Maybe it was jumping on Oprah's couch.
Or perhaps it was his testy interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show, or his constant expressions of love for his fiancee, Katie Holmes.
Maybe it was all of those things combined that prompted British movie fans to name Tom Cruise the most irritating actor in Hollywood.
Cruise was found to be more annoying than Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey.
Britain's Empire magazine surveyed 10,000 movie fans.
But while Cruise may annoy them off camera, they still like his movies. They named him the greatest movie star of all time.

WSMV - Nashville Channel 4 News Tom Cruise Voted Most Irritating Star Of All Time

The first Galileo demonstrator is in orbit, marking the very first step to full operability of Europe’s new global navigation satellite system, under a partnership between ESA and the European Commission (EC).

Giove A, the first Galileo in-orbit validation element, was launched today from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, atop a Soyuz-Fregat vehicle operated by Starsem. Following a textbook lift-off at 05:19 UTC (06:19 CET), the Fregat upper stage performed a series of manoeuvres to reach a circular orbit at an altitude of 23 258 km, inclined at 56 degrees to the Equator, before safely deploying the satellite at 09:01:39 UTC (10:01:39 CET).
“Years of fruitful cooperation between ESA and the EC have now provided a new facility in space for improving the life of European citizens on Earth” said ESA Director General Jean Jacques Dordain congratulating ESA and industrial teams on the successful launch.

The US needs to for a union with the ESA/EC to better our old GPS systems, just proof that the USA lags/slacks and Europe best us to it.... Why not? We are 'Paranoid Nation' ... are we not?

ESA - Navigation - The future - Galileo - First Galileo satellite on orbit to demonstrate key technologies

What day does the first of the year fall on? It wasn't always January 1st.
The ancient Babylonians, for example, celebrated the beginning of a new year on what is now March 23, although they didn't have a written calendar - no mean feat considering that this was long before the ubiquitous datebooks and wall calendars we can't live without.
Time passed, and with it came the development of the ancient Roman calendar, which was based on a lunar system. Better, but still not very accurate.
Then, in 46 B.C., Julius Caesar introduced a new, solar-based calendar (the Julian calendar). This was a vast improvement on the Roman calendar, which had become wildly inaccurate over the years. The Julian calendar decreed that the new year would occur on January 1st, and within the Roman world, this became the consistently observed start of the new year.

What day does the first of the year fall on?

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble!, you'll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically 'stumble upon' each others favorites sites.

StumbleUpon uses / ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers () have liked. Unlike search engines or static directories, this allows for a true "democracy of the web" – all SU members have a say ( or ) as to whether a page should be passed on.

In effect, StumbleUpon's members collectively share the best sites on the web. You can share any site by simply clicking I like it. This passes the page on to friends and like-minded people – letting them "stumble upon" all the great sites you discover.

Elonka ... Here is where that traffic is from... I use it for killing idle time....

:)

About StumbleUpon

Blaming The Worker: In Texas City and On the Rails

Headlines like these always make me wonder about the human tendency to find scapegoats to blame after a tragedy. Is it just a matter of companies wanted to point the finger elsewhere, anywhere away from themselves or the decision makers, or away from problems that are hard or expensive to resolve? And why don’t journalists generally look deeper than the simple “worker screwed up” story. Does blaming workers satisfy a basic urge in people to always have a readily understandable villain to blame. Blaming incompetent workers for accidents is so easy. Just fire them and the problem’s solved. Right?

Read more...

Blaming The Worker: In Texas City and On the Rails

The hunt has been going on for thousands of years, but it's only in the past two centuries that underwear has really come of age.
Around 1900, the bra was invented, followed by boxers and Y-front jockeys in the 1930s and bikini panties in the 1940s (named by a French inventor after the equally tiny Bikini Atoll). Then things got a lot more stretchy and comfortable when Dupont invented Lycra in the late 1950s.
But these innovations are nothing compared to the technology revolution now sweeping through the world of underwear.
Bulky, expensive seams and darts are out, thanks to the development of high-tech, seamless fabrics that stretch in all directions to mould around the body. The latest thing is underpants made up of different types of fabrics that do different jobs: an anti-bacterial fabric to keep the gusset smelling sweet; perforated, wicking panels around the groin to suck up moisture; and hidden silicon strips in the legs to stop your undies riding up

Read more on 'Cracking the science of undies ...'

Cracking the science of undies ...

Chronic cannabis use can lead to regular bouts of non-stop vomiting and an obsession with hot showers, Australian researchers have found.

General practitioner, Dr Hugh Allen of Mount Barker Hospital in South Australia, and team report this rare new syndrome in the November issue of the journal Gut.

Allen said he encountered the first case, dubbed patient Y in the paper, in the late 1990s. The patient came to him after a severe bout of vomiting.

"He would vomit continuously for two or three days," Allen told ABC Science Online. "It was so bad he had to go to hospital and be put on a drip."

Two or three months later it happened again, and then the vomiting episodes became more frequent, occurring every month.

The patient was a heavy user of marijuana at the time, said Allen, having started smoking at the age of 19 with the vomit attacks starting when he was 22.

"In all honesty, he was smoking 20 to 40 cones a day," Allen said.

When the patient was in hospital he started to act strangely, said Allen. The patient would sit in a hot shower, which he said relieved his nausea and vomiting.

"It became an obsession with him. He would have 10 to 15 showers a day."

After 15 months of cyclical vomiting, Allen said the patient concluded that his cannabis use was to blame. So he stopped using it and didn't vomit severely for nine months.

But Allen said the patient started using the drug again, and two months later was vomiting.

Pot heads can't stop puking ...

Scientists have found the part of the brain that makes cannabis users crave pizza, chocolate and chips.

The discovery of the part of the brain that creates the 'munchies' could help to develop pharmaceuticals for anorexia or obesity, with minimal side-effects.

Australian researcher Dr Paul Mallet of the University of New England in Armidale and team will report their rat study in the journal Neuropharmacology.

"Because smoking cannabis increases appetite, it was believed that this was somehow related to the effects of cannabis on some brain centre but that was until now not identified," says Mallet, a biological psychologist.

"We've actually identified which part of the brain is responsible for THC's [the active substance in cannabis] effect on the stimulation of appetite."

They injected THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, into a specific region of the brain's hypothalamus, known to control feeding behaviour, called the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus (PVN).

And they found it stimulated the laboratory animals' appetite.

"What we find is that these rats get the munchies," says Mallet.

Brain centre for the 'munchies' found ...

For weeks, the blogosphere has been abuzz with tales of intrigue about Sony’s XCP copy protection system. Among the strangest revelations was that XCP itself infringes on the copyrights to several open source software projects. In one case, Sam Hocevar found conclusive evidence that part of XCP’s code was copied from a program called DRMS, which he co-authored with DVD Jon and released under the terms of the GPL open source license. What made this finding particularly curious is that the purpose of DRMS is to break the copy protection on songs sold in Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Why would XCP rip off code intended to defeat another vendor’s DRM?

Hidden Feature in Sony DRM Uses Open Source Code to Add Apple DRM

Sony's recent debacle with the DRM is not going to die a quiet death. It seems that the code that Sony used to protect it's cd's from being copied contains copy protected code, at least that is what Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon contends. Finnish software developer Matti Nikki, has uncovered multiple components of the DRM software that reference LAME open source MP3 code Code in the LAME application is licensed under the lessser GNU General Public Licence (LGPL).

Kinda old news but still shows who talks and who walks....

Sony/ BMG Now Accused of Copyright Infringement!