During my high school years my favorite time was when the GM sponsored team showed up in a brand new H2+trailer to haul their robot and accessories. My team, from a relatively small town in central Virginia rolled up in our teacher sponsor's beat down conversion van.

What irked me about the engineer mentors was when I would overhear them say "it's doing exactly what we designed it to do" and other bits like that. My team never finished very high, but we designed and built all of it by ourselves in our school shop. We only had about 5 people that were really dedicated and about another 10 that half cared what was going on. Sure we had local engineers helping us, but it was for helpful input rather than whole ideas.

FIRST was fun, but the sponsorship generally throws everything off balance.

I used Connexion by Boeing over the Atlantic on SAS about 5 years ago or so. The speeds were good considering I was 36,000 feet above the water somewhere between Iceland and Greenland. The prices were similar then, I think. I used it for a few hours just browsing and chatting and didn't run into any problems. I would pay for it again, but only on long haul flights.

Connexion shut down due to financial feasibilty, is this the same satellite network but with new owners?