State of the art in large scale inserts - Mailing list pgsql-jdbc

I've read these threads on inserting large amounts of data via JDBC:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jdbc/2004-06/msg00021.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-jdbc/2006-04/msg00021.php

1) Is there anything new I should know?

2) Does that COPY patch mate well with the 8.1 or 8.2 versions of the
driver?

Thanks,
Kevin Murphy