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Lifeboat News #140

#140

Lifeboat News

This issue published on 03/01/14. Copyright 2014 Lifeboat Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

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://italian.lifeboat.com/ex/join.us now allows you to pay for your membership anywhere from monthly to every ten years.