There’s something so elegant about minimalism, which is why it’s amusing when something extremely inelegant, like Internet memes, are giving a boost of class through something so simple as taking elements away. Behold, the classiest Internet memes you’ve ever seen, told through the art of minimalist movie posters. More after the jump.

It seems that with every new technological advancement, a panic arises over addiction to that advancement. Addiction to television, addiction to video games, addiction to Facebook, and of course, addiction to the Internet at large. Some people might want to shrug Internet addiction off as a “fake” problem, not a “real” addiction, but a new study has found that certain brain structure correlates with what is observed as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), brain structure that is present in other varieties of addicts.

When you’re trying to figure out statistics about something as nebulous and pervasive as “the Internet,” you’re going to have to performs some interesting mental contortions. After all, how many things out there are connected to the Internet? How many of those things would you consider to be actively “using” it, how much power is there in the world? All valid and difficult questions, valid and difficult questions that Justin Ma and Barath Raghavan, of UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute respectively, were determined to tackle.

By looking at previously published research, the two were able to estimate that there are somewhere around 750 million laptops, a billion smartphones, and about 100 million servers in the world. On top of that, they added the power these devices consume, the power consumed to make these devices, average device life-span, and power to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers. All said and done, they came up with a range of 170-307 Gigawatts that are devoted to Internet use; enough to power 140-253 time-traveling DeLoreans.

And so the march of time continues: The sun sets in the west, the tides come in, salmon swim upstream to spawn, and yet another Angry Birds tie-in product comes into existence. Not content to have conquered the consumer markets with moon cakes, playable cakes, Google+, and just about anything else you can think of, UK company Gear4 has a line of Angry Birds speakers. The perfect device to round out your Angry Birds shrine by perpetually intoning that Pomplamoose cover.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a while. The products are currently listed as “coming soon” on the Gear4 website. Hopefully the rabid fans will be able to find a modicum of patience, and not attack the Gear4 headquarters with dynamite-laden birds.

(via Ubergizmo, Pocket Lint)

Stanford University researcher Jonathan Mayer discovered a super cookie in the employ of Microsoft on MSN.com. A cookie, as a moderately savvy Internet user would know, is a kind of tracking and logging tool — sometimes useful in storing data a user may not want to enter into forms for the rest of the portion of their lives involving forms, sometimes obnoxious in storing data that a user may not wanted stored — used primarily in web browsing. Dissimilar from the extremely super cookie pictured above, the super cookie in Microsoft’s employ is essentially a cookie that can ignore a web browser’s cookie management, thus avoiding extermination.

After Mayer exposed the super cookie, Microsoft associate general counsel Mike Hintze provided a less shady explanation as to why the tech giant might’ve been employing a fairly shady tracking device.

You know how you have browser-based games or listicles about your favorite celebrity breakups open in your browser window right now, but have mastered the art of alt+tabbing back to your spreadsheet when your supervisor walks by? Well, according to a new study, you may just want to leave that session of Civ World up and running next time your supervisor hovers around your desk, because wasting time on the Internet may actually increase your productivity.

Google is testing out the ol’ Infinite Scroll with their web search results. Instead of scrolling to the bottom of the page when searching for nefarious, embarrassing terms and hitting the “Next” link below the customary “Goooooooooogle,” the infinite scrolling feature will display a “show more results” button, similar to the Google Images infinite scrolling feature. Search Engine Land reports that a Google spokesperson has confirmed the testing of the infinite scroll feature. Head on past the jump to see a video of the infinite scroll in action, and in another language.

The Internet is a mysterious thing. We all use it, but what makes a website, really? Obviously, some of us know more about this than others. Still, this is the question asked and answered by the company Broadband Choices, in this infographic. The graphic provides statistics like how much data is on the Internet, from less than half a trillion gigabytes in 2005, to more than one trillion gigabytes in 2010, and a projected leap to nearly eight trillion gigabytes by 2015. So, if you’ve ever wondered what exactly is that Internet thing anyway, here is your answer.

Users pirating copyrighted material have always been the target of lawsuits. From pirating music, to movies, to games, to nearly fifty years worth of Doctor Who – if it is available in some sort of digital format, it will be pirated. Recently, the rate of file-sharing lawsuits have become much more prevalent, and almost exclusively focused on BitTorrent users. A few days ago, the number of people targeted by these lawsuits in the United States broke the 200,000 mark.

With all the variation that has sprung up around internet memes, there was bound to come a time when someone would finally organize them into one, easy-to-use chart. Now, the creation of deviantArt user OohLaLa423 doesn’t cover every possible permutation, nor every trend, but it is big. Really big. It’s also conveniently organized, showing the progression on the vertical axis, and when possible, grouping them by type.

At least, I think that’s what’s going on.