Cody Taylor

The Ultrasonic Bath is a pod-like human washing machine that cleans, massages and dries the user in a fully automated 15-minute process.

This beautiful concept, inspired by the curves and tapering of the Macbook Air coupled with the touch’s back, is even better than the cool Macbook-inspired iPhone 4G we featured at the beginning of the month.

An architectural overhaul to Apple’s QuickTime media software due as part of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard may ship with a media player that bundles once-premium features at no cost.

Gamasutra is running a feature by game developer Brian Green on how he and his colleagues are still striving for legitimacy and respect as part of a medium that’s still commonly thought of by many as “for kids” and “potentially harmful to kids.” He notes that while financial legitimacy is no longer in question, artistic and cultural legitimacy are taking more time. Green makes some interesting parallels to the early movie and comic book industries, and points out that moral outrage against comic books did significant damage to the medium’s growth in the US. “… in the United States there was a ‘moral panic’ about the corrupting influences of comic books on children, as there often is with many ‘new’ media. The government threatened to enact laws to censor comic books, for the good of the children. (Does that sound familiar to game developers?) The industry reacted by enacting their own regulations, the Comics Code Authority (CCA). The Comics Code Authority heavily restricted the content that comics could contain. For example, the words ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ were not allowed in the titles of comics. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and similar creatures of the night were forbidden.”

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soDean writes “Miro just launched their 2.0 release today. The free and open source HD video player and Internet TV features an all-new interface and an entirely rewritten UI engine, plus tons of new features and improvements — it’s less of a collection of new stuff and more of a rethinking of the whole experience. You can download Miro 2.0 here for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Miro is developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, hell-bent on making Internet video more open and decentralized, along with a dedicated community of users, volunteers, translators, testers, and coders.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krou notes reporting in the Christian Science Monitor that the current economic crisis is helping China’s push into higher-end manufacturing by shaking out low-profit companies. The hope is that, instead of just assembling iPods, Chinese companies will be able to invent the next big thing instead. In this move China is following the well-worn path taken by Japan and the Asian tigers before it. “Last month, the National Development and Reform Commission announced revised plans to transform Guangdong and neighboring Hong Kong and Macau into a ‘significant innovation center’ by 2020. One hundred R&D labs will be set up over the next three years. By 2012, per-capita output in the region should jump 50 percent from 2007, to 80,000 yuan (,700). And by 2020, the study predicts, 30 percent of all industrial output should come from high-tech manufacturing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.