mlimber sends us to the NYTimes for a story about flying people who jump from planes or other high locations wearing a wing suit akin to a flying squirrel's. Their efforts have potential military and Xtreme sports applications. The story profiles, with video, one guy who wants to be the first to jump from a plane and land without a parachute (and live). Here's a YouTube video of another of these fliers skimming six feet above skiers in the Swiss Alps. Quoting: "Modern suit design features tightly woven nylon sewn between the legs and between the arms and torso, creating wings that fill with air and create lift, allowing for forward motion and aerial maneuvers while slowing descent. As the suits, which cost about $1,000, have become more sophisticated, so have the pilots. The best fliers, and there are not many, can trace the horizontal contours of cliffs, ridges and mountainsides."

Due to the lack of product on store shelves and overwhelming demand, Nintendo is considering plans to pull marketing campaigns for the Wii during the holiday season. "The company recently dismissed suggestions that it intentionally engineered shortages to build up hype for the Wii. It claims to be producing 1.8 million of the consoles each month at full capacity. 'The issue of supply management has to be questioned, not least because 2008 is going to be the crunch year for the Wii. It's then that we'll discover whether it's a fad or something with legs,' Screen Digest analyst Piers Harding-Rolls told The Times."

coondoggie passed us another Network World link, this one discussing the FBI's newest offensive against botnets. They're calling it Operation Bot Roast II. Apparently it's already been quite successful, leading to indictments, search warrants, and the uncovering of some '$20 million in economic loss. writes "Today, botnets are the weapon of choice of cyber criminals. They seek to conceal their criminal activities by using third party computers as vehicles for their crimes. In Bot Roast II, we see the diverse and complex nature of crimes that are being committed through the use of botnets," said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. "Despite this enormous challenge, we will continue to be aggressive in finding those responsible for attempting to exploit unknowing Internet users." I can't help but think, though: how many more of these things are out there that this 'sting' didn't touch?

Grim Reaping writes "A feature in testing at Google Labs allows users to not only prioritize their favorite results, but also move, ignore, and add search results to personalized records of their preferences. The experiment features a simple 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' option for each search result; users can also suggest a URL that might be more relevant to their query. 'Other Google users will not be affected by the individual tweaking: instead it will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase, so users are required to log in to avail of it.'" The company is also clear on the experiment's page: this feature may never see full release on the site.

Via Voodoo Extreme, a Reuters report on some very 'interesting' research into violent games. A study out of the University of Michigan has apparently found that 'exposure to violent electronic media' is almost as dangerous to our society as smoking. "'The research clearly shows that exposure to virtual violence increases the risk that both children and adults will behave aggressively,' said Huesmann, adding it could have a particularly detrimental effect on the well-being of youngsters. Although not every child exposed to violence in the media will become aggressive, he said it does not diminish the need for greater control on the part of parents and society of what children are exposed to in films, video games and television programs."

foobsr writes "Google today announced its RE<C project to make renewable energy cheaper than coal in the near future. The company, and its charitable arm google.org, plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the initiative. Larry Page stated: 'With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the video game ICO for the Playstation 2 is using GPL-licensed code from libarc. Sony could end up having to release the source code for the entire game!"

a.d.venturer writes "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Sony has opened up a new downloads store for the PlayStation Portable. Store.playstation.com interfaces with your existing PSN network id, and will allow purchase and download of games, trailers, and demos to your Sony handheld. The company is already clarifying that this 'won't kill the UMD format', and that this is just an alternative method to obtain content. Darren Carins, head of online marketing for SCEE, was quoted as saying "The UMD business is still good for us and our publishers. It's still a burgeoning market, and we're still selling a large number of PSPs on a weekly basis, so there are a large number of new people coming into the market. I don't think that this would give us any cause for concern over UMD, I think they sit very well together. When you talk about the more casual games, pick-up-and-play games, you would definitely want to put them through the Store rather than have disc production, in to retail, and so on."

DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""

If you've ever read Wil Wheaton's blog (clevernickname to us), you know he's not afraid to put everything on the table. One of the things I've always admired about his writing is his willingness to talk about his kids. On the internet. With ... people. Despite the obvious problems that could cause, Wil has been sharing anecdotes about his adventures in parenting since the early days of WWDN. His newest book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, talks about growing up geek and what it means to be a nerd and a father at the same time. Read on for my review.

An anonymous reader writes "An award-winning science author, Gary Taubes, has written a book that pans the medical community's treatment of the obesity epidemic. What is interesting is that it looks like the medical community is behaving in a very unscientific manner. Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy — that consuming fat makes you fat and exercise makes you thin — has no basis in research. In fact, all the available research points in quite another, and more traditional, direction. Here's the (excellent) podcast of an interview with Taubes on CBC's 'Quirks and Quarks.' So, has medicine become a non-science? Is it mostly a non-science? Somewhat?"

An anonymous reader wonders: "I'm curious as to what tools Slashdot readers use to inventory and document their networks? What got me thinking about this is the part VMWare has been taking in data centers. You've got your SAN, various physical and logical networks, various VMs, and so forth. It just adds a new layer of complexity in terms of documentation. I'm curious as to what people have been using as for doing things like documenting how their backups work, LAN settings, FW settings, where and what runs what services, and so forth. How do you blueprint your entire IT infrastructure so that someone brand new could start and figure out what does what?"

foghorn666 writes "Forbes.com has posted a sprawling special report on games, which tackles the subject from several angles, looking at everything from gambling to playing games in a relationship. There is, naturally, a lot on video games, including an original episode of Red Vs. Blue and a funny piece on the dangers of Warcraft addiction. Particularly cool are the interviews with video game luminaries like Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier, and John Romero. Even Duke Nukem came out of hiding to answer a few questions."

Bender writes "The Tech Report has put Intel's 'Woodcrest' and quad-core 'Clovertown' Xeons up against AMD's Socket F Opterons in a range of applications, including widely multithreaded tests from academic fields like computational fluid dynamics and proteomics. They've also attempted to quantify power efficiency in terms of energy use over over time and energy use per task, with some surprising results." From the article: "On the power efficiency front, we found both Xeons and Opterons to be very good in specific ways. The Opteron 2218 is excellent overall in power efficiency, and I can see why AMD issued its challenge. Yes, we were testing the top speed grade of the Xeon 5100 and 5300 series against the Opteron 2218, but the Opteron ended up drawing much less power at idle than the Xeons ... We've learned that multithreaded execution is another recipe for power-efficient performance, and on that front, the Xeons excel. The eight-core Xeon 5355 system managed to render our multithreaded POV-Ray test scene using the least total energy, even though its peak power consumption was rather high, because it finished the job in about half the time that the four-way systems did. Similarly, the Xeon 5160 used the least energy in completing our multithreaded MyriMatch search, in part because it completed the task so quickly. "