For the last 12 months, Microsoft has focused on getting its flagship Office suite on screens where it’s never been before—iPhones, iPads, and Android tablets. The Office for OS X apps were left behind, though. Microsoft released a new version of Outlook and an official OneNote client, but the core Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps were stuck back in 2010.

That changes today. Microsoft has just released a preview of Office 2016 for Mac, a suite which will include the current versions of Outlook and OneNote alongside newly updated versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The preview runs on OS X Yosemite, it’s free to use, and it includes a tool for providing feedback to Microsoft. Once the final versions of the apps ship “in the second half of 2015,” an Office 365 subscription will be required.

The new apps take the styling introduced in OneNote and Outlook for OS X and apply it to the other apps in the suite. The ribbon interface now more closely resembles the one in Office 2013 for Windows—Office for Mac 2011 was closer to its Windows counterpart than older versions, but it still looked like a product from another company. The apps integrate much better with OneDrive than the previous versions did, and they support the standard collaborative editing features present on other platforms. All apps also play nice with OS X-specific features, including Full Screen mode, sandboxes for apps, and Retina display support.

A helicopter mechanic who popped off about his Middle East job on Facebook while at home in the US got more than an upbraiding from his bosses when he returned to his gig in the United Arab Emirates.

He was met in Abu Dhabi with an arrest, 10 days in jail, and a March 17 trial date—with a potential five years in prison if convicted. Thirty-year-old Ryan Pate of Belleair Bluffs, Florida, is accused of slandering his employer, which is illegal in the Emirates.

“I just couldn’t register it in my head because as an American growing up in the United States, the First Amendment right is just ingrained in my brain,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I never even entertained the fact that I would wind up in prison out here for something I put on Facebook in the United States.”

US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) this week filed legislation she calls the “Internet Freedom Act” to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s new network neutrality rules.

The FCC’s neutrality rules prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling Internet traffic, prohibit prioritization of traffic in exchange for payment, and require the ISPs to disclose network management practices.

These rules “shall have no force or effect, and the Commission may not reissue such rule in substantially the same form, or issue a new rule that is substantially the same as such rule, unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act,” the Internet Freedom Act states.

I don’t believe there is anything that can’t be improved by adding a laser to it. And now a group of intrepid engineers has proven me right by making an oscilloscope. An oscilloscope with lasers.

Of course, not everyone shares my obsession with lasers—such people are strange and have sad little lives, but we forgive them. But it’s a fair question to ask why we should bother adding lasers to oscilloscopes given that they are pretty well-established tech. The answer is speed. An oscilloscope is designed to display changes in voltage or current with respect to time. To do this, the oscilloscope needs to sample the voltage faster than it changes, which is problematic for today’s modern, high-frequency electronics, where it’s often easier to generate fast changes than it is to measure them.

This is where a laser may have some benefit. In principle, a light field can be modulated at a rate that is a large fraction of its base frequency (~600THz). Provided we can measure that modulation, we can measure time-varying voltages much faster than we could using any electronic method. But therein lies a conundrum: how do we measure the modulation of a light field? Using electrons. And what is the problem with electrons? They are too damn slow.

There’s an Apple event on Monday, so it’s time to run down our list of rumors and hunches so you know what to expect from the company.

Apple’s tagline for the event is “spring forward,” a less-than-subtle reference to the Apple Watch and a reminder that holding a product event the day after Daylight Saving Time begins is cruel. Since this event is likely to be the springboard for an all-new product line, it’s probably going to crowd out most other announcements, which makes this list shorter than it normally is. That said, the timing is right for a handful of other announcements—here’s what we think will share the stage on Monday.

Apple Watch

Don’t be sad, Apple Watch! It’s almost your “time” to shine.

Megan Geuss

This is a gimme. The Apple Watch has already been announced, so we know what it looks like and some basic things about how it works. We know it’s scheduled to launch in April, and we have some basic information about what it does. We know it requires an iPhone 5 or better and that it will support Apple Pay even when tethered to older phones. We know the price starts at $349, probably for the aluminum Apple Watch Sport model with a basic band.