News for Youse: In five years, we will all be living in the Matrix

by Miranda Nelson on December 20th, 2011 at 9:46 AM

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So, IBM's come out with five predictions on where technology will be in five years from now. Apparently we can look forward to harnessing kinetic energy to run machines, the elimination of online passwords as everything will be coded to your DNA, and actual, factual mindreading. Why yes, in five years, IBM sees us living in the Matrix.

Anyone else feel that chill go down their spine?

Did you know Kim Jong-Il was an Internet ninja, er, expert? If only he'd lived another five years, maybe he could have saved us from our impending Matrixing.

News for Youse was super excited to see the headline "Sweden legalizes and regulates cannabis" this morning, but 10 seconds of Googling revealed it was all a hoax. Damn you, Sweden. Damn you, users of JustPaste.it.

You know what's not a hoax? A Canadian-developed HIV vaccine has been approved for human studies. Now, News for Youse is always suspicious of corporations, especially those dastardly pharmaceutical companies that spend billions of dollars every year lobbying governments and extending patents on life-saving drugs ensuring the poor have less access to life-saving treatments. But this development is a big "FUCK YES". It's not a cure, but it's the first potential preventative HIV vaccine, and that deserves a fist pump or two. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared it for human testing as of January 2012.

Kids, sometimes drugs are awesome. See also: penicillin, medicinal uses for cannabis.

However, as stoked as the FDA is on the HIV vaccine, it's not so fond of Trent Arsenault, a 36-year-old Californian who has been giving his sperm away for free to women and couples desiring to get pregnant. Arsenault's sperm has led to 14 healthy babies, and four more are on the way. While Arsenault is regularly tested for communicable diseases, it's not frequent enough for the FDA, which would still like to slap him with $100,000 fine or up to a year in prison. Hey FDA; we were always told that sharing is caring.

Bell Canada and Bell Aliant have announced they will no longer be throttling Internet traffic, which the companies have been doing between the hours of 4:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. since 2008. A letter sent to the CRTC read, "with the increasing popularity of streamed video and other traffic, P2P file-sharing, as a proportion of total traffic, has been diminishing." Basically, companies have now figured out how to work a media player and make a buck off the advertising that plays before the clip a person wants to watch, so those evil illegal Internet pirates are slightly less of a threat to their (multimillion dollar) bottom line.

What's the moral of all these two stories? Don't give anything away for free, or the government will be down your throat so fast that you won't even have time to jerk off to the Internet porn that you downloaded to help inspire the sperm donation you were going to make for the charming lesbian couple that lives down the road from you.

But remember. In five years, the machines that read our minds will be so busy hooking up to us to use our energy for fuel and extracting our DNA to make more human-based batteries that none of this will matter in the slightest.