Sounds an awful lot like Iridium satellites: cell phone connectivity in the middle of nowhere. Their business plan must have overlooked that there is hardly anyone in the middle of nowhere, so they went bankrupt. The primary result is satellite flashes (iridium flares) that are brighter than Venus.

I work at a Department of Energy national lab (without nuclear weapons or other classified research). Wikileaks has been blocked since Tuesday, and we have all received a memo explicitly forbidding us from viewing the cables.

That's ironic. Just today Firefox on Ubuntu (Lucid) was updated to default to Yahoo search...

And what difference would it make? log(10^3) is still smaller than log(10^6)...

You should take a look at EVO . It was developed by CalTech for use in the high-energy physics projects at CERN. It is a Java application, no installation required, but works surprisingly well even with consumer webcams in mac and linux. You can use it for free by just registering and organizing a meeting in the 'universe' group, or you can request that your own organization is added (and still use it for free). It has all necessary features: multiple video streams, collaborative white board, recording and replay, file storage,... At particle physics labs around the world the meeting rooms are basically built around EVO, and polycom has virtually disappeared. It helps if you are close to one of those labs, or on an educational backbone.

Please, stay away from ROOT if you have the option! You could use EPICS or CODA for DAQ code.