Well sure; but DVCS's don't solve for that problem (or at least, they don't explicitly enable you to work offline). All VCS' allow you to continue to work offli

Well sure; but DVCS's don't solve for that problem (or at least, they don't explicitly enable you to work offline). All VCS' allow you to continue to work offline in some form. DVCS allow you to maintain a workflow; which is a subtly different thing (and if your use case is short-term once per year for each person then is it a critical requirement?). I'm not arguing against DVCS; far from it. Just trying to point out a bit of a "requirements fallacy" in some of the comments. You'll have a set of needs (requirements) in your business for an SCM tool. Based on the priority of those requirements then you can make a good choice about which tool to use. But the existence of such a requirements "a stranded developer couldn't code on the train" doesn't create a global condition where using DVCS is the only choice :)