feeds | grep links > Charging ISPs for Piracy, Insights on Room Temperature Super-Conductors, CouchDB on Android and More

• UK royalty group wants ISPs to pay for pirating customers
  Via Slashdot. Superficially, this isn’t too different from a statutory license but on further reading that breaks down. Mandatory licenses are usually flat rate, generating supplemental revenue to existing media as a manageable tax on emerging media. The reasoning here is different, it is meant to scale with the volume of unlicensed music flowing throw ISPs’ networks. The lack of consideration for legitimate online sales also being bolstered by improved access to broadband is concerning yet very typical.
• New insights that may lead to room temperature super conductors
  As The Register explains, copper-oxide super conductors enter a pseudo-gap phase when warming up, the main quality of which is that they stop conducting with zero resistance. It turns out that there is more if interest in this phase of the material than simply a roadblock to super conductivity that doesn’t require massive cooling. The new insights could lead to new materials or adjusting existing ones to finally achieve zero resistance at practical temperatures. For computing, such super conductors could crack Gordon Moore’s other observation, about power/thermal load that didn’t pan out as well as his famous prediction on doubling transistor density every eighteen months.
• CouchDB on Android
  Via Hacker News. The project just reached its 1.0 milestone for the regular release. The Android version is still a very early developer preview. It is a good example of the increased choice that Android offers mobile developers. And they don’t have to wait around for Google to provide them with more tools and options, there is nothing stopping a database maker or a toolkit author or anyone else from porting something useful not just to end users but to other developers.
• Black Hat talk on Chinese cyber army pulled
  Slashdot has the story, one that seems to repeat every year at one or more hacker conferences in some form or another. The pulling of talks is so expected at this point, I’d suggest it would be more surprising if at least one such story didn’t crop up in a given year. In this instance, the presenters are from a company with R&D operations in Taiwan explaining their concern about possible pressure from the Chinese government.
• New Chinese rule will require real names online
• David Lynch looking at crowd funding his next movie
• Brewing conflict between WordPress and proprietary theme developer
  HT Glyn Moody on Identi.ca.
• More on the recent developments with the WordPress, Thesis license conflict

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