Ah, human progress. It's long been possible to get drunk with your friends and make a permanent mistake on your body on spring break in Mexico, but soon you'll be able to do it electronically, too. That's right, we are entering the era of the LED tattoo.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been developing micro-thin, flexible, silicon electronics that have already been successfully implanted under the skin of mice without any harm. These devices can conform to the body's shape without causing any irritation or interfering with its normal physiological processes. (The silk is eventually dissolved and absorbed by the body.)

Every generation laments the passing of those utopian good-ole days when people apparently always treated one another with respect and compassion. The Internet has only exacerbated those grumblings, as people constantly bemoan living in an instantly gratified society with increasingly narcissistic attitudes.

But, at least one crusader is using a so-called narcissistic and shallow avenue to disprove those Information Age haters. The RoofCoffeeCup Twitter account is attempting to prove that people really do care about one another, or, at least, one another's coffee. According to Boing Boing, a guy known as GitEmSteveDave has magnetically attached a Starbuck's coffee cup to the roof of his car and tweets about people's reactions to the precarious cup in peril.

Gadget and gaming fans are in for a treat at this Sunday's Engadget Show taping. Our friend Chris Grant, Editor-in-chief of Joystiq, joins the Engadget crew for a special gaming-focused roundtable. Plus, for you mobile interface junkies, HTC's Drew Bamford will be there as well. Plus, a very lucky audience member will go home with a 'Modern Warfare 2' Xbox 360 bundle. If you're in the New York area this weekend, head on down to the Tishman Auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design for the free event. Doors open tomorrow at 4:30PM, show starts at 5:00PM.

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web.

• Tillman the Skateboarding Dog is a skating celeb, so it makes sense that he (or one of his bulldog buds) gets to try out the new Tony Hawk game, which comes with a digi-skateboard. Trust us, it's as cute as it sounds. [From: Urlesque]
• Nothing goes as well with Japanese minimalism than Lego, which is why this block set from Muji is amazingly cool. [From: High Snobiety]
• The debate is a bit more than seeing an ex pop up constantly on Facebook. Professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger talks about how new media makes it difficult to forget, which is an important part of the human experience, (though one commenter points out the other side of the spectrum). [From: Reuters]
• Wired's list of '10 Geeky Things To Be Thankful For" really are geeky (terabytes? really?), but we admit, we are glad there is good sci-fi on TV, too. [From: Wired.com]

The Internet turned the big 4-0 this year, and the commercially available wireless phone celebrated its own quarter-century milestone. After all of that time, it seems that state and national governments are finally ready to accept the crazy notion that both modes of communication can be used to instantly disseminate urgent information during times of strife.

Japan introduced a cell phone earthquake notification system two years ago, an Iowa county recently launched the first 911-via-text service in the U.S., and Israel is currently developing a text-based rocket alert system. New York is now taking a huge leap forward with the announcement of the statewide 'Empire 2.0' program, which seeks to employ technology in creating a more "transparent, participatory, and collaborative" government.

With the decade coming to a close in less than two months, expect to see plenty of "Best of" lists. It's awful fun to think back on marquee moments from years past, especially when those moments occurred on our beloved Internet. Plus, it's shocking to recall just how much the Web has changed since the start of the millennium. In that spirit, the Webby Awards has released its list of "The Ten Most Influential Internet Moments of the Decade."

The moments, which are listed in chronological order, begin with Craigslist's 2000 expansion from a San Francisco exclusive service to the largest free classifieds site on the Web. From there, Napster met its demise in 2001, the same year Wikipedia launched and changed the way we got information. A few years later, in 2006, online video became cooler than sliced bread thanks to YouTube. Shortly thereafter, Facebook became open to non-college students in 2006 (much to our chagrin), and Twitter started its climb to the top of the social networking ladder.

It seems that placing privacy settings on your social networking profile isn't enough to keep snoops away. Nathalie Blanchard, of Quebec, Canada, learned that lesson when her long-term, sick-leave benefits were stripped from her because of photos on her Facebook account.

For the past year and a half, Blanchard had been on leave from her job at IBM as the result of being diagnosed with serious clinical depression. Since the diagnosis, she had been collecting a monthly check from Manulife, her insurance firm. But after Manulife investigators discovered photos on her private Facebook page that showed her out partying with friends at a bar and vacationing on sunny beaches, the company decided to cut off benefits. The insurer considered the photos evidence that Blanchard was no longer depressed, according to a report by the CBC.

Yesterday, Google finally took the cover off Chrome OS and, in so doing, gave a bunch of foamy-mouthed tech journalists an idea of what to expect once consumers are able to get their hands on it late next year. There weren't many surprises in the announcement. Chrome OS is a tweaked Chrome browser running on top of a streamlined version of Linux -- exactly what most were expecting. We can already play games, watch movies, create spreadsheets, and send IMs -- all without leaving the comfort of any number of browsers. Chrome OS just seeks to remove the middle man.

The highly customized version of Linux is designed to run on Google-certified hardware. By specifying what components can comprise a Chrome OS netbook, Google is able to strip away many "unessential" parts of the OS, making it boot and run faster. Even in this early stage (a year away from release), it only takes 10 seconds to go from pressing the power button to browsing the Web. There are some trade-offs to this design, however. Chrome OS will not support traditional hard drives, meaning you can forget about keeping your giant music collection on one of these babies. Instead, it will only feature smaller, faster, solid-state drives (SSD) and rely on the cloud to store documents and photos. It will, however, recognize and open whatever USB drives and cameras are plugged into it.

As per usual, malware purveyors are hopping on the latest fad in order to lure unsuspecting Web surfers into their dens of digital evil. And what are the kids talking about right now? Well, 'Twilight,' of course.

With the new installment of the teen vampire saga set to hit theaters Friday, Web searches for interviews with cast members, for bootleg copies of the film, and for other content related to 'The Twilight Saga: New Moon' have sky-rocketed. Using this buzz to their advantage, makers of viruses, trojans, and spyware are embedding malicious code in fake movie files and video streams, and posting the nefarious results.

Paul Budnitz has amazingly sent young adults scrambling after collectible vinyl figures as if they were children after toys. And toys, in essence, those figures are, but not in the child-friendly sense of the word. (In fact, Budnitz points out that his company's products often come armed with cigarettes and machine guns.) Kidrobot, which Budnitz conceived while collecting figurines during a stay in China, is famous for its small and affordable art pieces designed by underground and mainstream artists, graffiti writers, and musicians.

What started as a pastime has become an international phenomenon; collectors camp out to get limited-edition Kidrobot figures, and people like Karl Lagerfeld and Matt Groening have gotten in on the design action. Kidrobot crosses cultures, claiming a strong following among comic book readers, alternative rock fans, hip-hop stars, and even us gadget nerds (who have the colorful creations brightening up our cubicles). And that's precisely what Budnitz set out to do: to give young (but not too young) individuals a way of "collecting art" without breaking the bank, and to brighten their lives with beautiful, hilarious, or just outright interesting art objects.

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines....

• It was only a matter of time before all of those irritating and ridiculous games got Facebook in trouble. The social networking site has reportedly been named in a $5 million class-action lawsuit, together with gaming firm Zynga, for allowing scam ads to appear during games like 'Mafia Wars' and 'Farmville.' [From: Business Insider]
• Oprah's Twitter entrance created an instant and massive surge of activity on the site back in April. Yesterday, Oprah was once again the focus of a tweeting frenzy (over 8,000 in just one hour), but this flurry centered on the anticipated, solemn end of her 23-year-old television show. [From: Mashable]
• The four-year-old acquisition drama between Skype and eBay has officially come to a close. eBay once claimed that it paid about $1 billion more than it should have with its $2.6 billion purchase of the VoIP service in 2005. Skype, though, has actually now been valued at a whopping $2.75 billion. [From: Mashable]
• Despite a 19-percent plummet in console and video game sales in October, 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2' earned a staggering $550 million during its first five days on the market. The numbers have topped the record-breaking $500 million that 'Grand Theft Auto IV' generated during its first week last year. So, if manufacturers want to make money during the recession, they apparently just need to let consumers virtually take out their frustrations by annihilating everything in sight. [From: Reuters]
• While some already exist, Google is hoping to steadily and automatically add captions to the bottom of every YouTube video. The site will utilize speech-recognition software to generate captions in order to aid deaf and hearing-impaired viewers. [From: USA Today]
• Rupert Murdoch's recent threat to remove News Corp. stories from Google has prompted a response from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Stone attested that the childish and antiquated return to a "ridiculously closed" approach would "fail fast." Harumph. What would that impudent whippersnapper possibly know about integrating the media and the Internets? [From: Mashable]

Our friends over at Engadget obsessively cover everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics, which is why we compile this daily roundup of their top stuff (or, at least, what we think is tops). For more details on any of these stories, click on the Engadget links in each story below.

California Mandates Energy Efficiency Improvements by 2011
Those heat waves rising from the back of your HDTV are a sure sign of energy waste, and are not long for California if the state government has its way. The Golden State is tackling HDTV inefficiency with new regulations scheduled to go into effect in just over a year.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Says Windows 7 Sales Double Those of Any Previous Version
We knew people were itching to get rid of Windows XP and Vista, but we didn't know they were this eager. According to Steve Ballmer, Windows 7 is selling twice as quickly as any previous version.

With Chrome chugging along toward version 4.0 and Firefox 3.6 just around the corner, Microsoft is in danger of falling even further behind in the browser wars. The boys in Redmond released Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) earlier this year, and while it was an improvement over IE7, we were generally disappointed with its stability. Plus, it still was far behind its competitors in raw speed.

Turns out that Microsoft is already hard at work on the next version of its browser, titled, chronologically, 'IE9.' There is no download available to consumers yet, but if the company's claims are to be trusted, IE9 represents not just an evolution of IE, but a complete redefinition of what should be expected of the Microsoft browser.

Rather than opening your Palm Pre's Card View function to sort through all of your open apps, you can simply swipe back and forth between running apps. Go to the Launcher and select Screen & Lock. Under the heading 'Advanced Gestures,' slide the Switch Applications option from Off to On. Now, when you have several apps open, you can swipe left across the length of the gesture area to quickly flip to the last app you used, or swipe to the right to view other running apps.

What we're watching tonight:

• ABC (720p) has 'FlashForward' at 8 p.m., 'Grey's Anatomy' at 9 p.m., and 'Private Practice' at 10:01 p.m.
• Fox (720p) has 'Bones' at 8 p.m. and 'Fringe' at 9 p.m.
• NBC (1080i) has 'Community' at 8 p.m., 'Parks & Recreation' at 8:30 p.m., 'The Office' at 9 p.m., and '30 Rock' at 9:30 p.m.
• CBS (1080i) has 'Survivor' at 8 p.m., 'CSI' at 9 p.m., and 'The Mentalist' at 10 p.m.
• CW (1080i) airs 'The Vampire Diaries' at 8 p.m. and 'Supernatural' at 9 p.m.
• WGN (1080i) has 'WWE Superstars' at 8 p.m.
• Spike (1080i) has 'TNA! Impact' at 9 p.m.
• History (720p) has the season finale of 'WWII' in HD at 9 & 10 p.m.
• FX (720p) has 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' at 10 p.m. and 'The League' at 10:30 p.m.
• TLC (1080i) the season finale of 'Street Customs' at 8 p.m., 'American Chopper' at 9 p.m., and 'Family Armor' at 10 p.m.
• NFL Network (1080i) has Dolphins/Panthers football at 8 p.m.
• ESPN (720p) has Colorado/Oklahoma State college football at 7:30 p.m.