Good Lord, I agree wholeheartedly. The ribbon is nigh-incomprehensible to first time users. I just had to use a version of Office with the ribbon for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a hard time with it.
Now, I don't know what it's like once you're used to it, but it didn't seem like a step forward in intuitiveness compared to the old Office menus. I don't think that I can chock that up just to me getting older and being used to the old ways.
I had to use MS Office 2007 a lot at work (over half a year at least, probably not a full year, and mainly Excel and Outlook, not so much Word), and so I got pretty used to the ribbon. My verdict is that I still didn't like it even after getting used to where everything was. Some of the options on the ribbon are hidden completely until you select them in the options. (It was 2 weeks before I learned how to get directly to the vbasic editor again lol.) And hotkeys for menus aren't as quick, requiring extra strokes to get to a function (Alt, then the letter for the tab, then the letter for the section on the tab, then the letter for the function, if my memory serves).
I preferred Office 2003 by far, and certainly prefer the existing versions of OOO to 2007, so I really hope they don't go ahead with this emulation, or at the very least make it optional (developing two versions of the menus however would rather seem like a waste of effort -- doubly so if everyone switched off of the new version!).
Maybe grandparent meant that + should have been used? I mean, in the current wording > resolves before && like so:
A laser diode is much more robust than a laser diode and the frequency-doubling package of nonlinear crystals.
(A laser diode > a laser diode) && the frequency-doubling package of nonlinear crystals.
If it had been worded as "plus" instead of "and" it would have resolved correctly, like so:
A laser diode is much more robust than a laser diode plus the frequency-doubling package of nonlinear crystals.
A laser diode > (a laser diode + the frequency-doubling package of nonlinear crystals).
So is every other currency.
The same goes for paper money unless you can survive on a paper diet. At least with a giant pile of gold you know I'm not just running a printing press in the basement--it takes a lot more work to mine more gold.
I think that's kind of the point everyone's trying to make though. Basically, gold is the same as every other currency, just as you say. So if a paper currency can collapse, it's entirely possible for gold as a currency to collapse as well. If people are desperate enough for necessities, they won't be willing to trade them for something that they know may not acquire them anything they need any more, be it gold or paper money.
Now on the opposite end of the scale, the one difference between paper currency and gold is that gold is something that has a finite amount, which guards it against some of the economic tactics that have damaged our existing economy. (Not all of them, mind, but some. Loans as an example are still totally possible with a finite currency.) All that said, if our existing economy suffered a total collapse, other economies tied in with it (both international currencies as well as gold) are going to be affected.
Just how they may be affected, I'll leave to people better than I at economics to discuss.
3.5" diagonal display (roughly 3"x2"), 480x320px resolution.
Apple lists it starting from $229 for the 8GB version.
The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]
