CrankyRants.com

Nothing beats watching two giant space Krackens go toe-to-toe in a battle for the galaxy. And now we get to watch it happen live as Google fixes it’s single eye, rimmed in fire, on the Blue Towers of Microsoft with their newest subscription-based Office suite.

Google has been offering a free version of its online software suite called Google Apps for the past six months. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities nationwide are using the free service, Google said.

The fee-based version, Google Apps Premier Edition, includes five times more e-mail storage — 10 gigabytes per e-mail box — as well as a guarantee that all services will be available 99.9 percent of the time with around-the-clock technical support.

Google also is adding mobile access to e-mail accounts through the BlackBerry devices that tether workers to their offices.

So what happens when two of the largest software companies known to mankind fail at winning the entire market and can’t buy the other out like they’re used to doing? Temporarily cheap or free software may be in the works! That always seems to be the next logical step.

The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at the age 93.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of couch potatoes.

“People ask me all the time — ‘Don’t you feel guilty for it?’ And I say that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Some respctful jokes for the funeral may include the following:

“Guess his batteries… just sort of ran out, poor guy.”

“His picture looks good. Can you get up and change it for me?”

“Have you seen Robert anywhere?” - “Check under the coffin lid over there.”

Lasers beamed from space have detected what researchers have long suspected: big sloshing lakes of water underneath Antarctic ice.

These lakes, some stretching across hundreds of square miles (km), fill and drain so dramatically that the movement can be seen by a satellite looking at the icy surface of the southern continent, glaciologists reported in Thursday’s editions of the journal Science.

So… I’m no scientist or anything. But I’ve seen enough James Bond movies to know that if there’s anything giant space laser are best at… it’s melting stuff. Anyone in the research team ever think to ask “Hey guys? Are we sure all of that under-ice water wasn’t just ice before we started pointing our giant laser blaster at it?”

Seems to me that would have been the first question asked… followed closely by “How’s progress coming on the research into the melting ice-caps from our Giant Direct-light Space Toaster?”

You’ll find jobs in London at Canary Wharf Jobs.com.

If professor Ray McAllister could perfect his time-machine technology… he’d send a note back to his 1972 self that simply read: “Tire reef. Dont!”

Back in the heady days of disco, cocaine, and environmental research, professor McCallister and a team of fellow oceanic engineers decided something needed to be done to help promote new coral activity and underwater wildlife growth. The solution? Strap tens of thousands of old tires together and sink them off the coast of Florida.

The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area. It just didn’t work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”

Give the guy credit for admitting he was wrong, I suppose. But clearly every member of that team needs to strap on a speedo and snorkel and commence to floating that 30 year old science experiment back to the surface. At least we now know a little more about tires. Can’t burn’em. Can’t drown’em. Those things are strong.