Android :: Is Bind Mechanism Suitable For One Shot Services?

What I need is to perform some network operations in background inside a service. I want them to run in a service because, as pointed out in the "developing rest client application" talk from google io, I don't want to loose the result if the activity is brought in background. What sounds quite obvious is to use an Intent Service, and get the result as a broadcast. In this way I am sure the service will die and no consume any other resources when its done, but I need to convert the actions I want to perform to intents and back. Well, I was now wondering if it makes sense to bind to the service instead, at least for getting the result. And a more general question: is the bind mechanism suitable for one shot services, or it just make sense for persistent services? What happens if I call the startService method but the service is already active? Will it start another service, or will it call the onStartCommand of the same service? I am asking this because if I use "regular" non sticky service, it could happen that I need it to perform some action and I don't know if it is already active (and I don't want to have a queue of action waiting for onServiceConnected to be called.