The US Department of Justice has sent Google a request for additional information as part of their scrutiny of the search giant’s proposed purchase of Motorola Mobility.
As with any deal of this magnitude, the DOJ must conduct an investigation before it can be finalized. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission may have a say in the matter.
Google Senior Vice President David Drummond announced the DOJ request on the company’s Public Policy blog, writing, “Today we received what is called a “second request,” which means that the DOJ is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal.”
He added that he doesn’t believe there is any reason to believe the Justice Department will not approve the sale.
However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be additional hurdles to clear before everything is said and done. At a US Senate antitrust hearing last week Google’s Erich Schmidt faced hostile legislators who accused Google of anticompetitive behavior.
Even though the hearing was focused on their search business, more than one Senator intimated Google uses the Android OS primarily to further their dominance.
With national elections for the US presidency and more than half of all legislators coming up next year, political pressure and grandstanding could easily lead to significant delays.
Result for: elections
It appears that how popular you are on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter actually had a real world effect on the November elections in the United States.
Candidates with more “likes” on Facebook won 71 percent of the time in the Senate elections while candidates with more Twitter followers won 74 percent of the time.
Facebook said that in 77 of the 118 races it followed in the Senate and the House, the winner had more “likes” than the opponent did.
If you had double the amount of “likes,” the average margin of victory was 3.9 percent.
There also seemed to be a correlation to money raised and spent, as one big spender, Jeff Greene of Florida, spent $24 million and did not even win his primary. The primary winner, Kendrick Meek, had 24,000 “likes” on Facebook to Greene’s lowly 644.
Of course, social networking popularity did not help a few high profile candidates like “I am not a witch” Christine O’Donnell, who was very popular on Twitter and Facebook but got crushed in the election by 17 percent. Meg Whitman, the billionaire, spent the most money and had the third highest amount of Facebook likes but still lost the California governor race.
Says ABC News: “[Social media] provides information about comparisons…trends and changes could be informative on the subset of people on it. You get more information out of it if you respect limitations. If you try to get too much, you get nothing.”
Result for: elections
The most popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent has moved onto version 2.0, albeit in beta form for the time being, and promises tons of updates and changes.
– 2009-08-04: Version 2.0 Beta (build 16081)
- Change: disable toolbar offers for Wine installs
- Feature: New Setup guide & Speedtest.
- Change: uninstaller is added to all user profiles
- Fix: crash when assigning new label to torrents from RSS
- Change: Incomplete downloads sort after completed downloads if sorting by “Completed On”
- Feature: Add Moldova to peer flags
- Change: Added upnp host cache to speed up upnp nat resolution on misbehaving routers
- Fix: maintain category list selection on update for some edge cases
- Change: if selected, install start menu and desktop shortcuts to all users instead of only current user
- Feature: Grayscale disabled toolbar buttons
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