If you can, use cyanogenmod on your droid. It has an option - and I'd love to see more granularity on this - to block apps from accessing your contact lists and some other things.

Yarr.... next time I should actually read what I post..

My customer domain is lazy"somethingsomething".... not terribly professional.

my custom domain is lazy.... I don't think that's terribly professional...

I moved my parents to a gmail account just because of this.

That linkedin stuff really burns my bacon. Everytime I log in, they beg me to let them log into my Gmail account so they can find more "connections" for me.

No. Just because someone is in my email address book does NOT mean they are someone I want to connect with on a business level.

Canada Border Services Agency can do the same thing.

I think it's fucking disgusting that this can happen. They don't have to charge you with a crime. They just declare the money as "bad" and make you prove that the money was earned legitimately.

Many provinces also have proceeds of crime legislation. The Government of Ontario has abused their implementation of the law to try to take someone's house (I don't know if they have been successful) after they were convicted of improper storage of a firearm (and I'm not getting into the mess that legislation is. there is no definition of proper storage) because they chose to fight the charge instead of plead guilty like a good little prole.

This just cements my belief that the Canadian criminal system - as imperfect as it is - is better than the American one. Municipalities cannot enact any criminal ordinances and provinces are strictly limited in criminal law. Criminal Law is seen as being Federal Jurisdiction.

That being said, in the US, I would rather see the States in charge of all criminal laws and the municipalities not permitted any criminal law and the federal government severely restricted (or better yet, if they just stuck to their enumerated powers as outlined in the US Constitution).

Time to write a L7 filter then.

The cell network was never designed with the idea that one phone was going to hit an entire metropolitan area's cell towers.

I took the TGV from Brussels to Paris in September. If I could do that in Canada (it'll never happen on the west coast, but I can dream), I'd never fly again.

of the materials they were going to Archive? Perhaps getting a lot of people to dig into their personal libraries might help fill in the gaps.

Remote Terminal over satellite? You probably won't be happy with the lag.

As a satellite technician, I think I can help answer some of your questions.

1. "I have also heard that some frequency bands are a lot better at cutting through cloud cover".
This is true. C-band has about 10dB less rainfade than Ku-band does, and Ku outperforms Ka-band as well (Not sure of the exact number as I don't do a lot of Ka links). C-band also requires larger dishes. You have to take into account what the acceptable availability is as well. 99% availability is quite possible and just requires a proper link budget (basically a series of calculations of gains and losses in the signal path which takes into account dish diameters/efficiencies, weather and satellite properties, among other things). Getting high reliability when taking into account weather is usually a lot easier on C-band, but if they are using an old bird with low output power or poor sensitivity, then a good Ku setup will outperform it.

2. "I would need at least 3/1Mbps with hopefully decent latency"
Latency is usually pretty fixed. The physics say it takes about 250ms for the signal to travel from your earth station to the satellite and back to the other earth station with an RTT of about 500ms. Any additional latencies are created by the FEC coders and access methods. The worst will probably be something that uses older Reed-Solomon over Viterbi (not used much anymore. Everyone has either already moved away from this 50 year old tech or is doing so right now) on a TDMA access system. I would expect an 850ms round trip time on this type of old system. The best will be a system that implements Turbo Product Coder or LDPC on an SCPC link (Dedicated link). I would expect about 600-650ms round trip. If you get on a shared network, anything modern will be using at least TPC and possibly LDPC if they're using DVB-S2 and you'll probably see an RTT of about 750ms (best guess on my part. each network is different). Additionally, using a shared access system will introduce jitter of which 50-100ms wouldn't be surprising to me. SCPC links tend to be quite good for lack of jitter. Getting the types of bandwidth you want is really a matter of contract.

3. "I've been looking for a decent contention service (4:1,10:1)"
On any shared access system, contention would be a matter of contract, and the lower the contention, the high the cost. When you start getting into 4:1 or better you're probably better off looking at a dedicated link, even if its not as fast as what the shared service is advertising. Personally, I'd actually rather pay for slower access with more generous transfer allowances than a fast connection with a really low transfer allowance. If you do go with a shared service, read their FAP carefully and calculate how much you can actually transfer taking into account transfer speed, FAP and transfer limits and compare this with your needs. It may also be to your benefit to either have multiple accounts with the same vendor or multiple vendors where you can switch between them as the month goes through. It could be cheaper than a more expensive link or cheaper than a dedicated link. Your budget will determine this.

4. Regarding "Globalstar, Iridium, Inmarsat, Thuraya and other similar systems"
These sorts of services will not provide the types of speeds you want and will cost you a small fortune in transfer fees, though they will have much lower latencies.

Unfortunately, satellite space is very expensive, as strider- indicated (and without sounding like we're colluding, I do know that he knows the industry). You really get into the "fast cheap reliable - pick two" and it should be more like "fast cheap reliable - pick one and hope for another one.... the third is right out" when you are dealing with some of the shared access satellite providers.

I wonder how long before new flash mobs start up with mobs raiding stores and cutting cables.

Long hair that covers the face....