Back in May, we told you about Swiss pilot Yves Rossy and his personal jet powered wing. It seems Mr. Rossy will now try to cross the English Channel with his invention. The flight was planned for Sept. 25 but had to be canceled due to poor weather. Yves will leap from a plane more than 2,500 meters off the ground, fire up his jets and try to make the 35-kilometer flight from Calais in France to Dover in England. If all goes well, the flight will take about 12 minutes. I'd like to officially ask Mr. Rossy for a review model for Slashdot.

Stony Stevenson writes "In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property." From the ComputerWorld article: "In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux 'uses our intellectual property' and Microsoft wanted to 'get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation.'" His exact wording is available at the Seattle Intelligencer, which has a transcript of the interview. Groklaw had an article up Wednesday giving some perspective on the Novell/Microsoft deal. Guess we'll have something to talk about in 2007, huh?

An article at the Guardian Gamesblog looks at the frustrations of online griefers. They talk about some of the unpleasant activities online gamers engage in, and briefly discuss the future of dealing with griefers. Scott Jennings and Richard Bartle chime in with ideas on how things might be handled. From the article: "'I expect we'll see more and more self-government,' says Scott Jennings, game developer and author of Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies. 'The reason is fairly obvious if not particularly noble: it's less expensive for game companies to have their customers police themselves than hire people to do it. The trick, and why you don't see it generally, is to construct self-policing schemes in such a way that they don't enable unscrupulous players to use them as tools of grief.'" Darniaq disagrees, on the basis that players just don't care about immersion.