I have a LoJack installed on my motorcycle, and it sends me text messages whenever it gets moved... not sure about cheap though... anti-theft will usually reduce your insurance premium.

there are plenty of Geo satellites with commercial off the shelve semiconductor parts that last 15+ years... Being in MEO and "only" lasting 12 or so years is no big deal...

Having once worked on GPS Satellite's clocking system, I was surprised that the AF was so against usage of atomic clocks phased-locked to crystals for accurate timing. Maybe the latest news about Galileo using atomic clock changed their mind?

Most satellites are still simple "bent-pipe" kind, send data up in one frequency, translate, send it down in another frequency.

Boeing SDC (formerly Hughes Space and Comm) was (and probably still is) the leading company in DSP payloads and only one with the expertise to space qualify an IBM ASIC, but they have a broken business model and a hard time selling it to their customers. That and they have a very out-dated bus led to market deterioration over the years.

That aside, bigger satellites are just like bigger processors: it will become prohibitively expensive to develop and produce at some point. DARPA has been funding research in microsats with absolutely no redundancy and minimal radiation shielding, so you can build a Beowulf cluster with graceful degradation and a giant transmission relay (like TDRSS)

Hmm... years ago, Boeing wasn't 3 years behind on launch schedule, and we wouldn't have this issue. If the AirForce had known 3 years ago, they would've exercised some option to build more IIMR builds. Boeing kept on pushing the launch date back, 3 months at a time, and here we are.

solar event will cause transient events that will recover in a few seconds.

GPS2F was awarded in the early 90s with a launch date of more than 10 years out. This caused parts issues that significantly magnified design issues. Without going into company secrets, let's just say that bean-counters and engineers fought long and hard. I wonder why Boeing lost GPS3...

If LockMart can't deliver as promised, Airforce can always buy more IIF. After 12-or-so builds currently on contract by Boeing, you figure even the incompetent can get their bugs worked out by then (sans part issues)

along that line, it's trivial to configure an USB controller such that it acts as a hub, 2 more controllers, 1 as HID, 1 as storage device. Then the HID device can just go willy-nilly and try to run d:\ or e:\ or whatever drive. USB controllers are cheap these days, most users won't know what hit them.

take any USB controller, have it emulate a Human Interface Device (aka keyboard), use it for the keystrokes of "windows, up, up, up, enter, virus-website, enter" and it's game over. you can do the same on Mac, just a tad more difficult.