Get On My Hype

Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka, Soulja Boy, Oj Da Juiceman – Short Bus Shorty [Cartoon Parody]

Ah yes, The Oregon Trail. Remember how pissed you used to get when your bloody oxen would drown after you decided to ford the river? Even though your classmate told you to add mileage to the trip and just go around the river!? Man, that was frustrating. Originally developed by three Minnesota teachers in 1971, The Oregon Trail’s intended purpose was to help grade school students understand the hardships of the early American settlers in the 19th century. After being bought out and further developed, the game really hit its stride in the mid-80’s and early-90’s when it was adapted to further leverage the technological breakthrough that was “the computer mouse.”

In order to successfully navigate The Trail you had to avoid: broken legs, drowning, measles, snakebites, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, exhaustion, and diarrhea, all while keeping your trail-mates fed and healthy. As we all know, a classic never dies, and updated versions of The Oregon Trail have been released as recently as 2009. Don’t be shy, let us know how good your hunting skills were (we know you were a good shot and never missed a speedy squirrel or mouse) or how much cash you managed to horde while battling The Trail.

Askari X – Another Pig Bites the Dust

Do you trust your government? Do you just support it like an obedient Britney Spears, steadfast to your faith that it will do the right thing? Your answer to those questions will almost certainly predict your response to a Wall Street Journal exposé of a classified US government program provocatively dubbed, “Perfect Citizen.” Why not just call it “Big Brother,” for crissake! Oh wait, according to an internal Raytheon email seen by the WSJ, “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

Histrionics aside, according to the WSJ, the “expansive” program is meant to detect assaults on private companies and government agencies deemed critical to the national infrastructure. In other words, utilities like the electricity grid, air-traffic control networks, subway systems, nuclear power plants, and presumably MTV. A set of sensors deployed in computer networks will alert the NSA of a possible cyber attack, with Raytheon winning a classified, $100 million early stage contract for the surveillance effort. Now, before you start getting overly political, keep in mind that the program is being expanded under Obama with funding from the Bush-era Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. The WSJ also notes that companies won’t be forced to install the sensors, they may find the additional monitoring helpful in the event of cyber attack — think of Google’s recent run-in with Chinese hackers as a potent example.

Like most citizens, we have mixed emotions about this. On one hand, we cherish our civil liberties and prefer to keep the government out of our personal affairs. On the other, we can barely function when Twitter goes down, let alone the national power grid. Now excuse us while we fashion a fedora from this roll of foil.

Slurp digital eyedropper sucks up, injects information wirelessly (video)

How does Jamie Zigelbaum, a former student at MIT Media Lab, celebrate freedom from tyranny, drool-worthy accents and “standing in the queue?” By creating Slurp, of course. In what’s easily one of the most jaw-dropping demonstrations of the year, this here digital eyedropper is a fanciful new concept that could certainly grow some legs if implemented properly in the market place. Designed as a “tangible interface for manipulating abstract digital information as if it were water,” Slurp can “extract (slurp up) and inject (squirt out) pointers to digital objects,” enabling connected machines and devices to have information transferred from desktop to desktop (or desktop to speakers, etc.) without any wires to bother with. We can’t even begin to comprehend the complexity behind the magic, but all you need to become a believer is embedded after the break. It’s 41 seconds of pure genius, we assure you.

Mase – Lookin At Me

Marc Anthony – Preciosa

NASA successfully tests autonomous lunar lander navigation system, codename GENIE