The move is part of a plan by the clubs industry to avoid higher music licence fees.

Clubs Australia has now announced a scheme to play and promote music by independent artists, instead of those registered with the PPCA, in a bid to avoid the higher fees.

A spokeswoman for the PPCA says the licence fees are set by the independent Copyright Tribunal, and she has described them as fair and reasonable.

"Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they don't feel they can show that legitimately, they'll show it by taking people down a notch or two," says Nathanael Fast.

Flattery seems to temper the aggressive urges of insecure leaders. When Fast and Chen coaxed the egos of these volunteers by praising their leadership skills, their aggressive tendencies all but disappeared. This is proof that leaders are aggressive because of a hurt ego, not simply a threat to their power, Fast says.

The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

Fabricating a device that captures optical wavelengths in the same way will not be easy, as visible light has a wavelength orders of magnitude smaller than that of microwave radiation.

An optical black hole would suck it all in and direct it at a solar cell sitting at the core. "If that works, you will no longer require these huge parabolic mirrors to collect light," says Narimanov.

Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview on Monday, Dell revealed that he is planning more deals within a variety of service industries, including healthcare.

The PC maker hopes that this will help it better compete with HP and IBM, according to Bloomberg.

China has banned foreigners from investing in the country's online games industry "in any form," as a way to restrict content that censors have deemed unhealthy to the public.

The rule also prohibits foreign investors from indirectly influencing domestic online game businesses by agreements or even offering tech support.

The restrictions come on the heels of a wider campaign to shut down online games operating in China without approval and, as it were, containing "unhealthy" content.

When Jules Verne wrote about a gigantic gun that could be used to launch people into space in the 19th century, no one expected it to become a reality.

At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second.

While humans would clearly be killed and conventional satellites crushed by the gun's huge g-forces, it could lift robust payloads such as rocket fuel.

A well known security researcher was banished from Twitter for more than two days for including the address of a malicious website in a two-month-old dispatch.

No, it wasn't a direct message, and no, there was no malware involved with the site. And yes, the URL contained spaces to prevent the security challenged from accidentally visiting the site.

As The Reg and plenty of others have pointed out, the site has become a hot bed for come ons that try to trick people into visiting sites that steal their personal information or install malware.

The same French president who has for the second time brought in three strikes to France has for the second time been caught infringing copyright on a large scale. The presidential audiovisual services have produced 400 unauthorized copies of the 52-minute documentary 'A visage decouvert: Nicolas Sarkozy.' This is quite impressive as the producer of the documentary has only shipped 50 copies.

One of these sites, MediaFire, is bothered by a Firefox plugin called SkipScreen which automates the user straight past the ads. Instead of going after the software's developers, however, they've apparently targeted Mozilla, which hosts a link to the plugin.

Not only did it start the download without any user intervention, but as soon as the file started downloading, it replaced the MediaFire page with one of its own making that's largely an ad for SkipScreen itself, with a Google-supplied text ad thrown in as well.

Edwyn Collins has been barred from streaming his own song through MySpace. Management for the former Orange Juice frontman have been unable to convince the website that they own the rights to A Girl Like You, despite the fact that they, er, do.

"I naturally blew my stack and wrote to MySpace on his behalf demanding to know who the hell was claiming copyright of Edwyn's track? ... Eventually, after HUGE difficulty, I was told Warner Music Group were claiming it."

While Collins has worked to make A Girl Like You freely available to his fans, she alleges that the same track is sold illegally "all over the internet". "Not by Edwyn, [but] by all sorts of respectable major labels whose licence to sell it ran out years ago and who do not account to him."