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This year, cold and flu season conveniently coincided with the November 13 launch day for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. A poll from IGN showed that one in four respondents planned to skip work or school to indulge in the new first-person shooter o its first day out.

A new option to live-stream Call of Duty gameplay on YouTube meant that work and school-skippers had to be a little more careful about hiding themselves in case their bosses were browsing YouTube Live and found them gunning down foes rather than crunching spreadsheets. … Read more

Some major technology-related political hot potatoes have been tossed around this past year. The Stop Online Piracy Act may have gotten the most attention.

CNET broke down the presidential candidates' stances on a variety of tech issues before the election. For example, when it came to SOPA, Romney spoke out against it, while Obama danced a little more delicately around the issue.

The election will be shaping the direction of tech-related legislation for several years to come. It has already had an impact by weeding out three SOPA-sponsoring congressmen.

As an informed geek voter, how much did tech issues sway … Read more

As election results roll in with Barack Obama taking Vermont and Mitt Romney winning Kentucky and West Virginia, Bing lets users tailor the political news they're getting.

In it's Election 2012 page, Microsoft's search engine has what you'd normally see, a map with color-coded states, numbers showing how many states each candidate has won, up-to-the-minute news, and results from the Senate and House races. But, there's one additional feature that's a bit more unusual -- a political bias slider.

Anyone who's even remotely interested in this year's contest between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has no doubt seen countless polls, many of which have shown the incumbent in the lead, while many others have given the nod to the challenger.

In recent weeks, many headlines have declared the election a tossup. A common narrative being spread in newspapers, on blogs, on social media, and on TV nationwide, is that no one will have any idea who will be elected president until all the counting is done because the race is simply too close … Read more

Selecting an e-mail provider is a very personal choice, like picking out a deodorant or a mobile operating system or pledging your allegiance to a particular king in "Game of Thrones." You may be a longtime Gmailer or an old school Hotmailer or a dedicated Yahooer.

New numbers from ComScore show Gmail has topped Hotmail as the most popular e-mail service in the world with 287.9 million unique worldwide visitors in October. Hotmail edged in just under that at 286.2 million unique visitors. Yahoo Mail took top honors in the United States with 76.7 million visitors.… Read more

The Walt Disney Co. has announced plans to make "Star Wars VII" for release in 2015, but it has yet to announce who the director will be.

Meanwhile, George Lucas will stay on as a creative consultant at Lucasfilm and the now-Disney-owned company will now be run by mega-producer Kathleen Kennedy.

But are you looking forward to a new movie? The second trilogy wasn't well-received by critics -- or long-term fans -- both of whom complained that Lucas had lost touch with his audience, with creations like Jar Jar Binks as exhibit A.… Read more

Microsoft officially launched Windows 8 today, and with it comes a choice for those who use its predecessors: do I stay, or do I go?

My Crave colleague Eric Mack touches on the subject in an opinion piece today titled "The Windows 8 question: To adopt early or not?" Eric owns a perfectly capable Windows 7 laptop and would rather wait for a Surface tablet with Windows 8 Pro to debut before considering new hardware.

Personally, I feel a slight temptation to upgrade to Windows 8. In his review of Microsoft's Surface, CNET Senior Editor Eric Franklin praises Metro -- the primary interface of Windows 8 -- saying it's "innovative, elegant, powerful, and versatile," the last set of words I would use to describe my cluttered Windows 7 desktop. Maybe a new layout would feel like a breath of fresh air. … Read more

Among a slew of other product introductions today, Apple revealed the highly rumored iPad Mini.

In case you missed it, the pricing for the newly introduced iPad Mini starts at $329, and the device contains the same processor as the iPad 2 while sporting the cameras found in the iPad 3. It's like the two previous iterations of iPads had a baby.

The Mini's 7.9-inch screen offers a 1,024x768 resolution that displays 163 pixels per inch (ppi), far below the ultra-sharp Retina screen seen in the iPad 3 and the newly announced fourth-generation iPad. … Read more