It is common for me to receive email from a company when I have never supplied an email address to them. As an example, I had my car serviced at an out of state car dealer while visiting family. I began receiving email from them to an old email address that I had not actively used in years. The same for my lawn service company. My point is that it is entirely possible that the email address is paid for by the company in question and the provided email has not been properly verified by the company the provides the message. I contacted these companies and asked how they obtained my email address and the usual response is that they have no idea at all. My general experience is that the lower level people have no idea about how this is done, don't really care, and have no ability to fix the problem. I was receiving daily phone calls from a collection agency that was convinced that my phone number belonged to a woman I never heard of. Every time that they called they said that they would fix the problem and they would not call back. After about a month my wife was overly stressed (because of the timing of the call) so when I chatted with them next I mentioned that if they called again I would contact the police. The caller told me that not even the police could stop them from calling me. So...... I chatted with the VP of the bank. Our next call was from a a rather high level manager that left his direct number and he asked very politely that he be informed immediately if we received another call and that we please do not bother the VP again. OK, so, lesson learned. If no link or general method for getting off the list is available, work your way to the top and ask why you are receiving personal information (such as billing information) for one of their customers; if you have time to kill or it really annoys you. If they blow you off, well, my guess is that there are privacy rules that they just violated and you can likely pursue that if you desire.

The non-power user is typically able to pickup and use OOo and feel comfortable in about one week. The non-power user will generally perform simple non-advanced tasks. The power user, however, usually requires closer to one month to figure out how to accomplish the "advanced" tasks in OOo rather than in MSO. As an advanced OOo user, I was asked how to accomplish a specific format in a text table in MSO. After 30 minutes, we gave up. I knew how to do this in OOo in seconds. MSO may have supported the effect, but neither of use could figure out how to make this work. To address the needs of both, it is recommended to have some sort of documentation, and perhaps even some class time, to help during the transition. It helps a lot to have a few power users learn OOo first and get them on board. A few dissenters can railroad the entire effort. The usual recommendation is that MSO be completely removed so that hold-outs are not continuing to use MSO. You should verify that at least the majority of your document's are usable/readable OOo. Having spent years moving documents between MSO and OOo, I have a handle on what is more likely to cause problems (at least for text type documents). A typical problem is related to graphics that is not anchored as a character and that is free to float around the page (this is the default use). For power point / presentation documents, there are some effects that may not translate well. Macro compatibility is not good between MSO and OOo.

I considered some of the answers insightful, for example: "We know money doesn't create loyalty--a sense of purpose does".

Yes, some answers lacked deep content in that they were the expected carefully worded answer. Unfortunately, these questions almost required such an answer. For example, "Why do we still confer most-favored nation trading status onto a Nation who is actively engaged in efforts to spy on and attack our government and corporate computer systems?" Although this is a very good question, General Lord seems like the wrong person to even attempt that question. The probable complaint is that the answers lacked detail. For example, from the same question "What, if anything, is being done against this type of cyber-terrorism against us and our allies?" The answer lacks detail, but it would be difficult to add detail to his answer without discussing a specific threat. I would have enjoyed that discussion, BTW, and use his answer as a start: "working to improve our ability to respond to cyber attacks, reduce the potential damage from such events, and to reduce our vulnerability to such attacks."

Thank you General Lord for your time!