Hugh Pickens writes"The 'Earthscraper,' a 65-story, 82,000-square-foot inverted pyramid beneath Mexico City takes a new approach to escalating megacity problems like population growth, urban sprawl, preserving open space, and conserving energy and water, promising to turn the modern high-rise, quite literally, on its head. The proposed building will be located at the Zocalo, Mexico City's major public plaza one of the few sizable open spaces left in the city of 9 million. 'It's a massive empty plot, which makes it the ideal site for our program,' says architect Esteban Suarez. The Earthscraper concept begins with a glass roof replacing the opaque stone surface of the Zocalo preserving the open space and civic uses of the Zocalo, while allowing natural lighting to flow downward into all floors of the tapering structure through clear or translucent core walls. The first 10 stories would hold a museum dedicated to the city's history and its artifacts. 'We'd almost certainly find plenty of interesting relics during the dig — dating right back to the Aztecs who built their own pyramids here,' says Suarez adding that the design incorporates a system of gardens occurring roughly every 10 stories, to help generate fresh air. One thing working in Earthscraper's favor is there are strict laws that prevent building upwards in this part of Mexico City, but no laws for building down. 'They will have to develop new laws to stop this from happening,' says Chief Design Officer Emilio Barja. 'I hope they don't [find the] time to do that.'"

ryzvonusef writes "Instructables Member 'Dimovi' utilized a spare LCD monitor and converted it into a 'privacy' monitor. He took apart the monitor's plastic frame, cutting out the polarized film with a utility knife and removed the film adhesive from the glass panel before reassembling the monitor, which now shines a bright white regardless of what is actually being displayed on the screen. He then removed the lenses from a pair of theater 3D glasses, and replaced it with the polarized film he had just removed from the monitor. Now, he is the only one who can see what he is doing on his computer."

xav_jones writes "The ABC is reporting that 'Australia's five major ISPs have revealed their plans to crack down on online piracy by sending warning notices to suspected illegal downloaders while assisting rights holders to pursue serial offenders through the courts.' The idea is that '[d]uring an 18-month trial, rights holders would send copyright infringement notices, including evidence of copyright infringement and the IP address involved, to ISPs who would then send "educational notices" to the internet users concerned.' Further action would entail that '[u]sers who are suspected of further copyright breaches would then receive up to three warning notices before rights holders are able to pursue court action.' This seems a gentler approach than other countries. Will it prove more effective and/or cost efficient?"

An anonymous reader writes "I'm essentially a self-taught computer geek who started learning BASIC at age 12, but decided NOT to do the traditional computer-nerd thing (comp sci or physics, computer degree, etc.). I've essentially kept up with computers as a hobby, teaching myself web-design, Linux/LAMP, Javascript, and now Drupal. I've worked for a short time at a web dev shop but mostly have just done freelance projects and here-and-there stuff for websites or projects, many of which have gone under or are no longer accessible. I'm creative, have Photoshop/GIMP skills, I'm personable and self-motivated...and I'd like to get a 'real' job now but I don't really look like much on paper — how can I (specifically with Drupal) make myself look good on a CV and/or establish solid credentials that will make people more willing to take a chance and hire me? Will Drupalcon 2012 help me make inroads? Are there other ways to 'prove' myself to be a capable web admin/developer?"

angry tapir writes "A yet-to-be-patched flaw discovered in the Apache HTTP server allows attackers to access protected resources on the internal network if some rewrite rules are not defined properly. The vulnerability affects Apache installations that operate in reverse proxy mode, a type of configuration used for load balancing, caching and other operations that involve the distribution of resources over multiple servers."

First time submitter Readycharged writes "The Daily Mail reports on a piece from The Sunday Times revealing that University College London have seen an increasing number of Muslim students boycotting lectures on Evolution due to clashes with the Koran. Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics, says, 'I've had one or two slightly frisky discussions with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it's Islamic overwhelmingly.' He adds, 'What they object to — and I don't really understand it, I am not religious — they object to the idea that there is a random process out there which is not directed by God.' The article also reveals that Evolutionary Biologist and former Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins also experienced Muslims walking out of such lectures."

bs0d3 writes "A small VPN service, Koppla, has had its service terminated by its host, Santrex Hosting Solutions. Despite actively advertising their services to be oriented toward file-sharing including torrents and XDCC, even going so far as to put 'Seedbox Hosting | An Effective Solution' in the title of their contact page, the UK based Santrex will independently act to terminate users who are thought to be distributing content that they don't own the copyright to. This is regardless of whether the infringement is done by a third party, as is the case with a VPN service such as Koppla."

dkd903 writes "According to reports from Macotakara, Hitachi Displays Ltd and Sony Mobile Display Corporation has started shipping the screens for the iPad 3 and a 4-inch LCD screen for an unnamed iOS device. It would be fairly safe to assume that the 4-inch display will be for the next iPhone – the iPhone 5."

Restaurants across the globe will soon use DNA technology to reassure customers that they are getting what they pay for. In recent years getting "counterfeit" seafood has become a big problem. In 2007 several people became seriously ill from eating illegally imported pufferfish that had been mislabeled as monkfish. From the article: "David Schindel, a Smithsonian Institution paleontologist and executive secretary of the Washington-based Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said he has started discussions with the restaurant industry and seafood suppliers about utilizing the technology as a means of certifying the authenticity of delicacies. 'When they sell something that's really expensive, they want the consumer to believe that they're getting what they're paying for,' Schindel told The Associated Press."

jjp9999 writes "In order to study the nature of lighting, the team at Lightning on Demand (LOD) plans to build two, ten-story-tall Tesla coils—the largest ever—that will blast arcs of lightning hundreds of feet in length. LOD founder Greg Leyh said the project aims to reveal details on the initiation process of natural lightning, an area that remains a mystery, since smaller generated arcs have more trouble breaking through the air. It is believed that 'laboratory-scale electric arcs start to gain lightning-like abilities once they grow past about 200ft in length,' according to the LOD website, and so the team hopes to build Tesla coils large enough to do this. According to Leyh, 'Understanding how lightning forms [and grows] is the first step towards being able to control where lightning strikes or being able to suppress it completely in certain areas.'"

Med-trump writes "Alberta's $60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: 'the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure — and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question.'"

First time submitter fikx writes "How do Slashdotters manage large collections of disks? I'm hoping for a way to manage a large collection of movies that would give me menu type access to the content, and the only consumer device left seems to be the Sony disk changer, which is discontinued. I would have thought that handling disks would have been a solved problem and on sale in many forms, but I guess not. Have Slashdotters found or built solutions? Or has this problem gone the way of the typewriter?"

miller60 writes "Is preventive maintenance on data center equipment not really that preventive after all? With human error cited as a leading cause of downtime, a vigorous maintenance schedule can actually make a data center less reliable, according to some industry experts.'The most common threat to reliability is excessive maintenance,' said Steve Fairfax of 'science risk' consultant MTechnology. 'We get the perception that lots of testing improves component reliability. It does not.' In some cases, poorly documented maintenance can lead to conflicts with automated systems, he warned. Other speakers at the recent 7x24 Exchange conference urged data center operators to focus on understanding their own facilities, and then evaluating which maintenance programs are essential, including offerings from equipment vendors."

PolygamousRanchKid writes "China's Commerce Ministry on Friday announced an investigation into U.S. government policy and subsidy support for renewable energy, after a U.S. decision earlier this month to probe sales of Chinese-made solar panels in the United States. 'The Ministry of Commerce has decided to initiate a trade barrier investigation into policy support and subsidies for the U.S. renewable energy sector,' a statement on the ministry's website (www.mofcom.gov.cn) said. The announcement said Chinese companies argued that the U.S. policies 'constitute a trade barrier against the export of Chinese renewable energy products to the United States.'"

Zothecula writes "Do you think that you'll never be able to afford a robot of your own that isn't a toy? Well, if you can get Swiss robot-maker K-Team Corporation to sell you one, chances are you can easily afford a Kilobot — perhaps even a whole bunch of them. Designed and first built by Harvard University's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group, the three-legged robots aren't much larger than the 3.4-volt button cell batteries that power them, and move by vibrating across smooth, flat surfaces. They were created to study robotic swarming behavior, with the intention that tens, hundreds or even thousands of them could be used simultaneously in one experiment. Harvard has just announced that it has licensed the Kilobot technology to K-Team, which will commercially manufacture the robots so that other groups and institutions can purchase them for their own research."