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Government

Former Astronauts Call Obama NASA Plans "Catastrophic" 555

Posted by timothy from the how-to-spot-a-special-interest dept.
krou writes "Talking to the BBC at a private function held at the Royal Society in London, former astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan both spoke out about Obama's decision to postpone further moon missions. Lovell claimed that 'it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology,' while Cernan noted he was 'disappointed' to have been the last person to land on the moon. Said Cernan: 'I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership ... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence.' Neil Armstrong, who was also at the event, avoided commenting on the subject."

Automatic Image Tagging 123

Posted by CowboyNeal from the on-the-horizon dept.
bignickel writes "Researchers at Penn State have applied for a patent on software that automatically recognizes objects in photos and tags them accordingly. The 'Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures Real-Time' software (catchy name) trained a database using tens of thousands of images, and new images have 15 tags suggested based on comparisons with objects or concepts in the database. Not sure how you identify a 'concept,' and they're only talking about having one correct tag in the top 15, but still cool."

Comment Re:Penny-arcade critique (Score 1) 88

by the_quark (#16298447) Attached to: Is the ESRB Broken?
It was user created content that caused all the controversy over GTA and Oblivion.
No. The "hot coffee" content was always in GTA, just not accessible. Can a Gameshark code be called "user-created content"?

Well, regardless, the point is that a proposal is on the table to make the ESRB play through "all" of the video games it rates. They could've played San Andreas for years, and they never would've found the "hot coffee" content, since it was not directly reachable from in the game. Or are you saying ESRB should be required to try every possible Gameshark code before it rates games?

For the purposes of this discussion, there's no difference between truly "user created content" and "enabling unreachable content by minor modification of the running executable." Neither of them is something the ESRB is going to be able to pass an opinion on until the modification happens. Since this legislation in supposedly in response to the recent "scandals" of GTA and Oblivion, it's worth noting that it would've prevented neither.

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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