I don't find much credence to an argument that Europeans tend to have larger or more efficient brains than the rest of the peoples of the world due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, or due to any reason. Neanderthals have gotten a lot of press lately due to the fact that they seem to be "superior" to Homo sapiens in may ways - more muscular, stronger skeletal structure, larger brains.

The fact remains, however, that in the end, they lost the race, and that would point towards some sort of ultimate inferiority. Definitely kinda cool to think that as someone of Northern European decent, I may have ancestors that were not human as we tend to think of it, but these studies have to be done carefully and such claims as pertaining to differences in brain abilities should be made exceedingly hesitantly, especially in such early stages of discovery.

After reading this article in MAKE I found out about Big Blue Saw, which is similar to eMachineShop. They'll take a DXF file and will produce machined parts in a handful of materials (plastic, steel, etc) and thicknesses. They even provide & promote links to a bunch of Open Source CAD software. Good stuff.

Since you already have connectivity to work, and they appear to be progressive enough, why don't you have them setup a SIP Proxy to their phone system and use a phone (Cisco or Polycom) or software (kphone) that supports SIP?