Some of us up here in the northern hemisphere have been experiencing an especially mild winter. You can attribute at least part of that to jet streams and some other meteorological mumbo jumbo, but you have to wonder if maybe this is just a symptom of global warming. Probably, considering that according to recent data from the World Meteorological Organization, this past decade, 2001-2010, has been the warmest decade in recorded history. On top of that, 9 of those 10 years are on the list of the 10 warmest. Quick! Buy stock in jorts!

The Pirate Bay has been sailing on some stormy seas lately, and things don’t look to be getting any better. U.K. high court recently ruled that the site ”authorizes” and encourages users to infringe on copyrights as opposed to merely “enabling” or “assisting,” a distinction which puts The Pirate Bay in the position of being decidedly illegal in the U.K.. That being the case, it’s possible that the site could be blocked outright by ISPs; they wouldn’t be the first.

We still don’t have flying cars, but every day it seems like more and more sci-fi tech is getting defictionalized. The chainsaw bayonet, for instance, is a real thing, and while you won’t be able to mount it on a real Lancer, you can strap it to your AK-47. You do have an AK-47, don’t you? Ideally for use in the zombie apocalypse, the Doublestar Zombie X Chainsaw Rail Attachment is surprisingly quiet and runs on a stock-mounted battery rather than messy, flame-prone gasoline.

It’s official, tomorrow’s anti-SOPA protest has reached its height: Google will be displaying an anti-SOPA message during the blackout. Google will not actually be blacking out, but instead will display a link to an anti-SOPA, anti-PIPA message on its homepage, presumably in the form of a Google Doodle, but they haven’t said explicitly.

Your first thought immediately after “where can I purchase this amazing Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots-inspired ukelele” may very well be: “Say, why is his head popped up? Doesn’t that mean I lost?” No, friend. It means you rocked so hard that you completely destroyed everything around you. This impressive uke is the work of the Celentano Woodworks, makers of the finest nerdy instruments. At $700 it’s a bit on the pricy side, but that just ensures that no one else will have a ukelele as cool as you. See more of this rock ‘em uke, after the break.

As you may be aware, MegaUpload released a star-studded video endorsing the benefits of their service on Friday. As you may also be aware, the video was stripped from YouTube after Universal Music Group filed a copyright complaint, had it overturned, and then filed a second successfully. MegaUpload insists that the UMG has no right to do anything with the video and is consequently suing. To boot, MegaUpload, which has previously been tight-lipped on the whole SOPA issue, has now come out against it.

When you’re coming up on the 7th game in a franchise that hasn’t really changed too much since its second iteration, you need to do some pretty seriously advertising. That’s why Nintendo went all out for their Mario Kart 7 promotion and had West Coast Customs create some life-sized models of the actual “Mario kart” as well as the bee kart for the L.A. Auto Show.

Surprisingly enough, functional LEGO guns are totally a thing. This LEGO gun, however, is particularly amazing because it pretty accurately recreates one of the most iconic, menacing guns in gaming today: The Gears of War Lancer. This replica, by PLUM B, is not only life-sized (and presumably to a scale of some sort) but also fires rubberbands and has a chainsaw that can do its chainsaw-y thing. On top of all that, the LEGO Lancer seems like it would be pretty inaccurate at a distance and do minimal damage, so it’s almost a perfect recreation of the in-game weapon! Now if someone could just make a LEGO M-92 Mantis my life would be complete.

No one is going to argue that Futurama has any illusions of being even remotely realistic. Between the energy beings, the wide cast of bizarre aliens, mutants, and anthropomorphic robots, you can’t really argue that anything in the show is trying to mirror anything remotely close to “real life” at all. That is probably why these realistic busts of Futurama characters by deviantART-ist artanis-one are so awesome and, let’s be honest, disturbing.

Can you imagine if Zoidberg actually looked like that? It’s hard to picture him as the clown of the crew when you’re staring into the face of a realistic lobsterman. Imagine what his claws look like. “Woob woob woob” suddenly gets a little more sinister. I’m not even going to bring up Nibbler. You can see that for yourself.

Not too long ago, Research in Motion announced a grim future, highlighted by poor financials and inevitable layoffs. Now, the details of the layoffs have been made clear, with RIM announcing that they’ll be cutting about 2,000 jobs from its global workforce. The 2,000 or so jobs make up about 11% of RIM’s total workforce.

Though RIM is cutting a significant amount of jobs, they also happened to make an acquisition, JayCut, which develops a cloud-based video editing app, in an effort to find synergy with their tablet, the PlayBook. Unfortunate that around 2,000 people will be out of a job, but maybe overall, some good may come out of it, in that RIM may be able to keep afloat and rebuild their empire.

(StreetInsider via Techmeme, Geek.com)