing claim 9 before filing, but then just swears the preliminary amendment was written just a week after the application was filed...in 2003?!?!?! A likely story. Thought you might find this interesting and maybe 'janktastically' humorous. On a separate note, I love the fact that I am not the only person in the world using the term jank, or its many variations. I also have used this phrase since high school (late '90s) and was very relieved to hear I'm not alone (yeah, Molly).

Not ready for thin clients--Jamie B. in Chicago, Illinois
I listened to your podcast yesterday where Molly was talking about how much she wanted to have thin clients on my way home. When I got home I wanted to write and tell her how much I agreed with her. But my cable was out. Is that ironic or what??