As will all of us be - sooner or later

talking on a mobile 'phone while driving was supposed to be dangerous ... so now we will all have to do it ???

Grampian Police started this a year ago and the police in London in May.

The trouble is how to hit back at them. Normally the most that you can do is to waste their time & phone bill -- but your time is more precious than that. I wanted to try to get some of them to stop scamming and, to a limited extent, succeeded.

I had a phone call from one of these crooks claiming to be from Microsoft security center trying to tell me about a problem on my MS Windows machine (I run 100% Linux). After a few seconds I interrupted him and asked him if he was a religious man. He was puzzled and, after a couple of prompts, said 'yes'.

I told him that I was worried about his eternal soul ending up burning in the fires of hell because he was trying to steal money from people while he was alive. I asked if it was really worth it spending billions of years burning in hell for the sake of making some money in the few short years that he is alive. None of us is alive for many years compared to the billions of years in heaven or hell after we die.

I asked him to think about it before he went to sleep tonight. Where did he want to spend eternity ? Should he be doing the job that he is doing ? Is it worth it ? How will he be judged by God ? He was by now sounding a very different man from the one who started the 'phone call a few minutes earlier. Thanked me for being concerned about him. The call continued for another minute or so, me laying the eternity bit on very thick. Him getting quieter, before quietly thanking me again before the call ended.

I don't know what long term effect this will have on him, but hopefully he will decide that he ought to get another job. I did this a few times, some just laughed, then I got bored with the game.

Yes: MS-Office/Word still has compatability problems with OpenOffice.

Why do people always complain that free s/ware is incompatible with proprietary ones ? OK: in this case he saved as a .docx - mistake, only use document formats that are properly defined, eg .odf - you will still find that MS Word will not import 100% -- in that case where is the problem: MS-Word or Open/Libre-Office ?

http://doctorwhomedia.co.uk/ -- however, the domain is being transferred so the content might not stay there for long. At the time of writing (23 Aug 16.45 BST) there is roughly the story above and some chats at http://doctorwhomedia.chatango.com/, and whois shows the domain still owned byJonathan Carlyle .

No real indication why it was taken down ... talking about Dr Who cannot be a problem. Was there copyrighted material hosted ?

Expect all sorts of (spurious) legal challenges from the motor industry ... they won't want their business badly dented.

As a smaller organisation a better strategy for you would be to install free s/ware on machines where it can do the job as well, eg: firefox instead of IE; thunderbird for outlook (depending on what you do for calendaring); LibreOffice instead of MS Office; ... Most (say 80%) user's requirements are simple and free stuff will work well for them. When a user's PC dies, you look to see what they are using - if it is all free s/ware you replace their box with one running a free OS; if not then you give them one running MS Windows or OS x

More to the point the web site needs to comply with disability legislation. In the UK blind/partially-sighted people must, by law, be able to use the web site. This is one of the advantages of CSS - you can keep the site clean so that it works well with a screen reader. In theory a web site (owner) can be prosecuted for disciminating against people who have sight problems, in practice this does not happen very often.

So: all the bot would need to do is to claim to be blind and so avoid the game playing CAPTCHA.

Reading TFA I suspect that the sorts of problems are:

• * Interoperability with third parties. Eg document exchange. In a world where most others use MS software then there will be issues, moving to ODF will help, but not eliminate all issues -- incompatabilities between the way that MS and Open/Libre Office interpret the spec will remain. People will still use other formats where Open equivalents may not exist - eg CAD
• * Munich have gone out on their own, few are following their lead. They thus have to pay the first implementor's penalty. Those who follow will find things easier and cheaper.
• * Hardware devices (eg mobile phones). Although many of these might have Linux as the base, the vendor will make sure that it works with MS products and not worry about Linux equivalents
• * Users are using something that is new and will blame problems on it. This time they have a name ''Linux'' - this becomes perceived as the root of all evil.
• * Similar problems would have happened with a roll out of a new MS system and these problems would just be accepted as teething problems of a new system. But because Munich is doing something different by having software running on Linux systems this will be seen as the cause of it and thus blamed, with a belief that return to MS will fix all the problems. It will fix some but cause others, but until then Linux systems will get all the blame.

The best way to fix Munich's problems is for others to grab the LiMux distribution and use it. This will:

* Reduce compatability problems. A tipping point will eventually be reached, look how MS IE was king and then it went to less than 80% and suddenly slid as web sites had to take web standards seriously.

* Hardware vendors will have to test against more than just MS Windows and its ecosystems

* Others will contribute software and patches, the cost to Munich will drop.

* Munich IT department will not be seen as maverick since others are also doing it. Eventually they will, hopefully, be lauded as pioneers and visionaries.

in the hope that this might provide them with yet another way of separating the public from their properties (especially money).

then what have they got to hide ?

At least: that is what we are being told. So if that is good enough for us, why is it not good enough for them ?

Not everyone has such a short attention span that they need jangley noise to keep them from moving to another web site.

Who modded this troll, it should be modded insightful? Are the NSA operatives getting in quick these days ?

Send a letter to their registered head office stating that you do not want their service from xxx date. Then cancel the payment with your bank. Job done.

Your new provider can do whatever work is needed to take the line over. Send them a copy of the letter that you send to your old provider.