Sounds to me like you over-pay (or perhaps are over-taxed) in the UK.

Where I live, I am forced to pay more money to a library than I would spend if I purchased every book I want to read. On average, the people where I live are happy with this or they would not approve the taxes to support it. An area (county, city, country, what ever) is free to pass (almost) any law that they desire and then they can live with the consequences. If the people that pass the law prefer the consequences of the law than the consequences of not having the law, then it will likely stay. I am aware of a couple of companies that opted to get out of certain geographic areas because they did not care for some of the laws and the effect on the cost of doing business (for example, it might take years to shut down a branch because the government does not allow you to close based on labor laws). Some people lost jobs in those areas, some services are no longer offered by those companies. Other companies likely came in and charged more money to cover their overhead or chose to just collect less profit. A typical (but not always) result is increased cost of something. As for the government being there for the people and not the companies, that feels more like a happy wish. I chose to remove my ramblings on people looking out for themselves rather than the good of someone else since you are likely able to as easily build that argument as I; especially if you have ever worked with or in the government.

I had a lot of problems with fedup from 17 to 18. They were fixable after you figured out the issues, but, it caused problems on two systems anyway. Apart from that, the update problem has been pretty tame. Things have been sufficiently stable that I no longer update with a full new install in its own partition while retaining the original so that I can backtrack. I probably should, but I don't.

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!