The Null Device
2005/12/9
A group of Republican Party activists in California, disenchanted with Arnold Schwarzenegger for being too left-wing, are planning to recruit Mel Gibson to run for Governor:
"He's shown himself to be both fiscally and socially conservative," said Mr Spence, "and the success of The Passion of the Christ shows that he has the ability to reach out to people".
Should they succeed, it raises the bizarre prospect of Californian voters being faced with a choice between Warren Beatty and Mel Gibson for governor.Did California pass a law requiring Governors to be celebrities or something?
A group of browser vendors has published a preview of HTML 5.0, also known as Web Applications 1.0. Users of browsers in the future can expect a lot of nifty enhancements, including new web form controls (drag and drop, flexible grids, progress meters), more DOM events to facilitate AJAX programming, more intelligent web forms (including support for minimum/maximum values and automatic validation) and a canvas element which can be drawn on using JavaScript (and for which the demos include a pure-JavaScript SVG viewer and a Wolfenstein-style 3D maze game). The HTML 5 features should make AJAX applications more efficient and powerful.
Web Applications 1.0 is a proposal by a group named WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), which consists of people from various browser developers, from projects such as Opera, Mozilla and Safari. It appears that the elephant in the centre of the room is the conspicuous absence of Microsoft, who own most of the browser market share. Which is hardly surprising, as if AJAX becomes a reality, it could cannibalise Microsoft's OS lock. Perhaps we can expect MS to specify their own, incompatible AJAX-esque technologies that are locked to their browser and technologies?
A game developer in Montréal has developed a video game to teach techniques of female sexual gratification. It involves stroking a cartoon rabbit named Lapis, whose response to the stroking is modelled on female sexual response:
The prototype teaches how to reach orgasm by simulating the affect of pleasurable sensation on the cartoon. Players tickle, touch, tap, and stroke Lapis using the touch screen of the Nintendo DS, a hand-held video game device. They can also talk, sing and blow on the bunny's fur using the device's built-in microphone.
The more they stimulate the bunny, the happier he becomes until eventually he begins flying through the air. But Lapis is also an unpredictable creature who needs a variety of sensations. Sometimes, no amount of stimulation is going to work.Heather Kelley's page on her prototype game is here, and includes a presentation and a (Windows-only) downloadable prototype demo. Lapis itself was developed for the Nintendo DS, and thus may not ever make it out the door, assuming that Nintendo have to sign off on each title published for the DS and they are as censorious about game content as they were during the NES Maniac Mansion days.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 0
The next stage of the Australian police state may have been announced; after their triumph with workplace relations, sedition laws and making universities inhospitable to student leftism, a sizeable contingent of the Tories are pushing for mandatory internet filtering. Of course, because Australia Is A Liberal Democracy, those perverts who want to look at porn could apply to do so after signing the perverts' register, getting a National Pervert Number which could be entered into the firewall page, giving one a less-filtered level of access.
It remains to be seen whether this suggestion will become government policy.