London

We stagger around for most of our lives desperately hoping that someone, somewhere will actually understand us.

Not in the "what the bloody hell is he saying?" kind of way. But in the "Oh, I totally realize why he just took his trousers off and did a handstand while singing the national anthem of the Congo" kind of way.

When you go around trying to explain yourself, it can be extremely tiring. Both for you and for the person who has to listen. Thankfully, scientists at University College, London, have taken significant steps in, well, mind-reading.… Read more

Crave UK recently went for dinner at Inamo restaurant in London, where interactive touch-sensitive tables take your order. Each table has an overhead projector and a mouse trackpad, so your dining surface is effectively a PC monitor. You can customize your "tablecloth," play a video game against your companion, and order a taxi to get you home.

When you're ready to order, you can browse the menu, with each dish projected onto your place setting. When you've chosen, you can even see a live Webcam feed of your chef at work. The restaurant's founders say … Read more

Our pals over at Crave UK indulged their inner children with a trip to London Toy Fair trade show last week.

Luckily, they brought cameras along so they could share all the geeky goodness, including game action figures, Watchmen merchandise, and a couple of toys that scared the "living bejeebus" out of them.

Click on the gallery below for an excerpt of their very cheeky tour of the toy extravaganza. You'll understand why we've been trying so hard to get CNET to send us on vacation (or should we say holiday?) to the U.K. office. … Read more

Location matters. Black Swan-author Nassim Nicholas Taleb finds "living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters – you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity." That's particularly true for romance. People move to big cities not to advance their careers, party, escape, disappear, be a star, and so on. The chick-flick fan that I am, I remember very well that candid line from Sex and the City (the movie): "I came to New York City to fall in love." Exactly. "Anyone who's predicting the decline of big cities has … Read more

Since embracing Incorrectness, I have noticed that the passion of those who love either Microsoft or Apple seems even to exceed a Goth's passion for black eyeshadow.

The more I have come to know the two sides, the more their mutual stand-off resembles the kind of love-hate continuum embraced nightly by those two remarkably large-headed souls, Fox's Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

Now, research led by Professor Semir Zeki of University College London may help to illustrate and explain the inflamed emotions that surround two mere technology brands.

It appears that, although love and hate … Read more

LONDON--In the first part of our interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference, CNET News asked the Web start-up poster boy about everything from the company's Series C funding round to whether he's concerned about when those election stories stop rolling in.

In part 2, Rose got a little more specific: What would happen if Digg got hit with a stock-plunging news hoax? Will he be making acquisitions? And most importantly, does "digg" mean anything dirty in any foreign languages?

CNN had that big debacle with a user-submitted story, about … Read more

LONDON--Perhaps it's fitting that Digg founder Kevin Rose chose the Future of Web Apps conference here as the place to elaborate on his company's international expansion strategy. London, after all, has become the San Francisco-based Digg's biggest hub of user activity. But with headlines dominated by financial disasters, life gets a little more complicated for a company determined to build up and keep hiring.

CNET News caught up with Rose shortly after his presentation on Thursday morning. Here's the first part of our two-part interview.

You're a geek hero. You've got a huge following. … Read more

LONDON--Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It's time to grow up.

"We have to do better," he said in his talk, called "The Future of News," and said that it's time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. "Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?"

Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, … Read more

I just spent two weeks in London and Paris with no computer, phone, or MP3 player. I didn't want to bring a laptop lest I be tempted to work. I was scared to bring my iPhone because of possible horrendous roaming charges and I got three different answers from AT&T about whether Wi-Fi access would be free. (Memo to AT&T: please come up with a single answer and train your phone support people to give it.) I don't have a European-U.S. electrical adapter to recharge any of my gadgets anyway.

Even so, I … Read more