Technology

Cracked has a whole section on Technology here. Technology surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together. Some of it is necessary (cars, PlayStation 3, cell phones, etc.); some of it is not necessary (Amazon Kindle, Roomba, everything on this list - 6 Most Overhyped Technologies); and most of it can kill us (robots, Large Hadron Collider, weapons, but mostly robots). Please enjoy this little guided tour through the world of technology as it directly relates to us. Specifically, how it will either kill us or deliver us pornography.

Pictured above: Colonel Sanders and his secret blend of diodes and cathode ray tubes and the secret ingredient - the steering wheel of a boat.

The most common use of technology is computers. Batman uses them to fight crime. The Matrix uses them to eat us. Men use them to download porn. Computers have completely changed the way the world works. You can download MP3 playlists from official terrorist webpages, virginity can be bought and sold on eBay, we can look in people's living rooms and see into their back yards on Google Maps, and if you haven't heard, you can also download music that you haven't paid for. Their uses are seemingly without limit. Or so Hollywood would have us believe (see Cracked article 5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do).

Hollywood isn't the only one trying to capitalize on computer hype (see Cracked article 10 Most Baffling Computer Gadgets Money Can Buy). Spoiler: There is a humping dog USB dongle.

The PC v. Mac Debate:

On the one hand, Macs never crash and have better hardware and are hacker-proof. On the other hand, shut the fuck up.

There are two types of robots: 1) robots that serve no purpose, and 2) the robots that will eventually kill us. Here's a run down of both types.

Type I Robots: Robots That Serve No Purpose:

This article, The 7 Creepiest Real Life Robots, pretty much sums up what a useless robot is. Basically, a useless robot is one that doesn't do anything that a human can't do. For example, you just dedicated your life to creating a robot that gets irritated when you poke his face? Congratulations. You just built a robot that can kick and cry like a two-year-old baby? The ladies must love you. We don't know why these people build these robots, but by all accounts, they are pretty damn good at it and it's probably a good thing that they are not building the killer robots.

Type II Robots: Robots that will eventually kill us:

All robots just want to kill us, it's just a matter of whether they were built with the capability of doing so. Reason: They are assholes. We are no threat to robots (by "we" we mean everyone except John Connor). Humans don't get in the way of robots or prevent them from doing what ever it is that robots do. Robots just hate us (See Cracked article Science is a Dick: 5 Most Evil Robots ever invented and 20 Japanese Robots Probably Intent on Murdering You). Look at Skynet. Its very first thought is to blow up the whole world with nuclear weapons and build terminators. And let's look at the robots in the Matrix:

Robot 1: "We have unlimited technology and ability and we need energy. Should we look for a solution to clean up the skies?"

Robot 2: "Or we could just eat baby humans."

Robot 1: "I like it."

And then there's the Decepticons. They build a teleportation bridge to Cybertron in Season 1, but stay on Earth and just blow stuff up and do things like bribe politicians and drill holes under Central park to take over New York City for no real reason.

Pictured above: the most fearsome robot of all time, Megatron. Embarrassingly enough, the Michael Bay version looked cooler, but had a much less erect penis.

For most of us, playing video games was our first exposure to technology. Now, we have the PS3, the Xbox 360, the PC games, the Wii; but things were not always so refined. The new task of designing video games and marketing them to kids proved to be extremely difficult to adults who grew up entertaining themselves by watching Leave It To Beaver.

In retrospect, it has become crystal clear that they had no fucking idea what they were doing. Here's the proof:

Here's how they used to convince us to buy video games: 6 Baffling Old-School Video Game Commercials.

Here are the consoles they came up with: The 6 Most Retarded Gaming Consoles Ever Released.

Here are the accessories they tried to sell us: 6 Most Ill Conceived Video Game Accessories

So programmers kind of groped around in the dark trying to find out how to entertain these 80s kids and came up with the various Atari systems. Then, we got the NES and got some real classics like Zelda and Battletoads. Sega entered the video game arena and brought us the Sega Genesis packaged with Altered Beast, the first of many embarrassingly horrible failures for Sega, followed by the Game Gear and the Sega CD and the Nomad and the Saturn and the Dreamcast. The PlayStation represented the first of the next generation systems. It had such classics as Final Fantasy 7, Resident Evil, the Twisted Metal series and Tomb Raider. Then, Microsoft and PlayStation started competing with each other to create the better system and we all came out winners. Things started getting serious. Microsoft gave us the XBox 360 and Sony gave us the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo gave us the Wii.

Video games may seem harmless in an article populated by killer robots and deadly weapons, until you realize that you are effectively a mindless slave to your system, staring at it for hours on end. Wouldn't that be just the perfect distraction if a robot wanted to sneak up behind you and beat you to death? Or maybe it wouldn't beat you to death, because you built it without hands. It's not like there are a bunch of....

Oh shit, right, weapons. Ever since technology was invented by the Romans and later refined by the ideas of such sci-fi authors as L. Ron Hubbard and George Lucas, people have been trying to harness its power to kill other people. The problem is that people are getting really good at it. Check out 5 Famous Sci-Fi Weapons that they're actually building right now and 6 Non-lethal weapons that will make you wish you were dead.

And, remember, we build robots to be better, stronger and more efficient versions of ourselves. If we're making weapons, that officially puts "murdering other humans" into the category of "Things We Want to Do." Marry those things, and suddenly "murdering humans" jumps to the top of every robots' "To Do List." (Also there is nothing else on that list.)

But even so, robots would need a REASON to want to kill us. They won't just hate us, not unless we do something totally screwed up with and demeaning to them to deserve it.

1. This guy replaces his amputated finger with a USB drive.

Also available in black and Asian.

Well, fuck us.

But it can't be as bad as our imagination, right? No matter how much the robots hate us (so much), we're nowhere near a point where they could be advanced enough to do real damage, right?

We are just wrong all day over here.

Virtuosity: SID 6.7 was a built in a fist-sized 50 TB card

2 TB SD memory cards: You know, those things that you put in your camera and in your phone to save your pictures and your downloaded music? Well, here is some news from sdcard.org about the soon to be released 2 TB SD card (which is probably 1000 times bigger than the one you have in your camera):

SDXC (eXtended Capacity) Cards: The Next Generation

The next-generation SDXC (eXtended Capacity) memory card specification, pending release in Q1 2009, dramatically improves consumers' digital lifestyles by increasing storage capacity from 32 GB up to 2 TB and increasing SD interface read/write speeds to 104 MB per second in 2009 with a road map to 300 MB per second. SDXC will allow your electronic devices - from laptops to cameras, camcorders and mobile phones - to store more content and to download content faster than ever before.

Control 3-D projected holograms with your fingertips like in Ironman and Minority Report:

Microsoft Surface:

Microsoft has come out with a touchscreen interactive surface ala Quantum of Solace.

Because nothing is cooler than knowing exactly where to put your iPod Zune on your $15,000 coffee table.