Well... on GitHub the wiki _is_ actually stored in a Git repo... and all of the pages are simply Markdown. They are VERY easy to move to many other systems (or even to view locally).

GitHub even publishes an open source version of its wiki renderer to make it even easier: https://github.com/gollum/goll...

NOW: The bugtracker stuff is a little more difficult. You can use the GitHub API to pull out all of the info easily enough and store it locally... but you have to do some sort of transformation to get it into a new format if you're trying to move to a different service.

Personally, I've done this the other way around. We went from using Trac on our own servers to using GitHub. I wrote scripts to take all of our Tickets from Trac and upload them to GitHub as Issues using the GitHub API. It was a pain but not impossible....

If GitHub is down just:

git remote add bitbucket git@bitbucket.org:company/project.git
git push bitbucket

And then keep rolling.

Replace Bitbucket with any number of alternatives.

It simply doesn't matter if GitHub goes down. It has a convenient interface, for sure, but you can continue to work without it easily.

Subversion has gotten better recently... but in the past nearly every command required a round-trip to the central server. Like I say, that has recently changed for a few (like 'svn stat') but there are still MANY that require a live link to the central server.

Contrast this with Git where the _only_ time you need to access a server is for sharing.

When GitHub is down it only takes one command to push your whole repo to BitBucket so you can keep working with peers. Sure, you don't have access to any *data* (wiki, issues, etc) that you had on GitHub... but the most important thing (the code) is VERY mobile.

I somewhat agree... but the problem is not "is a driverless car better than a human" it's: who do we sue when something goes wrong.

In the proposed hypothetical, whoever gets hit is going to be suing someone. Who do they sue? The owner of the car (even if they weren't in the car the time?) the "passenger" or the company that makes the vehicle.

I tend to think that it will be the owner - and the owner will need to have insurance to cover whatever the autonomous car could do. There is no way a company like Google is going to put out a product like this where it's liable.

As for "rare/never seen in the real world situations" you have to remember that with a high enough saturation of these on the roads... those "rare" situations will happen all day long, every day (they already do with regular cars). The statistics makes this quite tricky...

Note that I am NOT an obstructionist and I am all for autonomous vehicles... but the legal aspects of self-driving cars is something that needs to get solved soon...

Spotify has a playlist called "ESM" for Electronic Study Music... it's a pretty good mix of "near muzak" that is better than muzak: https://play.spotify.com/user/...

In related news: Purity Ring released a new album this week: "another eternity".... it's been a good coding companion for me this week...

And of course... there is my Spotify station based on Skrillex... must have good beats while coding...

You are obviously not a scientist.

If you have "blindly done research" and you're publishing in a reputable journal... then you'll get your ass handed to you if your science isn't correct (trust me: my ass still stings from some of the scathing reviews I've received on a few of my papers).

The funding agency DOES NOT MATTER... if proper peer review is undertaken. If the science is good... then the science is good... this isn't an opinion piece in the New York Times paid for by big oil...

Really? To walk out of my room I need the lights on. You just finish your movie and turn everything off and "feel" your way out of the room?

I use the Logitech Ultimate Home Control in my living room and Logitech Home Control in my bedroom for just this purpose. Integrates and works beautifully with my Hue lights.

I also use the Philips Hue Tap to have a physical "switch" on the walls that can control the lights.

Without physical hardware that she can touch none of the home automation stuff would have flown with my wife :-)

The only "remote control" (like away from home) thing I use with my Hue lights is using IFTTT to automatically turn them on when I come home.

That is actually pretty convenient (and works really well).

I do use the ability to turn the bedroom lights off when I'm in the living room and vice versa... but I'm not sure if you would consider that "remote control".

Now: with my Nest I _do_ use the ability to change the temperature before I come home. If it's cold outside I can set it to be nice and toasty by the time I get home... and the other way around if it's hot. That works pretty well :-)

I bought:

* Logitech Ultimate Home Control
* Logitech Home Control
* Nest
* Philips Hue Bridge
* 3 Philips Hue Luxe Bulbs
* 2 Philips Hue bulbs
* Philips Hue Light Strip
* 2 Philips Hue Taps

The Ultimate Home Control is in the living room along with the colored Philips Hue bulbs and the Light Strip. I also put one Tap in there right where the normal light switches are.

The bedroom is the regular Home Control with 3 Luxe Bulbs... again with a Tap where the normal light switches are.

Everything synced up perfectly and works perfectly. Having integration with the Logitech remotes is awesome. You just press "Watch Movie" and all of my AV gear resets for watching a movie while the lights dim: awesome! After the movie you turn the system off and the lights automatically come back on: sweet!

If you don't know what a Tap is... go check it out: http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/...

It's essentially a "light switch" that makes running the whole system super easy. Each one has 4 buttons that I've set up as different lighting combinations: Everything on, dim, dimmer, everything off... essentially. I have both set the same way in both rooms so that you can easily remember what the buttons do. Also: they don't take batteries! They're powered by the force of pressing the buttons themselves... so they are very reliable.

All of this is so dang simple and fool proof that my wife even loves it... she is a non-techie but she loves the extra flexibility with the lights. If she's reading at night she'll even pop open the Hue app on her phone and dial down all the lights except the one on her side of the bed.

My advice: don't go cheap. Buy actual name brand stuff: Hue, Logitech, Nest. Don't try to cheap out on something that you need to interact with all day every day...

I'm in Boston as well and it basically unfolded exactly as predicted.

Note: this was a pretty tricky storm to forecast: it wasn't just a "system" that moved across from west to east like a lot of snowstorms do in the midwest (where I'm from). This thing was swirling off the coast and depended on a low pressure system combined with north/south winds on shore to make for "waves" of snow that washed onto the land. Definitely a really interesting beast.

As a computational scientist (I specialize in the types of multiphysics models that underly a lot of weather modeling) I can tell you that this type of thing is VERY hard to predict. I think they did a really good job here of informing the public and keeping people safe.

The message definitely worked here in the Boston area as everyone stayed home and was stocked up in case the power went out. Everything basically went smoothly despite the fact that 2-3 feet of snow fell in a densely populated area.

This is just basic NYC centric reporting. They happened to get a little less there than forecast (they still got several inches) so people are griping. If they hadn't made preparations and it had been as bad there as it is in Boston then we would have had a full-scale media blitz on how they screwed up this emergency management effort....

Where? A basic music package is $10/month:

http://www.siriusxm.com/ourmos...

"very expensive"?

I don't think most people would consider $10/month "very expensive". It is a small amount of money by almost any measure.

Is it worth $10/month? That's a personal question... but there's no way that's "very expensive" to anyone with a steady job...

I subscribe to Beats for my unlimited, play anything service.

I use iTunes for buying Albums I want to keep forever (that I usually listen to on Beats first).

BUT... I still subscribe to Sirius/XM in the car (and online)... and that's where I normally learn about new bands (on the Indie/Alt stations). I use Shazam to snag a song that comes on the radio... and it directly has a button that lets me listen to it (and the album) on Beats later after I get home... from there I typically spin off to other things Beats/iTunes suggests.

I tried dropping the "radio" portion of this system a while ago... and found myself stuck in a musical rut. Beats does a decent job of leading me into hand-picked playlists that are "radio like" - but when faced with the choice of picking something I know is good vs something I don't know about I still often find myself listening to stuff I've already heard before. The "forced" nature of the radio naturally leads to listening to things outside of my current library...