Having softpedaled rumors of Steve Jobs's failing health, CNBC is falling over itself to catch up to the story — with embarrassing results.

Is Steve Jobs dying? Larry Ellison thinks so — the prospect reportedly moved the Oracle CEO to tears. A Gizmodo source thinks his "health is rapidly declining." For Apple, it could be good news.

Supernova conference organizer Kevin Werbach is part of President Change's FCC transition team. I've hung out with the guy, and I never would've guessed he belongs to not one, but two guilds in World of Warcraft. Here's his take on WoW's benefits to grownups:

Gene Wood, an operations manager at Ask.com, the Barry Diller-owned search engine beloved by Midwestern moms, wrestled a mugger to the ground rather than lose his iPhone, for which he paid $499. While riding on a subway train in San Francisco and watching a movie, Wood felt a hand reach behind him and snatch the phone. Wood, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 240 pounds, jumped from his seat and pursued the thief. Here's his harrowing account of how he got his iPhone back through hand-to-hand combat — and got away with just one small, if nasty, head wound:

He's not the most trustworthy source, granted, but Fox News host Chris Wallace claims to have heard that CNN is all embarrassed about its election-night holograms, which teleported the likes of singer Will.I.Am and correspondent Jessica Yellin into CNN studios in New York. Wallace, who serves as Fox's ambassador to the Godless liberals at the Daily Show, also maintains ties to CNN, via an old college roommate who is a technical producer there. He called this buddy at 5 pm on election night, resulting in the following exchange, according to Broadcasting & Cable:

You've probably never heard of Bob Cohn, but he played a major role in saving Wired from running aground in 2001. As executive editor, Cohn was the low-key second-in-command to Chris Anderson. He pushed editors and writers to abandon Wired's too-insidery voice and craft a new kind of tech journalism aimed at curious outsiders. Trust me, that sounds great until you try to do it. Starting in January, Cohn will take editorial charge of TheAtlantic.com, reporting directly to editor-in-chief James Bennet. "It's a great website," Bob told me via cell phone just now. Translation: Change a-comin'!

We just knew CNN's magical holodeck was going to be hours of fun: Here's political correspondent Jessica Yellin delivering a report to election-night anchor Wolf Blitzer and looking, as Yellin herself pointed out, like no one so much as Star Wars' Princess Leia. The election may remain uncalled, but the future is now! Click the video icon to watch.

Did the internet just cause Sarah Palin to destroy evidence? The potential Veep is in a bit of trouble for conducting state business using her personal, unarchived email address (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) instead of her official account (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). Emails from that Yahoo account are already being sought in connection with the Troopergate investigation. Now comes word that Anonymous, the fun-loving Internet trouble-makers based loosely around the message board 4Chan, gained access to another Palin email account: gov.palin@yahoo.com. It looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin's email? Ok, sad thing first: a good Samaritan reset the password and tried to alert Sarah. But he also posted the new password, causing multiple people to try to log in at once, freezing the account for 24 hours. And now, the account has been deleted! Which is, as we said, maybe destruction of evidence? So for now this is, we think, all we'll get to see from this email account (if anyone finds evidence of saved emails, let us know.) The full timeline of events, with corroborating evidence of the legitimacy of these screengrabs, is here. Here's why it all looks convincing:

When you watch The Real World on MTV, don't you often wish the episodes were only five minutes long, focused mainly on computerized digital art, and full of awesome Hewlett-Packard products? No? That's cause you're out of touch with the youth of today. Luckily MTV and Hewlett-Packard are in touch with what's hip, and are bringing this fantasy "Real World Of Kids Looking At Computer Screens" to life! Could this be the best digital art-focused corporate co-branded semi-reality advertainment vehicle ever? YES, if Moby has anything to say about it! The totally tubular new series is called Engine Room, and is thoughtfully sponsored by HP itself. It follows in the footsteps of classic HP-sponsored MTV branded entertainment video series like Meet or Delete and Dorm Storm. Remember those? Yea! HP is seriously spending "tens of millions of dollars" on this show. Try to ignore this focus-grouped lineup!:

Company-review site Glassdoor says that according to employees at both companies, Apple's repair technicians — known as "geniuses," with the attitude to match — make $18.30 per hour and $36,000 per year on average. That's about 56 percent more than Best Buy's Geek Squad "agents," who earn $11.58 per hour and $23,000 per year. The reason for the difference? Apple's "geniuses" are tasked with repairing beautiful objects that restore your sense of childlike wonder, whilst their Best Buy counterparts open tickets on junk in black plastic cases. Right, Steve?

NEW YORK — I'm sitting outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store here in New York, writing up a post about the long line for the iPhone, when a pretty girl wearing aviator sunglasses and a white blouse sits next to the guy sitting next to me. She says to her friend: "So I've got a date with Dan." "Who?" the guy asks. "The guy who was first in line — the guy who bought the first iPhone today. He's doing the documentary thing, his name is Dan."

Soon America's most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and make their workaday homes in cubes at Google, MySpace, or Amazon.com. And they will suffer not just the indignity of having to work for a living, but also the dispiriting realization that a job at a cool company isn't always that hot. These employers, and the others hiring for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs, listed below, will look spiffy on a resume someday, but for now the only good these jobs promise the world is the pleasant feeling you and I can share knowing we're not the ones stuck in them.

Shareholder activists Jana Partners and company got their way, sort of. CNET has new management, and in fact ownership: CBS, which will purchase CNET for $11.50 a share, or $1.8 billion. That's about $150 million more than Google paid for YouTube, but there is no buyer's remorse from CBS as of yet. "The acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States," reads a statement from CBS, its traffic now fattened by visits to CNET sites CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, MP3.com, News.com, and UrbanBaby. CNET CEO Neil Ashe's internal email is copied below.

At Apple's iPhone SDK announcement today, Steve Jobs had "one more thing..." to reveal. Venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins came onstage to announce a $100,000,000 "iFund" to help "young developers with funding." This is a huge amount of money for developers, but no details on how it will be invested or allocated. Compare this to the $10 million Android programming contest that Google introduced with its Android mobile phone platform. Thanks to the dedicated gadget-hounds at Gizmodo for the pic and info.

At Apple's shareholder meeting today, Steve Jobs said the Apple board has many potential successors to choose from should something happen to him. "We've got great talent ... we talk about it a lot." Candidates include COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. Have you ever seen either of those guys talk? Jobs is said to be worth $16 billion in market cap to Apple. Apple PR could spend that much on media training for Apple's stiffs-in-waiting, and they still wouldn't fill the seats at a Macworld keynote. Our vote is for design guru Jonathan Ive, who'll shut up and let the gadgets speak for themselves.

Let's play a guessing-game! A shamelessly link-whoring blogger has collected photographs of every fellow geek you've ever seen, and many you haven't. (We've put them together in a gorgeous tapestry of self-regarding dorkiness, in a shameless link-whoring exercise of our own.) There's a reason most of these faces are hard to recognize. If bloggers were hot, they'd be washed-up teen football stars, or on TV. Whereas the mainly pasty faces in this gallery are basically the nerds who got ignored in high school. Writes Young Manhattanite: "It's like Children of the Corn, except they killed all the black people and all the women... I feel like I've scanned past the same photo 352 times." Which makes this test particularly hard: even if you dispute the very notion of a famous blogger, see how many of them you can recognize. Your score, and ritual abuse of blogger looks, in the comments. We're working on the honor system here, so no cheating by looking at the original gallery, which has the names. Special bonus question, to sort out the empty boasters: we've sneaked a stray photo into the mix, of a priest arrested for indecent exposure; who is he? (Click for an enlarged view).

Do most flat-screen TVs strike you as numbingly similar? That's because under the hood, they are. LCD production is consolidating into an ever smaller number of suppliers. Sony and Samsung compete on store shelves, but they buy their LCDs from the same company — S-LCD, a joint venture. Now Sony is forming a new joint venture with Sharp, another fierce rival. Why? Moore's Law, the overlord of chips, is moving into the TV world. Making an LCD screen requires skill in handling silicon, and billion-dollar investments: Sharp's latest plant costs $3.5 billion, an expense Sony will now subsidize.

Belief is a powerful thing in this valley of hopes and dreams. Yahoo's board is set to reject Microsoft's offer to buy the company at $31 a share. Instead, Jerry Yang and Yahoo's other directors are seeking at least $40 a share, or nearly $60 billion — a price Microsoft may not be willing to pay. This is incredibly gutsy. It may wreck the hopes of a deal. And yet it may save the company.

A source inside Yahoo says the company is reconsidering a previously discussed business partnership with Google as an alternative to Microsoft's $44 billion hostile takeover offer. Yahoo believes that offer, at $31 a share, significantly undervalues the company. Private equity firms and News Corp. have been named as other possible suitors for Yahoo, but neither are seen as realistically able to get a deal together. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Google CEO Eric Schmidt called Yahoo cofounder and CEO Jerry Yang to offer Google's help in thwarting an unwanted Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.

Palm has hired Mike Bell, a 16-year Apple veteran, as its SVP of product development. But you'll never hear that from Palm. The hiring of an industry veteran for a top executive spot is something normally trumpeted as loudly as possible. But Palm is desperately trying to keep quiet the fact that it won over Bell shortly before Christmas. Why the silencing effort? Jon Rubinstein, Palm's chairman, was part of Steve Jobs's turnaround team before he left Apple in 2006. Since he joined Palm last year, the smartphone maker has been hiring a number of Apple engineers. There have been "screaming matches and threats of lawsuits," says a plugged-in source.