Glad to see this, and kudos to the team. Ever since I heard that they were taking code cruft seriously (http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-01-09-unused.html), I've had high hopes for LibreOffice.

I've been using Git for a couple years now, and I don't think I've ever lost any work.

Even if you do `git reset --hard HEAD~5`, "throwing away" your last few commits, they aren't actually discarded yet. You can do `git reflog` to see them and then `git checkout -b some_commit_hash` to recover one to a branch, or `git reset --hard some_commit-hash` to set this branch back to that point.

Only if those commits stay orphaned for a while (a week or two?) will Git truly discard them.

It becomes dangerous if you have changes in your working tree. You truly lose those changes with a "git reset --hard HEAD" or the forced checkout.

Exactly. As mentioned in the article, `git reset --keep` is the preferred way to do it these days. It preserves uncommitted worktree changes.

Oh! I see. I would never do a `git reset` of any kind if I hadn't committed or stashed. Yikes!

I would have liked your comment better if you hadn't given away what kinds of cars you like and made them guess.

See my reply to PlanetGuy.

> 1) ones that give you what you want > 2) ones that drive demand

A big part of Google's success is that #1 is much easier to prove than #2.

"People bought our product more because they had become familiar with it over the last month via newspaper/radio/Facebook ads" is a hard-to-prove claim.

"We got X clicks from Google ads leading directly to Y purchases" is much easier.

Do they also sue people for word-of-mouth referrals?

This may be one of the strongest arguments for stopping this. US companies will certainly not want their business to be compromised by competitors because of this rule.

US companies continue to do business in China even after their businesses have been compromised and knockoffs are being made because it's cheap to do so. They clearly do not have a problem with it as long as the price is low enough.

Cory Doctorow's talk "The coming war on general computation" is a very interesting take on that: http://craphound.com/?p=3817

Our reactions to the thought of armed drones firing on American citizens on American soil should not be very different from our reactions to using these against our enemies.

American politicians often said, after 911, that the attacks were "cowardly." I suppose that's because they were against unarmed citizens. But still, the attackers did it knowing they would die. Evil, yes. Cowardly? I don't see that.

On the other hand, I bet Al Qaeda gets lots of propaganda value out of our drone attacks. "Those cowardly Americans kill us without even risking their lives." And if a drone strike kills innocent people, that's quadruple propaganda points. If it even IS propaganda anymore...

I don't know, I think this sounds disturbingly doable in the near future. Both your problems are essentially "opportunities to strike are few." But the point of drones is that they're cheaper than humans. If you can afford to tail someone with 2 goons, maybe you can afford 20 drones all along their typical route. And the drones can recognize license plates and other non-facial things to help them hone in.

As for facial recognition software, there's probably already an Android app for that. Sure, there's a lot of work involved - it has to recognize the person, it has to drive around autonomously, it has to aim and fire. But most of those may be pluggable components of hardware and software soon, coming from perfectly innocent projects.

I think drones may well be a big problem in the near future.

What about assassinating rival mob leaders who are cutting in on your drug business? Plenty of money in that.