Japanese restaurant’s unusual rule: You get what the person before you ordered. – “What a wonderful, bizarre idea (especially if you ignore the unresolved question of what the first customer of the day receives.) When you order, say, an ice cream and coffee, you pay for them and find a seat. In a few minutes, you’re called to the counter where you pick up, you guessed it, not an ice cream and coffee. You receive whatever the person before you in line ordered…”

Iceland looks to serve the world – “”For every watt that is spent running servers,” says Dr Brad Karp, of University College London, “the best enterprises most careful about minimising the energy of cooling and maximising efficiency typically find they are spending 40-60% extra energy on just cooling them.” “

Card counters’ days are numbered – “GAMBLERS who adopt a well-known probability strategy to beat the house at blackjack beware – UK researchers have developed an automated system that will detect card counters before they can cash in…”

Is AT&T about to clamp down on heaviest iPhone data users? – “AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega took his turn in front of the CTIA conference to argue that the wireless industry doesn’t need any net neutrality regulation. He also suggested that AT&T would be doing something about its heaviest data-using wireless customers…”

How could you get more people to take the stairs?

T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger’s Servers Crashed, And They Don’t Have A Backup – “Wow. T-Mobile and Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, has just announced that they’ve likely lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers due to a server failure…”

The Speed Of Computing – “A recent LiveScience article ‘Computers Faster Only for 75 More Years’ has indicated that new research conducted by two physicists have placed a speed limit on what’s attainable regardless of the size of the components…”

30 Astonishing 3D Portraits – “One of the best ways to really trip deeply into imagination is to check 3D works! Yes, 3D opens wide possibilities for stories, as we see new characters, still to have their story written. Seriously, thank God for 3D artists, like the ones featured here…”

Police stop more than 1 million people on street – “Police in major U.S. cities stop and question more than a million people each year – a sharply higher number than just a few years ago. Most are black and Hispanic men. Many are frisked, and nearly all are innocent of any crime, according to figures gathered by The Associated Press…”

Computers now better at lip-reading than humans – “A new study has revealed that computers are better at lip-reading than humans – a finding that could lead to novel methods of lip-reading training for the deaf and hard of hearing…”

PowerLabs High Speed CD-Rom Experiments – “When CDs came out they were heralded as the solution for the need for high storage-high speed information devices, transferring data at a whopping 150kb/s, but like all technologies, 1x CD players quickly became obsolete as the need for higher and higher transfer rates pushed for faster players, and, with them, higher rotational speeds. As we advance into the 21st century CD players are reaching the ultimate speed limit: we are getting to the point where the CD player simply can not spin the CD any faster or else the CD will literally fly apart…”

$10 billion takes fiber to every school, hospital in the US – “The US has more than 120,000 schools, hospitals, and libraries, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that they can all have fiber optic Internet for $5 billion-$10 billion….”

Jaw bone created from stem cells – “Scientists have created part of the jaw joint in the lab using human adult stem cells. They say it is the first time a complex, anatomically-sized bone has been accurately created in this way…”

Rogue satellites to be cleared from Earth’s orbit by German robots – “German-built robots are to be sent into Earth’s orbit to repair ‘dead satellites’ or push them into outer space…”

How We Lost Our Diversity – “Modern humans are a lot alike–at least at the genetic level–compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago…”

Aggression in Girls May Be Linked to BPA – “New research suggests a link between prenatal exposure to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) and increased aggression in girls, but not boys, at age 2…”

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