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The White House Listed On Real Estate Website 123

Forget visiting the White House, if you have $10 million you can own it. At least that is the price for the president's home on the real estate website Redfin. From the article: "Obviously this is an error. It looks like Redfin software pulled an example listing from the website Owners.com by mistake. That example listing was the White House. We have e-mailed Redfin for comment." I know it's historic but it still looks a bit on the high side according to the comparables in the area.
Google

Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good? 307

theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"

Comment Re:I guess the only question is... (Score 4, Insightful) 350

(and no couriers available to fall back on)

Luckily, they have plenty of *general purpose* organic units to fall back on, which, while less efficient than the tube network, can quickly transport the physical objects. Just because no one has "courier" in their job description, doesn't mean there are no available couriers.

Comment Re:Why should I care? (Score 2, Informative) 319

It shouldn't (but probably will) be considered trolling to point out that the political section of their client list consists of the Republican Party, the Conservative Party (of England), The Department of Defense, the Whitehouse, and the State of California. That section hasn't changed in that last year, so I assume it's referring to not only the Republican governor of California, but also Dubbya's Whitehouse. Sounds like they get most, if not all, of their political business from conservative sources.

Comment Re:the point (Score 5, Informative) 326

Apple charges me around $100 each year to upgrade my G4 Mac from 10.3 to 10.4 to 10.5, whereas Microsoft charged me *nothing* to upgrade from XP to XP-SP1 to SP2 to SP3

That is hardly true. Upgrades once a year? 10.3 had a 1.5 year lifespan, 10.4 lasted almost 2.5 years, and 10.5 is nearing it's 2 year mark as well. Plus, the soon-to-come upgrade to 10.6 is only 29 bucks. Also, Windows service packs are minor updates, mostly for bugfixes and consolidated security patches; Apple doesn't charge for these minor updates either. All the OS X point upgrades (10.3, 10.4, 10.5) were *major* upgrades, packed with new features.

Over the last seven years using Wintel OS has been free, where using Apple's OS has been costly.

In other words, over the last seven years, Windows has not released any new features. And you're ignoring Vista, which you apparently were not forced to upgrade to; Interestingly, you weren't forced to upgrade to 10.3, 10.4 or 10.5, either. You always have the option not to buy; if you don't think the feature set of a particular release is big enough, wait for the next one, and you get double the features for the same price.

Government

Streaming the Inauguration In a School? 201

Anonymous Teacher writes "I work in a small school in Washington and we are trying to prepare a way to watch the inauguration in 20 classrooms over a 1.5 T1. As our bandwidth severely limits the ability to individually stream to these rooms, is there an alternative to presenting it to the students? Are there any sites that offer a downloadable copy of the video quickly after the event that can be hosted locally or is reconfiguring the computers to use a proxy server the best solution?"
Encryption

Google's Obfuscated TCP 392

agl42 writes "Obfuscated TCP attempts to provide a cheap opportunistic encryption scheme for HTTP. Though SSL has been around for years, most sites still don't use it by default. By providing a less secure, but computationally and administratively cheaper, method of encryption, we might be able to increase the depressingly small fraction of encrypted traffic on the Internet. There's an introduction video explaining it."

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