Book Updates
The Futurist has just reviewed our book "The Human Race to the Future:
What Could Happen — and What to Do" at
http://www.wfs.org/futurist/2014-issues...-species
Also, our 2014 Edition was awarded the "Peer Reviewed & Approved for
Science" seal of the Washington Academy of Sciences which was founded in
1898. 10 Nobel Prize laureates have participated in the academy's
peer-reviewed Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences over the
past century.
We are offering the Kindle version of this important book for •FREE•
from April 3 through April 5 at http://amzn.to/19H3qf0. A discounted
version of the paperback version is also available at
http://amzn.to/1cujxeG.
Into the Cloud
In the July 2008 edition of Lifeboat News we talked about the new high
speed machine that we had upgraded to. Recently, we had a page reach #18
on reddit which strained that setup, specifically the ethernet
connection on the machine became saturated. (The machine workload was
still quite low so at least our caching efforts worked well.)
Thanks to efforts by our Chris Haley, we have now upgraded from a
dedicated machine to a double-layered cloud setup. The core of our setup
is a virtual server with Linode which has twice the CPU power and two
and a half times the bandwidth of our old setup. The surrounding layer
is of the cloud service CloudFlare that can increase our bandwidth by as
much as 30 times assuming that a handful of pages are getting most of
our traffic. So overall, we currently have about 75 times as much
bandwidth than before and Linode has been increasing the bandwidth
allocated to their virtual servers over time so this number will just
increase. CloudFlare only caches non HTML items so we couldn't only use
CloudFlare in a setup. Finally, note that we could upgrade the speed and
bandwidth of our Linode virtual server in a matter of minutes if needed.
Blog
Harry J. Bentham joins our blog team with the post "Book Review: The
Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)" at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/03/book-r...eil-2005
Recent interesting blog posts include:
"The false allure of centenarians — Why centenarians epitomise our
fears about growing old" by Avi Roy at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/03/the-fa...wing-old
"Immortality, biotechnology, and the woefully unprepared criminal
justice system" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/03/immort...e-system
"Square Market Partners With Coinbase To Accept Bitcoin" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/04/square...-bitcoin
"Why Asimov's Three Laws Of Robotics Can't Protect Us" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/03/why-as...otect-us
"Why We Need to Name Our Planet" by Zachary Urbina at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/03/why-we...r-planet
Growing Membership
Recent donations/pledges we have received since our last newsletter:
Franco Cortese: $120,
Roy Mitsuoka: $100,
Michael Dickey: $85,
Sergio M.L. Tarrero: $85,
Philippe Van Nedervelde: $85,
Kenneth P. Weiss: $85,
J. Broadbent: $25,
Matthew L. McGuirl: $25,
Anonymous: $20.05 (including 5 solarcoins),
Frank Sudia: $20,
Rebecca R. Cooper: $10,
Thomas Dolphin: $10,
Alexander Macrae: $10,
Aaron Mayzes: $10,
Philip Morehead: $10,
and Roland Schiefer: $10.
Our Join Us page at https://lifeboat.com/ex/join.us now allows you to
pay for your membership anywhere from monthly to every ten years.
