Hmmm.

The one Chinese-made vehicle I owned (purchased against my better judgment, I admit) was a scooter I bought new for $1200. It lasted approximately four months (~500 miles) before dying. The drum on the CVT went and not only could you not get a replacement, the old one couldn't be removed.

As much as possible, I've stopped buying made-in-China stuff, except for the occasional toys for my daughters.

Did you try the bread? The stable self life bread had just made it into MREs when I was in the Middle East (for GW 1) and I thought that was some pretty nasty stuff. Made from 70% flour, 10% water, and 20% preservatives, was how it tasted. :-)

Hang in there.

My oldest daughter is three, and a total delight. She is bright, inquisitive, and interested in learning about everything. When I get home in the evenings, she runs to give me a hug and tell me all about her day.

My wife (and I think most girls, but that's probably an over-generalization) loves babies. To me, they're just little blobs. But once they're old enough to really interact with you, you're going to mostly forget the all-nighters.

When I was in the 82nd, we used to say that the cooks had a way to tell if the coffee was strong enough: if you can't stand a fork up in the cup, it's too weak.

I agree: if it's hot enough, you can drink some pretty terrible coffee. My theory is that the boiling water burns off your taste buds so you don't notice the awfulness so much. Of course, the Army also taught me that you can eat anything, if you put enough Tabasco on it :-)

Yes. However, since there is apparently no Chinese word for "quality" and since human lives are at stake, clearly the bottom line isn't the end-all, be-all of this proposal.

Personally, you couldn't pay me to ride in a Chinese-built car at freeway speeds, let alone fly on a Chinese rocket at escape velocity.

Maybe not, but it would surely make me think twice about whether I wanted to use this "feature" in the future. I agree that it's probably not some nefarious scheme, but losing access to important documents because of a mistake on Microsoft's part would be a big red flag for most organizations.

And it hurts one important anti-cloud argument that I've been expecting "traditional" software vendors to make--that when docs are in the cloud access is at the whim of the vendor/connectivity, whereas when they're local, as long as you have electricity you have access. So much for that.

I have the Mac version of Office ($10 through MS's HUP program if your employer is a member) and it's a lot better than OOo.

I wanted to like OOo on the Mac--I would've been only too happy to ditch that last little bit of dependency on Microsoft. I installed it first, and tried it out for a couple of months. But I'm not an Open Source ideologue/zealot so actually being able to accomplish things is of primary importance to me and I just couldn't handle OOo's slow speed and other assorted issues.

It's kind of sad, but Office on the Mac is one of Microsoft's better offerings.

No, the ribbon is bad UI design. Like a lot of the cruft put out by Microsoft--designed for the perpetual novice with little or no thought given to how it works for those already familiar with the interface. Microsoft's UI group is badly broken because of their inability got get past this issue (hiding "advanced" options, "personalizing" menus, etc.)

Fortunately, real "power users" of Word don't bother with menus, so as long as the keyboard shortcuts don't get changed (again) it's not that big of a deal. And people writing (anything of length) professionally don't use Word anyway.

But this is why professional writers don't use Word for "work"--it's fine for a memo or letter, but I've never met any half-competent writer who relies on Word for long (>200 page) documents.

I'm a writer in my day job, and I've turned down jobs (of course, in a different economic climate :-> ) where they were trying to write books with Word.

But that doesn't mean that I want to read tags or hand-edit page layout in a relatively obscure config file. There are a number of powerful, flexible WYSIWYG tools out there other than Word that allow me to write without getting caught up in the details of presentation.

Not that I'm a LyX/LaTeX hater, but there are plenty of other non-Word options out there.

Apparently while it's possible use on slashdot to teach how to use apostrophes, it's not possible to learn how to use them here

FTFY