>But latency through multi-hop LEO is potentially as bad as geostationary.

No, it's not. Iridium LEOs are 485 mi high, GEOs are 22,236 mi high. That's 46 hops, which Iridium doesn't do. Even with per-satellite latency, you're nowhere near GEO delay.

I used to own an Inmarsat phone, which uses GEOs. There's simply no comparison. The Inmarsat phone is in a little briefcase, and the lid is the antenna (which must be aimed at the GEO). By comparison to my (admittedly large) Moto 9500, it's like, uh, carrying a briefcase. And it doesn't work above 80 degrees latitude.

Slashdotters think that if it doesn't fit in your ear like some Zoolander phone, it's not a breakthrough. With Iridium, I can talk to anyone, from anywhere, any time. I consider that a breakthrough.

>Um. Iridium didn't actually work that well at all. Perhaps you missed my post. It works flawlessly. It was never going to compete with cell phones, nor was it designed to. It works where cell phones *don't*, not where they already do. Tall buildings? Why would you need a satellite phone if you're near a tall building? Your cell phone doesn't work in the middle of the desert (technical flaw?). Nor in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Nor in most of the places in the Pacific Ocean. My Iridium phone does.

I have an Iridium phone (the original Motorola 9500). Not only does it work flawlessly (as long as you're outdoors...), it only uses 66 active LEOs. They vastly underestimated the number of people who want/need one, but it's the only (handheld) phone system in the world that works *everywhere* in the world: North pole, south pole, everywhere.

The only "flaw" (besides the multi-billion-dollar goof in estimating the market size), was the name: They knew they really only needed 66 satellites, but who's going to name a company after that wacky Lanthanoid "dysprosium"? Nobody, that's who.

Footnote: Globalstar (the only other publicly-offered, LEO-based satphone system) also went bankrupt. But they also have resurrected, and have a larger customer base than Iridium, despite vastly smaller world coverage (in part because of cheaper handsets and air time).

It's interesting to note that through this decision, the effect of privacy in your emails is totally dependent on your email carrier (unlike the post office, which is government-run). For example, if I send a message to another employee of my company, and the email server for both me and the other employee are run by me (or my company), the message is private and cannot be obtained by a subpoena. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy because the company operates the servers and the message never left "our" control.

However, if I send a message to someone who uses Gmail -- where the recipient *knows* that their email's content is used by Google to target advertising -- then I have given up all expectation of privacy, even if I run my own mail server for outgoing messages.

But what if the recipient actually owns and runs their mail server? Then the sender can be assured of privacy under this ruling (providing that the sender runs his own mail server) because the recipient controls the delivery. Of course, a sender typically has no knowledge of who runs a recipient's mail server, so they can't always have an expectation of privacy. Right?

Uh, I'm pretty sure both Wordpress.com and Facebook.com end in the TLD .com. Which is entirely the point.

I disagree, ICANN has a clear purpose for adding TLDs: funding. The primary reason ICANN wants to add TLDs (and sooner rather than later) is because it raises money for them. Everyone who applies for a new TLD sends a check to ICANN as their first step. It doesn't matter whether the TLD is successful long-term or not, if they have enough applicants, they can raise lots of cash. Top salaries at ICANN increased 74% in one year (http://gordoncook.net/wp/?p=274) between '06 and '07. Rod Beckstrom makes $1MM per year (sfgate:http://tr.im/KzVB ). ICANN's annual budget in '09 was $65MM, up 37% from 2008 (http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-17may08-en.htm). These increases cannot be sustained without new sources of revenue, and the plan to add new TLDs is just that: a revenue generation system. Follow the money, folks. This has nothing to do with choice, demand, or Internet governance. This is about a pseudo-governmental organization with an insatiable appetite for money and power and little, if any, oversight, building themselves into a $100MM pork factory. What did ICANN do for *you* last year? And how much should that have cost?