government

To paraphrase the old saying: Everyone complains about the government, but no one does anything about it. If you want to get more involved in the political process, "elect" Visible Vote Mobile to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

The free app lets you compare the voting records of your state senators and congressional representative(s) with your votes on the issues of the day.

For example, do you agree with the bill to expand Medicare coverage? (You can read a description and highlights right on your iPhone.) Cast your vote, then see how it matches up with your … Read more

The U.K. government claims that it may save 75 million pounds ($119 million) over the next five years by harnessing itself firmly to Microsoft. That may be true, but the cost savings come from what the U.K. would have paid Microsoft, and they don't take into account what it could have saved by shopping around.

More ironic, however, than such ironic "cost savings" is its nomenclature: Angela Eagle, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, suggests the Microsoft purchase "reinforces the Government's commitment to its Open Source Action Plan." Huh??? Buying lots of non-open-source … Read more

Ubiquitous, reliable, and free to the public, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is now taken for granted, but don't dump those maps from the glove box just yet, since it's uncertain for how long the U.S. government can continue to deliver.

The US plans to invest more than $5.8 billion through 2013 to modernize and replenish the existing GPS satellite constellation. But facing cost overruns of $870 million and "significant" technical problems, the US Air Force, which is in charge of GPS acquisition, has struggled to build and deploy the next generation satellites on … Read more

Update: Corrected Reuven Cohen's title and added link to Chris Hoff's post.

Update 2:The NIST has added a Web page with links to the definition, and an email address where one can send comments.

Reuven Cohen, CTO of cloud infrastructure vendor Enomaly, recently posted a review of his trip to Washington, D.C. to speak to a variety of federal officials about the potential for cloud computing in government. Reuven points out that the enthusiasm with which the federal government is pursuing the cloud may in fact be putting the private sector to shame.

And it makes … Read more

This was originally posted on CBSNews.com.

A White House "virtual town hall" that Barack Obama hosted last month was intended to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy that would allow the president to interact with average Americans.

Aides billed it as permitting members of the public to "pose a question or vote for a particular question" using the Google Moderator utility. A new area of the WhiteHouse.gov Web site was titled Open For Questions, and nearly 1.8 million votes were cast.

That was the plan. After voting began, though, a committed group of … Read more

The main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives has reopened a probe of Lime Wire and other peer-to-peer file-sharing companies over the issue of "inadvertent sharing." The move comes nearly two months after it was alleged that Iran took advantage of a computer security breach to obtain information about President Barack Obama's helicopter.

CNET News has obtained copies of the letters written by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission asking them for help investigating the recent rash of security breaches caused when people … Read more

Bankers are finding it hard to get a little love these days. Their spouses offer a cold shoulder. Their relatives, a cold consomme. Their golden retrievers, cold comfort.

As they spend their lonely nights sipping their VSOP and trying to make an online appointment at the Emperor's Club, perhaps they might slide over to Facebook just for moment.

Facebook, like the odd banker or two, makes a mess of things sometimes. But there is a certain sweetness in the way in which the company's upper echelons sometimes remember who their customers are. And, perhaps even more importantly, how … Read more

Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurship it fosters is different because it thrives on adversity, on making much out of little. This is why Sarah Lacy is right to rebuke Thomas Friedman's suggestion that the U.S. government should bail out venture capital firms:

Friedman further says in the column that "Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we'll get out of this crisis." Agreed. But what country got rich by bailing out winners? Is that even a concept that makes sense? I can't imagine … Read more

Almost three years after Jeff Howe coined the term in his seminal article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," and, ironically, in the very week 1,300 handpicked scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other thinkers, movers, and shakers assembled at the TED conference in Long Beach, the term "crowdsourcing" yielded more than 1 million search results on Google.

That's quite an accomplishment. Crowdsourcing is no longer an exclusive noun for a few in the know, it has become a verb for the crowd. Mom-and pop shops, SME's, and large corporations, receptionists, interns, middle managers, and CEOs – everyone'… Read more