National Geographic Channel | Secret History of the Bra

Slashdot | First New Nuclear Plant in US in 30 Years

Looks like we’re finally building some new nuclear power plants.  It’s about time!  I’m sick of the fear and paranoia of the uneducated dictating what can and can’t be done in this nation.  For years we’ve been building coal and oil power plants instead of nuclear simply because people were scared of their own shadows.

Slashdot | PC Makers Offering a Bridge Back to XP

I know – there was just as much resistance to the new OS on the block when it was Win3.1, WinNT, Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2k, and WinXP.  The difference is how Microsoft has approached the issue in the past, and how they’re dealing with stragglers this time around.  Microsoft seems to be trying to force people to upgrade, whether they want to or not.

I have no doubt that Vista will eventually be the de-facto standard OS, it’s only a matter of time.  In a year or two it’ll be just as common as XP is now.  For the moment though, Vista still has some very rough edges.  People will adopt when it meets their needs and not a moment before.  If Microsoft wanted faster adoption they should have included more must-have features.

Slashdot | Vonage Hit With $69.5M Judgement

Looks like I may have to find a new phone provider soon…

Yesterday I mentioned that there were some privacy concerns regarding WordPress 2.3…  Well, it looks like those concerns were largely unfounded.  Looks like 2.3 doesn’t report as much information as the story on Slashdot suggested, and there are a couple plug-ins available to disable 2.3′s reporting entirely.  So, I will likely be upgrading my blogs this weekend afterall.

Slashdot | Mysterious Peruvian Meteor Disease Solved

Bah.  Looks like it was just some arsenic-tainted groundwater vaporized into steam upon impact…  I was kind of hoping it was some kind of alien zombie parasite or something like that.

Saw a notice earlier this morning that WordPress 2.3 was now available.  I had planned on spending some part of this weekend upgrading the blogs that I run to the latest version…  But then I saw the headlines on Slashdot – apparently 2.3 sends a good amount of personally identifiable information back to a database periodically.  I guess this is used by the new plugin update notification feature…but I’m not sure if I want all that data being sent off to somebody else’s database.  I’ll have to look over the change notes a lot more closely and make sure this is something I actually want to install…

I wonder how long it’ll be before there’s a more private fork of WordPress available?