A deep and detailed survey by Focus.com concludes that the best job in the United States is a tech job: systems engineer. No. 2: physician assistant. No. 3: college professor.

Recent PR debacles surrounding Google Buzz and Facebook's privacy settings have put the spotlight on basic misunderstandings by tech companies about how people use social media.

A view of the expo floor from on top of the Sony booth at the Game Developers Conference in the South Hall of Moscone Center in San Francisco.

When Facebook changed its privacy settings, Zuckerberg took pictures off his Facebook pages. Google's Schimdt is reportedly trying to take down his ex-lover's blog. No one cares about privacy? Really?

Chevy is hoping to tap into the same sentiments that spark gadget fandom with its new Volt electric car. But is the crowd at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival the right audience?

After last year's network meltdown at the hands of thousands of iPhone-toting geeks at the interactive confab in Austin, Texas, AT&T promised it would do better. People were skeptical, but they've been won over.

Now "99.9 percent" certain that it will close its Chinese search engine amid conflict over censorship, Google has detailed plans to do so, according to a Financial Times source.

Eager to court fans of cutting-edge tech at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, General Motors sends the e-car. And CNET's Caroline McCarthy gets a chance to drive it.

A ComScore-Offerpal Media survey shows that social gamers are willing to be marketed to in order to get free virtual currency. Avoiding scams will be key to making this trend last.

Sources say Dan Dobberpuhl, PA Semi's founder and pre-acquisition chief executive, has jumped ship to work at chip-related start-up Agnilux.

Here are a few of CNET Reviews' favorite items from the past week, including the 2010 Mini Cooper S, Falcon Northwest Mach V, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7.

At the 2010 Game Developers Conference, artists, programmers, and designers are sharing their best ideas on the future of gaming.

Toshiba shows off a two-wheeled autonomous robot than can roll over ramps and balance a tray of food. Wheelie might make a decent waiter.

As the Web generation descends on the South by Southwest Interactive show in Austin, several location-based start-ups try to put themselves on the map.

Hunch, a buzzy start-up that answers questions using crowdsourced recommendations, has lined up at least $10 million in funding, according to sources.

Microsoft is testing a patch for a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer, but stopped short of promising to deliver an emergency fix before the next scheduled Patch Tuesday.

The iPhone was a radical reinvention of the phone as an internet device. The iPad is a reinvention of computing in general, says columnist Michael DeAgonia.

Last year was a tough one for most businesses, but for cybercriminals it was one of the best yet.

Billions of dollars are at stake in the FCC's net neutrality rule making, which could mandate rules for broadband Internet access over wireless and wireline networks.

The Troyak ISP, which has been linked to the Zeus botnet, was briefly taken down this week. The takedown occurred on the heels of the RSA Conference last week, where there was much talk about the "cat-and-mouse" game of trying to squelch cybercrime. Otherwise, things got a little testy at the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, and iPad pre-orders got rolling. Oh, and the Internet was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission plans to release a national broadband plan next week that will lay out an ambitious set of goals for broadband deployment and adoption.

Twitter on has turned on its new geolocation feature that allows you to tell the Twitterverse where you are when you tweet.

Back in early 2005, I covered URLwell, a clever menu-bar program that made it easy to store URLs you want to check out at a later time. Unfortunately, URLwell was last updated less than a month after I wrote that review, but I recently discovered a candidate for replacement: Quiet Read, which adds a few useful features of its own.

Mozilla has begun offering Firefox 3.6 to users running older versions of the open-source browser.

The unveiling of six-core desktop processors by AMD and Intel mark a step in the evolution of chip technology, not a revolutionary move, mostly due to the lack of software that can take advantage of the advances.

View more news and analysis from Computerworld.com

Enterprise communications is speeding toward a convergence of voice, data, and video. See it all come together at VoiceCon 2010 in Orlando, March 22 - March 25.

Microsoft will unveil Silverlight Analytics Framework at the Web designers & developers conference kicking off March 15 in Las Vegas, while Preemptive will launch Runtime Intelligence Analytics Provider for Silverlight.

But sales of all gaming hardware, including the Sony PS2, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS, are down from a year ago.

The agreement puts Microsoft's Bing search on Motorola's Android smartphones.

Promising consequences if Google flouts China's censorship laws, Chinese authorities also chide the U.S. for its human rights record.

Software and service bundles are designed to make implementation time and cost predictable.

Workers' comp carrier taps Riddle to oversee strategic direction of claims operations and medical cost management.

DecisionMaker Rating Enterprise customers will be able to minimize overhead, create multiple cloned environments and quickly perform "what if" analysis with version 7.1, the vendor says.

Using RingCube's virtual desktop, which copies apps, data and permissions to a USB drive.

Lehman Brothers used accounting gimmicks and had been insolvent for weeks before it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, but there was not extensive wrongdoing, a court-appointed examiner has found.

The appetite and sense of urgency for world financial reform have waned as markets have rebounded and the world economy has shown signs of recovering, the head of exchange operator NYSE Euronext said.

Warren Buffett had at least three opportunities in 2008 to help Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, but failure to enlist his aid contributed to Lehman's bankruptcy and the global financial crisis, a court-appointed examiner said.

The enhancements fall within the company's APEX project, an agent-focused series of technical initiatives to be completed in 2001 that will allow the company to fulfill new customer needs and provide what the carrier describes as outstanding service to its policies with advanced straight-through processing to its independent agents.

Spiking sales of PCs, external drives, and optical drives signal increasing revenue for the storage sector.

$7 million, five-year deal involves support services for closed books.

AP - Motion controls and social gaming were the hot topics at this week's Game Developers Conference, the annual convention of game designers, programmers and executives.

AP - Apple Inc. is giving its chief operating officer a $5 million bonus for "outstanding performance" running the company while CEO Steve Jobs was on medical leave.

AP - A federal court Friday upheld regulations that require cable TV companies to make sports programming and other channels they own available on equal terms to rival TV providers such as satellite companies.

AP - Porn Web sites can't park themselves at a ".xxx" address quite yet.

AP - China's top Internet regulator insisted Friday that Google must obey its laws or "pay the consequences," giving no sign of a possible compromise in their dispute over censorship and hacking.

AP - DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. has canceled a sequel to a $1 million movie-recommendation contest, avoiding a potential courtroom drama over the privacy rights of its subscribers.

PC Magazine - On the opening night of SXSW Interactive, HDNet founder Mark Cuban and Boxee founder Avner Ronan traded verbal barbs and a few well-reasoned arguments trying to answer the simple question: will Internet TV take over?

PC World - Apparently we aren't the only species to prefer the crisp, smooth picture of an HDTV compared to that from one of those old CRT sets of yesteryear.

AP - Factory worker Chen Qinghai frowned as he looked at a tall bulletin board full of help-wanted notices from companies making everything from photocopiers and DVD drives to mobile phones and car parts.

AP - THE DISPUTE: Cable TV providers challenged a five-year extension of federal regulations requiring them to make channels they own available to rivals such as satellite TV.

PC World - Microsoft's Xbox 360 outsold Nintendo's Wii in February to claim the top spot in the U.S. monthly sales ranking for the first time in more than two years, analyst group NPD said Thursday. Overall the industry had a poor month with total sales down 15 percent from February last year.

PC World - If you're one of the folks (or as others have said, "idiots") who have already decided to hand over a few Benjamins for an iPad pre-order, chances are you haven't given much thought to what happens if your battery goes bad. Rest assured that Apple is one step ahead of you.

AP - Shares of QAD Inc. sank Friday after the business software provider reported a drop in fourth-quarter revenue and predicted another drop for the first quarter.

AP - RadiSys Corp., a maker of servers that support wireless phone networks, said Thursday it acquired privately held Pactolus Communications Software Co. Terms were not disclosed.

PC World - The Troyak ISP, which has been linked to the Zeus botnet, was briefly taken down this week. The takedown occurred on the heels of the RSA Conference last week, where there was much talk about the "cat-and-mouse" game of trying to squelch cybercrime. Otherwise, things got a little testy at the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, and iPad pre-orders got rolling. Oh, and the Internet was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously.