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Because, speaking as an electrical engineer (but not an antenna designer) I don't think anything other than pure DISTANCE (which the rubber bumper neatly provides) will actually help all that much.

Indeed, the vacuum (or at least air) is the best cure. A dielectric may actually make things worse. First, a dielectric with high permittivity will make the capacitance higher, so though your hand is now farther away it may affect the antenna more. Second, the dielectric will have losses in it, so an antenna shrouded in a dielectric may be not as good as one in free space. There are dielectrics suitable for encapsulation of antennas, but they are not of the kind that you spray onto stainless steel. If you get that far you probably want to redesign your whole phone enclosure - it will be cheaper, and will work better.

Hmmm I wonder what can also go around corners and has a tubelike appearance....? A cable?

Makes sense. Here is some cable good to 65 GHZ.

http://www.gore.com/en_xx/products/cables/microwave/defense/high_frequency_microwave_interconnect_solutions.html

"How do we build better institutions?" is clearly a big question. There is quite a bit of material out there about Gore, the people who came up with Gore-Tex. The 'big' difference is that their organizational structure does not have very much hierarchy in it. They even have a list of material about them as an organization on their website:

http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/reading/index.ht ml

I get the sense that the development side of Google is somewhat like this(the 20% time doesn't have any hierarchy at all right?), and they are doing well, even though they are a bit young to use as a reference for a good organization, and I don't have anything to point at as evidence. In "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell posits that part of the reason that we don't do well in large organizations is that our brains top out at handling about 150 social relationships(more here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/stories/2003/01/0 1/tippingPointNetVersion.html#number ), where those relationships include your relationships with the people, and their relationships with each other, so you know how everybody 'fits' together. (Part of the reason that this is interesting is that if you look here: http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/index.html you will see that Gore has 7500 people working in 45 locations. 7500/45=166)

"How do we build better institutions?" is clearly a big question. There is quite a bit of material out there about Gore, the people who came up with Gore-Tex. The 'big' difference is that their organizational structure does not have very much hierarchy in it. They even have a list of material about them as an organization on their website:

http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/reading/index.ht ml

I get the sense that the development side of Google is somewhat like this(the 20% time doesn't have any hierarchy at all right?), and they are doing well, even though they are a bit young to use as a reference for a good organization, and I don't have anything to point at as evidence. In "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell posits that part of the reason that we don't do well in large organizations is that our brains top out at handling about 150 social relationships(more here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/stories/2003/01/0 1/tippingPointNetVersion.html#number ), where those relationships include your relationships with the people, and their relationships with each other, so you know how everybody 'fits' together. (Part of the reason that this is interesting is that if you look here: http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/index.html you will see that Gore has 7500 people working in 45 locations. 7500/45=166)

Signals propagate through coax at approximately the same speed as they do through fiber, in both cases around 2/3c. Sometimes, electrical propagation can be faster than optical. For example, this coax product has a propagation delay about about 0.85c.

Propagation delay through the medium is not a relevant question here. Much more relevant are the packet processing delays through the switch nodes. Much more important than that are the packetization, jitter buffering, and any echo cancellation delays imposed by the VoIP network.

For that matter, most cable networks are "hybrid fiber-coax" (HFC). They're coax at your house, but once they reach that first box, the rest of the network is fiber.

All connections are shared connections at some point, generally very early in the network. FiOS and DSL become oversubscribed at the first box past your house. It's point-to-point to that termination, then shared from there. There's little difference between the two architectures in practice. It doesn't matter in practice whether each of 20 users gets 1.5Mbps to a box where it all gets crammed into a single 1.5M pipe, or all 20 users share a 30Mbps medium to a box, where it all gets crammed into a 1.5M pipe.

Even in theory, however, with all else (bandwidth!) being equal, a shared medium is superior because it can at least burst to a single user when other users are idle, whereas multiple point-to-point media cannot. Because of the physical separation between wired, their bandwidth is statically allocated, and can't change unless you dig up the wires. A shared medium can reallocate bandwidth electronically.

They follow the magic 150 number for organizational groups and are more a collection of semi-independent colonies than one large hive.

This from http://www.gore.com/en_xx/careers/graduates/workin g_at_gore.html

"At Gore you'll find direct communication, a team orientation, and one title - associate - that's shared by everyone. It's an unusual corporate culture that contributes directly to our business success by encouraging creativity and opportunity.

Gore's 'Lattice' structure gives associates the opportunity to use their own judgment, select the right projects, and directly access the resources they need to be successful. For more than 40 years, the talent, determination, curiosity, and inventiveness of our associates have contributed to the introduction of new products at a pace that few global corporations can match.

We're proud to have been repeatedly named a great place to work. In fact, we've been listed on each of Fortune magazine's list of the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America."

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I believe the 'hive mind' is nothing more than group dynamics creating an artificial structure to maintain the wholeness of the group. A vicious circle develops where the organization develops a life of its own. A corporation is just one example of this.

Umm, you might want to wander around in some rural areas, because most of the ones I've lived in are almost always surrounded by defense contractors or military bases big enough to have a civilian workforce.
I know when I lived in Flagstaff, AZ there was a W.L. Gore Factory there that did a bunch of things, some of them "top secret". High paying, too.

Similar stories in Utah, Idaho, Missouri, and eastern Washington state.
Maybe it's just an "out west thing?"
Oh yeah, nuclear power plants (maybe any power plants) are a good bet for high tech in the rural environment too.

Who new, that a few physicists, trying to login into SLAC library, will code up the U.S first web server, sweaty cosmonauts will need the development of the Gore-Tex, and you will get you ticket by a laser radar.

Fundamental research pays. Many times over.