I may do so at some point in the future, since there seems to be some interest in it. I would want to run anything like that by an attorney first, since I'm fairly certain it does constitute legal advice.

Citizens of the Nordic countries don't need visas to visit the US. So bring him on.

The Siberia Times article talks about a plan to put "not less than four seismic stations" in the region.

And if I don't want to use a GUI? Seems your steps should still be applicable to the CLI. That being said, you're rewriting history when doing that, and that is considered a huge no-no when using Git, especially when you have a team of developers. You'll have a local branch without the commit you just skipped over, but everyone else will still have that commit in their history, meaning they'll all still have the "bad" code. It's probably fine if you're the sole developer, but it's generally not advised to assume that will always be the case. Methinks I'll not follow your advise on this.

Go a little farther west and you can walk into a 7-11 and walk out with a dozen anonymous phones.

I read about it yesterday at bbc.co.uk. But thanks for playing.

Your semi-literacy must be an embarrassment to you.

On the mobile layout, only the first line of your comment was visible, and I thought you were going to say something about Bill Millin.

Thanks for helping me laugh on a sad day.

Yes, he took a few missteps, as have we all.

Yes, he was still awesome, and yes, he gave those of us who grew up in the 60s/70s a different and better sort of role model.

I use OpenSUSE. The few things I've not been able to find in their stock repos (most notably a non-braindead version of VLC) have always been available in the alternative repos which can be located simply by searching http://software.opensuse.org/ (Packman rocks, BTW). The only stuff I ever *have* to compile on anything like a regular basis is for work.

And my comment was about clients making changes to the spec. It doesn't matter how good your estimate is or how perfect your project plan is if the client decides to change the project after work has begun. You can refuse the changes, but they can also refuse to pay. You can give up the job, but hey, you're still not getting paid if you do that. The best hope you have is for the client to understand that their change, no matter how trivial it may seem, means more work for you and, therefore, more cost for them.

Or, to put it another way, go ahead and estimate the cost of that paint job. Then build a project plan for it that holds up in the situation I described. I'll be pricing you against a few local shops who are known for quality work; you high has to be competitive or I'll go elsewhere.

This isn't as much of an issue when your client is internal to the company, but that was clearly not the case in my analogy.

And yet, you still get know-nothings who insist that you're wrong and want to push forward anyway. Thankfully, for the ones I've encountered, money is not an object and they're more than happy to pay for the work to be redone. I had one client try and argue the point and I told them very plainly that their options were to continue the project as originally detailed, take the incomplete work, as-is, or pay for the changes they were requesting. Which option they took is irrelevant, but I'll say the project got done and I got paid.

That doesn't negate the fact that people will still insist on changes, no matter how careful you are in communicating issues you find in their requirements and getting clarification before starting work. You're absolutely right, though; many people don't know how to handle it when it happens.

Here's the story. It's free text online. tldr: The government paid for the research and development, took all the risks, an academic researcher did all the work, a private company came along, took advantage of a naive scientist, and sold the test back to the taxpayers for 50 times what it actually cost.

(The New York Times just had a series on health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal which gave a dozen examples like this. Asthma inhalers cost about 20 to 50 times as much in the US as they do anywhere else. There are people who go to Europe once a year to buy a year's supply of drugs.)

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Perspective
History of Medicine
Patenting the PKU Test — Federally Funded Research and Intellectual Property
Diane B. Paul, Ph.D., and Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:792-794
August 29, 2013
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1306755

In 1961, the U.S. Children's Bureau (USCB) embarked on a field trial of the test, requiring rapid production of kits to screen more than 400,000 babies. Guthrie, who had a cognitively impaired son and a niece with PKU, was involved in a parents' group, the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC). In consultation with the NARC, he decided that commercial production of test kits would be most efficient.

Guthrie favored the Ames Company, a division of Indiana-based Miles Laboratories, which marketed the earlier PKU tests. Although Guthrie assumed that the government would enter a contract with Ames, the company said it would manufacture the kits only if a patent were issued. In 1962, Guthrie filed a patent application in his own name and signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Miles, under which he would receive no royalties but 5% of net proceeds would be divided among the NARC Research Fund, the Association for Aid of Crippled Children, and the University of Buffalo Foundation (affiliated with the Buffalo Children's Hospital, Guthrie's employer). There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted.2

Miles, however, couldn't quickly produce test kits in the required quantity. So with financial support from the USCB, Guthrie rented a house in which to produce and assemble kits containing the materials necessary to perform and interpret 500 tests, at a cost of about $6 each. But when Guthrie visited the Ames Company in June 1963, he discovered that it planned to charge $262 for what were essentially the same kits. He was appalled, and when appeals to the company proved futile, he alerted USCB officials. They recommended that Miles not be granted exclusive commercial rights, in light of the large public expenditure on the test, the potential effect on states that planned to manufacture their own materials, and the steep price Miles planned to charge. Although the test had been developed with support from various organizations, the majority of the funds had come from the Public Health Service (PHS), which provided $251,700, and the USCB, which contributed $492,000 plus $250,000 through the states, chiefly for the trial. Given this federal funding, the surgeon general of the PHS determined that the invention belonged to the United States and abrogated the exclusive licensing agreement.

My example was meant to highlight the fact that a single word change in the spec can mean having to redo work. No matter how easy it is to *undo* the work (in the case of programming, it's often much easier than in my analogy, but this is not always the case), the fact remains that the work must still be redone. Just because my analogy did not include having done work that needs to be kept, subsequent to having done work that needs to be redone, doesn't make my honest curiosity irrelevant; and your response seems to indicate that, save for having planned for that very occurance, it is indeed not possible (and even with planning, only maybe, if you're willing to create a new branch for nearly every commit... and you're lucky).

Honestly, I was hoping you'd tell me it was easy. This is one of those instances where I'd jump for joy while screaming at the top of my lungs "I WAS WRONG! I WAS WRONG! THANK YOU, LORD, I WAS WRONG!" Not that I have a use for it at the moment, but it's come up in the past and I'm sure it'll come up again in the future.

You still end up rewriting code. Version control is great for many things, including rolling back to a previous point in time, but please tell me how to undo something I did last week without rolling back everything I've done since. I'd actually really like an answer to that, with regards to Git, if you've got one.