SpectreJCB - Slashdot User

MIT and the Constant Robotic Gardeners 101

Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 15, 2009 @05:50PM from the integrated-growlamps dept.

Singularity Hub writes "MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is pioneering the field of automated farming. During a semester-long experiment, CSAIL's researchers created a laboratory farm: tomato plants in terra cotta pots with artificial turf for grass. The goal of the experiment: to see if these tomatoes could be grown, tended, and harvested by robot caretakers."

March 14th Officially Becomes National Pi Day 321

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 14, 2009 @10:23AM from the pi-in-the-sky-legislation dept.

whitefox writes "The scoop from CNet is that 'The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days earlier that designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day. It urges schools to take the opportunity to teach their students about Pi and "engage them about the study of mathematics."' The resolution is available online. I doubt it'll ever become a national holiday, but the Pi string in the article is pretty cool in a nerdy sort of way."

Panasonic Working On 2-Terabyte SD Cards 270

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 08, 2009 @06:56PM from the never-delete-another-snapshot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "SD cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB are in development by Panasonic and the SD Association, it has been announced. The technology is called 'Secure Digital Extended Capacity', or 'SDXC', and Panasonic has announced it will soon show off a 64GB SDXC card. Using the new technology, read/write speeds are set to hit 300MBps. SanDisk and Sony are using the same standard to develop Extended Capacity cards in Sony's Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Micro range. SDXC utilises Microsoft's new exFAT file system — AKA 'FAT 64' — which first appeared in Windows Vista SP1, and has a theoretical file size limit of 16 exbibytes." Reader xlotlu adds a note about the "proprietary exFAT file system, which is available for licensing under NDA. There are currently no specific patents on exFAT, but its legal status is uncertain since it's based on FAT. The FAT patents have been previously upheld in court."

Comment Re:Reckon it in terms of upstream bandwidth (Score 1) 333

by SpectreJCB on Friday November 10, 2006 @01:58PM (#16795996) Attached to: Judge OKs Challenge To RIAA's $750-Per-Song Claim

Not sure if someone brought this up yet (and I'm Canadian, so my US law knowledge is sketchy at best). How do these lawsuits even work in the first place? When you share a file in a P2P application such as Limewire, while you are sharing the file, if someone attempts to transfer the file from you, does it not only send parts of the file if others are sharing it as well? Ie/ You have 5 sources available for the file, so the file is split in 5 parts, each part being sent from a source. The file is only working and complete if you have 5/5 parts. If you don't receive all 5 parts, then you basically have a useless file that doesn't contain anything of substance. How can you be sued for distributing only seemingly random parts of a file?

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