Sure, these days MTV is a heartless, godless whisper of what it once was, but don't say it's forgotten how to gorilla-pimp talented children.

This Monday, Engine Room, MTV's newest long-form commercial, will premiere and completely reinvent the exploiting-artists genre. Populated with ambitious computer whizzes, Engine Room takes four teams divided by nationality (!!!!!!!!!!) and pits them against each other in a digital design-off to see who can create the best artwork. "But how does this race baiting dogfight and the art it will produce make enormous whales even richer?" you're asking, well aware of MTV's MO. Where the cash comes in to play is in the computer hardware, all of which will be provided by Hewlett-Packard.

PCs are losing handily to Apples with the grownup-babies-who-buy-things-to-look-cool demographic – a huge demographic, by the way – and everyone except for Steve Jobs is looking for ways to appear "with it." So what better way to look cool and boost sales while exerting a piddling amount of creative effort than with a reality program on MTV? A program that promises a real live guest appearance by electronic vegan Moby? It's not like people are completely disgusted with that station's garbage yet. And wouldn't everyone love to see that smirk knocked off The Mac Guy's face? Everyone wins!

Best of luck to the Engine Room editors, the men and women whose job it will be to make viewers forget they're watching a bunch of sweating, anxious nerds make YouTube videos.

After Hewlett-Packard was found out for illegally monitoring (buzzword alert: pretexting) the investigations of CNet's reporters to expose a media leak, a trio of the website's staffers are suing over invasion of privacy and business practice laws. HP, for its part, offered a "substantial settlement" to avoid litigation. Oh, and they issued personal apologies. [News.com]