The First Amendment doesn't cover speech between two private parties. It covers speech that the government may not oppress. Please stop claiming First Amendment rights when the government is not involved.

Maybe it's related to this but I noticed this past weekend that the Jabber server running on my Linux machine no longer can get presence information for people on GMail/GTalk. From the logs I can see my server attempting to make a connection but nothing happens after 20 seconds and my server gives up for the time being. I haven't changed anything on my side but I'm unsure who to contact about issues like these.

If you are out in the wilderness a lot or driving lonely stretches of road without cellular signals you can also get a hand-held beacon that can be handy.

I have this one: http://acrelectronics.com/product2.aspx?sku=2898

Here in Arizona (as I'm sure many other places with extensive wilderness) people get lost and in distress a lot. With no cell phone service and no one knowing of their plans (so that they can be reported as "missing" by someone) their first instinct is to set a "signal fire." In somewhere as dry as Arizona that's a very bad idea. A couple years ago someone set a signal fire that ended up destroying 250,000 acres. I realize that when someone's lost they panic but if people just used a little forethought when they go out to the wilderness (like taking a PLB) then things would turn out better for everyone.

That's because cell phone towers concentrate their signal towards the ground where the users are. The article talked about putting a picocell in the aircraft that would give a connection to everyone's phone. You wouldn't want ground-based towers providing cell phone service to airplaces anyway. At 30,000 feet you're going to be in range of hundreds of towers and that's likely to confuse your phone and the network.