It may be a violation of the academic honesty code of your school, but I'm not convinced that hiring a ghost writer constitutes plagiarism ("1. The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft."). In particular, purchase is not theft.

Really, would you say that any of the many biographies of famous people are plagiarized?

I can tell you've never read the "warranty" that comes with your car or your washing machine. They say precisely that.

...and here I thought *baseball* was stupid.

Videoconferencing is, has always been, and will always be a solution in search of a problem. Nobody (who has any sense) has ever said "gee, I wish I could look at a grainy, postage-stamp-sized picture of the person I'm talking on the phone with". Nobody *cares*. Not for meetings, not for classes. Audio is critically important. Shared presentation is critically important. Shared whiteboard is criticall important for some purposes. Video? Video is utterly useless.

(I've worked with most of the videoconferencing technologies out there, in the context of a large University research group. I've even built custom videoconferencing platforms for clinical case conferencing. It's all useless. People *say* they want it. People *think* they want it. But even when you spend $50k on a pair of high definition Access Grid Node rooms, it's no better than a good speakerphone. And nowhere near as good as $150 plane ticket.)

Who *cares* who made the part? It'd obviously be trivial for any competent machine shop to duplicate.

After all, in soviet russia, national security threatens you.

If you were *actually* in a position to influence their purchasing decisions, you would already know what they're currently purchasing and how much they're paying for it. You would certainly know that site license pricing is highly variable depending on how much the software company in question wants your business.