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Google's Eric Schmidt to meet Kim Jong-Un?

Wouldn't you like to be a wall on the flight?

Can you imagine what Google's Eric Schmidt will be muttering to other members of a U.S. delegation that is reportedly going to Pyongyang, North Korea for a little diplomatic pying-pyong?

According to the Associated Press, this trip might even happen in the next few weeks, with former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson also in the party.

Naturally, details of this alleged trip are being kept very close to official chests. But one can surely hope for nothing more than a meeting between Schmidt and North Korean … Read more

8:52 p.m. tonight: Your best chance this year of an online date

You know I care about you, don't you?

Sometimes it might not seem it because I make jokes about your favorite brand, religion, or Justin Bieber. But I want you to be happy. I don't like the thought of you sitting all alone in front of your computer, wishing that somebody would just put their arms around you and tell you they love you.

So I need you to know that tonight's the night when your life is most likely to change -- at least if you're single, or merely in a miserable relationship that's heading for hell's flaming gates.

Tonight at 8:52 p.m. is your best chance to get an online date -- yes, all year. … Read more

Google's arty after-party New Year's Day doodle

Are you experiencing a slightly dry feeling in your mouth? Are your limbs offering involuntary jitters and twitches?

The fiscal cliff negotiations can do that to you.

However, Google would like to tell you that it understands the pain of entering 2013 without a sheet to the wind.

Having presented a charming doodle for New Year's Eve (below), featuring so many of the characters from the doodles of 2012 (you can see all Google's doodles here), today it presents the cleanup.

Reality has chimed. The cleaners have arrived. Robert Moog, Moby Dick, and Niels Bohr have all gone … Read more

New Apple ad a bit disturbing, as touted feature reportedly has New Year's hiccups

Last update: January 2 at 11:13 a.m. PT

However walled your garden, rodents still pad around, cockroaches still shuffle.

One can only, therefore, feel sympathy for Apple's new ad for the iPhone 5.

It features the mysterious and wonderful Williams sisters. They are in a dream. They are playing the dreamy Jeff Daniels at ping-pong.

And yet the ad also features the phone's "Do Not Disturb" feature, which users can switch on to silence in-coming calls, alerts, and notifications, or set up to perform such silencing during a preordained period of time. And who … Read more

Stephen Hawking sucks opera singer into black hole (in an ad)

Once you're famous, you get inundated with offers to appear in ads.

But which ones to choose? Should you peddle soap or Siri? Should you declare your love for Buick, while secretly pootling around in your Mercedes?

Stephen Hawking made an interesting choice to advertise auto insurance -- Go Compare's online auto-insurance comparison service, to be precise.… Read more

Predicting the most unlikely tech events that will happen in 2013

The other day I was lying on the beach when an older, bronzed man came and lay down next to me.

He made some groaning noises and chatted on his flip phone. He was Iggy Pop.

This, in itself was unusual. However, at the very moment he was there I was reading a book called "Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down," by Rosencrans Baldwin. It's the story of an American writer who moves to Paris with his wife to write silly ads for Louis Vuitton.

I happened to be on page 167, where … Read more

Theater tweet seats: A highway to hell?

The pragmatic and the weak tend to believe that if you can't beat them, you should join them. However, a significant number of the world's humans would just as soon carry on beating them.

Please choose sides, then, on a subject that may divide the artistic community from here to eternity.

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis is the latest to offer something that might stick in a throat or two: tweet seats.

Yes, this is a specially cordoned-off pen in which digital obsessives whip out their iPhones and tweet: "Oh, look. The fat lady's dead!" … Read more

Ho ho ho! How a 5-year-old got a porn-filled Nintendo for Xmas

Refurbishing is an art, as well as a craft. The whole point is to make a gadget feel pristine, even when it used to be owned by a cult leader, a scout leader or an exhibitionist.

Sadly, someone in a Colorado GameStop stopped refurbishing before the job was complete.

So much so that 5-year-old Braydon Giles opened his Xmas gift -- a Nintendo 3DS -- and discovered images of naked people doing less than pristine things. As Channel 9 News tells it, Braydon showed the 3DS to his brother Bryton. He wanted his help to remove these weird pictures.

Bryton … Read more

Randi Zuckerberg loses control on Facebook (and Twitter)

It's easy to have sympathy for those who have been misled by Facebook's ever-morphing privacy controls. One should therefore have additional sympathy when the person led astray is a former director of Facebook and enjoys the name Zuckerberg.

Randi Zuckerberg thought she had posted a picture to be only seen by her friends. Suddenly, it was there for all to see. Yes, all. The world. The whole misanthropic, green-eyed human race.

As ReadWriteWeb's Dan Lyons icily fulminates, it seems that one of her sister's friends saw the picture, assumed it was for public viewing and -- … Read more