Q: How hard can copy-paste be?

A: as overly complicated as anything else that comes out of the Mac BU of Microsoft. Hey Microsoft, stop playing around with multi-touch in Windows 7 and get some engineers working on very basic aspects of your OS and major software. (You'd think they'd have a better business strategy than developing features for 0.01% of their users when features used by 90% of the users don't work properly. But that's what you get when you have a de-facto monopoly on the industry. I mean, people still use Powerpoint instead of Keynote!)

Well, through trial and error, here is what I have discovered. Let's say you have some data. You plot it in excel and format it all nice and pretty. Then you copy-paste it into Powerpoint for your talk at an upcoming conference. Uh-oh, it doesn't work! Turns out, you need to go back, and save that spreadsheet in .xls format (previous version format). Then you've got to copy and paste-special as a Microsoft Excel Chart Object. Now your format is screwed and your chart looks like shit. No worries, double-click it, tell it to convert, wait a ridiculously long 5 seconds, and now you can edit your chart directly in Powerpoint.

To review:
1) you can't copy and paste from .xlsx to .pptx format directly.
2) when copy and pasting from .xls to .pptx, you need to paste-special (Microsoft Excel Chart Object)
3) the pasted chart needs to be converted before you can format it and for it not to look like crap

I had similar problems copy-pasting from pdf. Solution? save as png and then paste it in.

Now I know why the Empire stuck with plain TIE fighters

As they say, the TIE/D Defender's high cost was one of the major obstacles for adoption by the Imperial Navy.

Here, the LEGO version (coming out in 2010) is priced at $49.99. Which is a pretty bad deal, even for a 304 piece Star Wars set. Maybe Lucas is upping the price for the license?

I'm also upset with image showing two lasers coming from the cockpit. Come on people, it only takes two minutes to read the Wookieepedia page and realize that there are two lasers on both of the bottom panels, and two ion cannons on the upper panel. The weapons on the cockpit module should be the warhead launchers. Tsk, Tsk.

[Thanks to FBTB for the image.]