government

It has been a big year for Google in a number of capacities. The company constantly begins new projects, and many are ones that have a tremendous impact on users' lives. Whether that be something as simple as allowing video chat in Gmail, tracking the flu virus, or helping to educate the young.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been on the campaign trail stumping for Barack Obama, virtually formalizing his “informal campaign advisor” role, a suddenly very public endorsement that fueled speculation about a possible cabinet position, specifically Obama’s proposed tech czar.

Google has an office in Washington D.C., and now it is opening another one just a stone's throw away in Reston, Virginia. Why? So the company can try to sell "cloud computing" to government agencies, according to the Washington Post.

Google is apparently going to disregard the investigation into any antitrust practices, and move forward in its advertising deal with Yahoo! in October, unless the government stops them.

Quebec's open source organization Facil is suing the province's government for spending millions of dollars on Microsoft software, and never entertaining the idea of using anything open source. The problem here is that there is no room for competition  because the government automatically goes to Microsoft.

For the first time the federal government has released an online searchable database of hospital death rates at more than 4,300 hospitals across the U.S.Death rates for patients with pneumonia, heart attacks and heart failure are now posted on Medicare's Web site, Hospital Compare.

The Australian government is calling its $85 million plan to filter online pornography a failure.The filtering project was part of the governments $189 million NetAlert program launched in August 2007 to protect minors from online sexual predators and to block adult content.

Fouad al-Farhan's criticism of the Saudi government earned him an investigation by authorities, followed by his detention for questioning.