Groundbreaking new services from Amazon and Google

It's that time of the year again. In time honored tradition, the giants of the internet announce the most stupendous projects imaginable on April 1st. Just don't take their announcements at face value.

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of a new cloud computing service called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment.

"For a while the cloud was simply a metaphor meaning "a bunch of computers somewhere else." Until now, somewhere else meant good old terra firma, the Earth itself. After extensive customer research we found that this rigid, antiquated way of thinking just won't cut it in today's post-capitalist world. They need locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it... The FACE uses durable, unmanned helium-filled blimps with a capacity of 65,536 small EC2 instances, or a proportionate number of larger instances. The top of each blimp is coated in polycrystalline solar cells which supply approximately 40% of the power needed by the servers and the on-board navigation, communication, and defense systems. The remainder of the power is produced by clean, efficient solid oxide fuel cells. There's enough fuel onboard to last about a month under normal operating conditions. Waste heat from the fuel cells and from the servers is used to generate additional lift."

Our commentary? Amazing.

Gmail now includes a new option called Autopilot. "As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages." Autopilot lifts that burden off people's shoulders by taking care of their email communication for them. All you need to do is adjust the sliders for capitalization, typos, brevity and emoticon use.