I blame this on only having two political parties. Since each party only really has one competitor, it boils down to us versus them rhetoric.

With a viable third or fourth party, I think we'd see less "that party wants to eat your children" attacks and more stands on what they believe in. Because it's much harder to go on the attack against two or three opponents, the merits of a particular stance would have to take center stage or least get out of the back alley behind the concert where it's drinking it's cheap whiskey and crying itself to sleep.

But, for that to happen we'd need to have less of a winner takes all approach to our election system.

The problem isn't that he didn't make another great movie.

The problem is he took that great movie and manipulated it again and again.

To use your analogy, he cooked us dinner and took us around the block. And now he's retelling us that same story night after night with new fabrications such as changing the steak to salmon and making us believe that we blew him instead.

Living on past accomplishments is one thing. Dwelling on them and reminding us frequently how great it was that ONE time. Not so great.

I concur with that problem with Skype. However, for voice over IP it does seem to be a great solution in terms of sound quality and talking in groups.

The trouble I see initially is that members of a team, particularly those in the main office are less inclined to kick off a skype session. IT people/Coders tend to route around inefficient areas and chatting with somebody over the internet to a different timezone seems much more difficult than walking down the hall and having a conversation. What I see happen is that people who do similar tasks abroad as those in the office will get less input because of that perceived barrier. So breaking that perception is very important.

For whatever reason a group chat doesn't seem to have that same perception barrier even though you can get better idea bandwidth through conversation.

I think it depends on what you do and some of the corporate culture. I work in a place that is very progressive in it's telecommuting policy.

So, we've learned as a development staff how to communicate across the country or across the room. I happen to live close to the office, so I spend a few days in a week. But realistically, I end up being more productive at home. I find at home that a lot of the incidental conversations are lost. (You know the lol's over the latest meme conversations.) While, the important ones still happen.

All it takes is a team that is willing to learn how to do that and it becomes no obstacle.

In some places you can write off the cost of certain home expenses on your taxes if you work from home. I have a friend who gets to write off some of his utilities as well as some of the mortgage on his house.

YMMV.

Sure it sucks if you're there already and you have to fork it over. But, what the parent is saying is that you're foregoing 30% of your revenue to go from the small sliver of pie and get in on a much bigger whole pie. You can lose 30% of your income and not even notice if the opportunity nets you 1000%+ gain in new customers and revenue. That's totally worth it. That doesn't change the fact that this is a dick move, but still worth it in monetarily.

Do you think this is because of the quality of the teachers or the administrators? In my experience teachers are often very open to different avenues of parental involvement and new education approaches but are often handcuffed by bureaucracy and poor administrators. I'm hoping these funds will act like a big fat carrot to get these administrations to update their lines of thinking and adapt.