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Submission + - New Zealand bows in on software patents (nbr.co.nz)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New Zealand is a fierce defender against the patenting of software but the state now may trade that democratic decision away in the Transatlantic Partnership Agreement.

A pending international trade treaty could override a recent New Zealand law change that excluded software from patent protection.

Software patents are considered an insult to programmers and strongly debated in multiple nations. Pressure groups like the FFII and NZOSS defend the freedom to program and the use of patent-unencumbered standards
Democrats

Submission + - Obama Wants To Fund Clean Energy Research With Oil & Gas Funds (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Obama Administration has put forth a proposal to collect $2 billion over the next 10 years from revenues generated by oil and gas development to fund scientific research into clean energy technologies. The administration hopes the research would help 'protect American families from spikes in gas prices and allow us to run our cars and trucks on electricity or homegrown fuels.' In a speech at Argonne National Laboratory, Obama said the private sector couldn't afford such research, which puts the onus on government to keep it going. Of course, it'll still be difficult to get everyone on board: 'The notion of funding alternative energy research with fossil fuel revenues has been endorsed in different forms by Republican politicians, including Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowsi. But the president still faces an uphill battle passing any major energy law, given how politicized programs to promote clean energy have become in the wake of high-profile failures of government-backed companies.'
United States

Submission + - Obama Accuses Iran of Nuclear Ambitions Despite Testimony by Top Intel Official (democracynow.org)

Submitted by Forty Two Tenfold
Forty Two Tenfold writes: U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed this week Iran has not decided to develop a nuclear weapon and that it would be unable to do so secretly. Testifying before the Senate, Clapper said Iran could not divert safeguarded material to produce weapons-grade uranium without it being discovered. Despite Clapper’s statements, President Obama raised the prospect of Iran developing a nuclear weapon during an interview Thursday with an Israeli television station ahead of his visit to Israel next week.

Submission + - EU Car manufacturers completely manipulating fuel efficiency figures (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by pev
pev writes: From The Guardian in the UK : European car manufacturers are rigging fuel efficiency tests by stripping down car interiors, over inflating tyres, taping over panel gaps and generally cheating. This overestimates the figures by 25% to 50%. One would have thought that a simple clause stating that cars have to be tested in the conditions that they are sold in would have been obvious?

Submission + - US National Vulnerability Database Down Following Malware Infestation (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The US government's National Vulnerability Database (NVD) maintained by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is offline since a few days because of malware infestation. The public facing site has been taken offline since last Friday because traces of malware were found on two of the web servers that house the NVD. A post on Google+ containing an email from Gail Porter details the discovery of suspicious activity and subsequent steps taken by NIST. As of this writing the NVD website is still serving a page not found message.
Censorship

Submission + - Bad Neighborhoods on the Internet are a real nuisance (utwente.nl)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Of the 42,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surveyed, just 20 were found to be responsible for nearly half of all the spamming IP addresses — and some ISP have more than 60% of compromised hosts, mostly in Asia. Phishing Bad Neighborhoods, on the other hand, are mostly in the US. Also, there is a silent ticking 'spam' bomb in BRIC countries: if India would have the same Internet penetration rate as the United States while keeping its current ratio of malicious IP addresses, we would observe 200% more spamming IP addresses worldwide. These are just few of the striking results of an extensive study (http://dx.doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036534604) from the University of Twente, in The Netherlands, which scrutinizes the Internet Bad Neighborhoods to develop next-generation algorithms and solutions to better secure networks.
Displays

Submission + - Laptop with large screen an resolution 1920x1080 1

Submitted by
NotesSensei
NotesSensei writes: "My aging Lenovo W500 is up for replacement. I have a model with 1920x1200 screen resolution on a 15" screen and don't want to downgrade my display. Now I know the Chromebook Pixel and the Macbook Pro Retina go beyond the 1920x1080 found elsewhere, but I'd rather run a standard Laptop with a decent size SSD and Linux as my main OS.
Even the Alienware gamer laptops seem to be frozen in time at 1920x1080. A big screen doesn't harm, 20 years of staring took some toll on my eyesight, so 2400 pixels wide on a 13" monitor won't cut it.
What are my options?"

Submission + - New results indicate that particle discovered at CERN is a Higgs boson (web.cern.ch) 1

Submitted by M3.14
M3.14 writes: It seems that the statistic is more and more in favor of latest big LHC discovery being the Higgs boson everyone is expecting. There are still some unanswered questions though.
From the article: At the Moriond Conference, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented preliminary new results that further elucidate the particle discovered last year. Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model.

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