Time for a Bigger Machine
We are working to raise $2,500 to pay for high speed web hosting for a
year. Jaan Tallin, cofounder of Skype, has gotten us started with a
$300 donation. Our page for donations is
https://italian.lifeboat.com/ex/time.for.a.bigger.machine
Having fast pages is important to attracting people and we have had a
few slowdowns recently and even a few blog database errors when our
machine became overloaded. Due to increasing public awareness, we also
have a need to be able to handle large spikes in traffic. We already
have higher traffic than the Foresight Nanotech Institute, The
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the National Space
Society, the Mprize, the World Transhumanist Association, and many other
organizations.
While waiting to implement a faster machine, we have been busy behind
the scenes, activating and developing a cache for both our blog and
regular web pages. (This means that whatever machine we are using can
now handle A LOT more traffic!) We have also activated our own
nameserver to provide redundancy.
We even updated all our non blog pages to "almost standards" mode from
"quirks" mode. Our blog pages were already in "almost standards" mode.
What this means is that we can take advantage of features in Internet
Explorer that became available in version 6.0 to make Internet Explorer
more compatible with other browsers. This improves the efficiency of
caching as it reduces the need to cache different pages for Internet
Explorer than other browsers. Our site has A LOT of pages so this was
non trivial.
For you HTML experts out there, the reason we didn't choose to use
"standards" mode is that there are more differences between browsers in
that mode than in "almost standards" mode and there are no special
features that we need that are only available in "standards mode".
AIShield
Thanks to input from Daniel Berleant, our AIShield program at http://lifeboat.com/ex/ai.shield has been significantly upgraded.
James Blodgett Talks
James Blodgett will be distributing Lifeboat Foundation brochures at his
poster presentation at the Second World Congress on Risk in Guadalajara,
Mexico June 8-11, described at
http://www.sra.org/events_2008_world_congress.php, and his talk at the
American Mensa Annual Gathering in Denver, Colorado, July 2-6, described
at http://www.ag2008.us.mensa.org//AM/Temp...on=Home5
You can learn about James Blodgett at
http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.james.blodgett
2008 Space Elevator Conference
Learn about the 2008 Space Elevator Conference at http://spaceelevatorconference.org/. This conference will be held in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft Conference Center on July 18-20, 2008. It is sponsored by Microsoft and will feature topical discussions in all of the Four Pillars of Space Elevator Development: Science/Technical, Political/Social, Legal, and Economic.
WorldFuture 2008
Believe it or not, we have expanded our planned presence at the
"WorldFuture 2008: Seeing the Future Through New Eyes" conference.
Our updated lineup includes: Lawrence A. Baines, Raj Bawa, Craig
Bettles, Peter C. Bishop, Dennis M. Bushnell, Josh Calder, Arthur L.
Caplan, José Luis Cordeiro, William J. Cosgrove, William Crossman, Irene
J. Dabrowski, Yasmin Dada-Jones, Devin Fidler, Medard Gabel, Ashok K.
Gangadean, Jay Gary, Jerry Glenn, Ted Gordon, Terry Grim, Linda Groff,
William E. Halal, Don Heathfield, Jay Herson, Michael Jackson, Carl
Jensen III, Shun-jie Ji, Tom Lombardo, Gary Marx, Jim Mathews, Kenneth
L. Nichols, Amy Oberg, Jonathan Peck, John L. Petersen, Carrie Rathsack,
Sheila R. Ronis, Karlin Sloan, Rick Smyre, Stephen F. Steele, Mike
Treder, Thomas F. Valone, Verne Wheelwright, James Wright, Mariann
Zanardo, and Michael Zey who will be speaking at WorldFuture 2008:
Seeing the Future Through New Eyes at the Hilton Washington, Washington,
D.C., from July 26 to July 28, 2008.
Learn more at http://lifeboat.com/upcoming
Donor Information
Our donor list format has been improved. You can now see who donated in 2004 at http://lifeboat.com/ex/donor.date.list#2004, view a list of our Executive Class members at http://lifeboat.com/ex/donor.membership...xecutive, learn about our $10,000-$100,000 donors at http://lifeboat.com/ex/donor.dollar.list#100000, or look up donors whose last name begins with a "W" at http://lifeboat.com/ex/donor.list#W
Growing Membership
Blackjack! Thanks to George Garrett, we now have 21 Economy Class
members.
Here are some of the recent donations/pledges we have received since
the last newsletter:
Jaan Tallinn: $300,
Tyrone Steels II: $264,
Humberto Castaneda: $200,
Sergio M.L. Tarrero: $170,
Mike Brogley: $100,
Michael Anissimov: $85,
Eric Bauswell: $85,
Michael Dickey: $85,
Chris Haley: $85,
Donald Maclean: $85,
Jason Gaverick Matheny: $85,
Philippe Van Nedervelde: $85,
Kenneth P. Weiss: $85,
C M Anderson: $25,
Vincent A. Cate: $25,
Adam Dobrin: $25,
Rick Hubbard: $25,
Peter Murray: $25,
Matthew L. McGuirl: $25,
Robert Hunt Robinson: $25,
James William Taylor: $25,
Mark A. Walker: $25,
Maggie Whitton: $25,
Anonymous: $20,
Alexander Braitberg: $10,
Stephen Fleming: $10,
Joshua Fox: $10,
Christopher Dilkus: $10,
Sylvia Engdahl: $10,
George Garrett: $10,
Joseph P. Jackson III: $10,
Sheridan Layman: $10,
Marcel Lossi: $10,
Glenn A. Miller: $10,
Sarah Jane Pell: $10,
John N. Philipps (Jack): $10,
Kaj Sotala: $10,
and Thoughtware.TV: $5.
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.
